Prāgjyotiṣa

In the epics

The Mahābhārata names Prāgjyotiṣa as an eastern kingdom whose king Bhagadatta fought on the Kaurava side with an elephant force, and describes his father Naraka as a king of the same country killed by Kṛṣṇa. The Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas use the name similarly.

The word is usually explained as the place of eastern light or eastern astrology, and the capital Prāgjyotiṣapura is identified with Guwahati, where the Kāmākhyā temple stands on the Nīlācala hill above the river.

Legend and history

Prāgjyotiṣa is not a historically documented state. It is the legendary prehistory that the historical dynasties of the region claimed: the Varmans of Kāmarūpa in the seventh century traced their descent to Naraka and Bhagadatta, and later Assamese and Koch houses did the same.

What it registers is that the Brahmaputra valley was known to the composers of the Sanskrit epics as a distinct and distant eastern kingdom, and that a lineage claim reaching back to it was worth making in Assam for well over a thousand years. The Kāmākhyā shrine, a major Śākta centre whose ritual has strong non-Vedic and tribal elements, sits at the centre of that continuity.