इतिहास
Two things make this belt's periodisation its own. The first is that authority here really is hereditary, which makes it an exception in the Northeast hills. The Nocte lowang and the Wancho wangham are chiefs by descent, assisted by a council but not bound by it, and they take tribute from subordinate villages — where two hundred kilometres north the Adi have no chief at all. But hereditary chiefship is not a kingdom: there was never a capital, a dynasty ruling the belt as a whole, or a court, and any attempt to build a king list from these villages would misdescribe them. The second is the pass. Everything datable here is dated by what came through Pangsau. The medieval period begins in December 1228, when the Ahom migration crossed it, and its content is a three-hundred-year contest with a plains state over salt wells. The modern period begins in 1826 with the Treaty of Yandabo, and has a second hinge in 1943, when an American military road was cut through the same saddle and the belt received a regular administration for the first time.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनBefore c. 1200 — no dated record
Nothing in this period can be given a year. No inscription, coin or dated monument has been recovered anywhere in the belt, and the earliest datable references to it are entries in the Ahom chronicles from the thirteenth century onward — that is, written by the people on the other side of the hill. What exists instead is oral: Nocte and Wancho migration accounts, both describing movement from beyond the Patkai or from the Tuensang country to the south, and both carrying community reckonings rather than dates. What can be said with confidence is structural. Villages sat on ridge crests rather than in valleys, stockaded and defensible; the men's house — the paang or morung — was the institution that trained the young and held the log drum; and the brine springs of the lower ridges produced the belt's only tradable surplus.
मध्यकालीन1228 – 1826
In December 1228 a Tai party under Sukaphaa crossed the Patkai at the Pangsau pass and descended the Noa-Dihing to found the Ahom state on the plain. From that point the belt is documented, though always from the plains side, and the relationship it documents is neither conquest nor peace. The Ahoms took the salt well at Mohong in 1536, and there followed nearly two centuries of intermittent fighting over the brine springs, broken by settlements and gifts. The plains state's instruments were the khat — blocks of cultivable foothill land granted to hill chiefs — and the Naga kataki, an Assamese agent attached to a group of villages to carry messages and collect tribute in mithun, tusks, cane and salt. The hills' instrument was the salt itself and the ability to close the route. Alongside all this ran a quieter transmission: a Namsangia chief took Vaishnava initiation at a sattra on the plain in the early eighteenth century, and a form of Vaishnavism combined with existing practice spread through parts of Nocte country without any state doing anything about it.
आधुनिक1826 – 1947
The Treaty of Yandabo handed the plain below to the East India Company in February 1826, and within four months David Scott had taken engagements from sixteen of twenty-eight Singpho chiefs. Those engagements did not hold. The Company's administration abolished slaveholding, took land for tea, and pressed on the arrangements the hill economy actually ran on, and the result was three armed episodes in under forty years — the Khamti attack on the Sadiya station in January 1839, the Singpho attack on the Ningroo outpost in January 1843, and the killing of a survey party at the Wancho village of Ninu in February 1875. After 1875 the belt was largely closed: except around Banfera the Wancho villages were kept out of the plains, and the Inner Line kept the plains out of the hills. Regular administration arrived only at the very end, and it arrived because of a war three thousand kilometres away — the Ledo Road was cut through the Pangsau pass between 1942 and 1945, and the Tirap Frontier Tract was constituted under a Political Officer in 1943.
शासक और सेनापति
The lowang Nocte village chief शासक In continuous use
The real unit of authority on the Tirap ridges, and the reason this belt is an exception among the Northeast hills. The office is hereditary, normally passing to the eldest son; the chief holds judicial, executive and customary authority together, settles disputes, regulates ceremony and receives an annual tribute called seiko in paddy, millet and rice beer from subordinate villages. A council of elders, priest and advisers called the ngongwang assists him but does not bind him.
राजवंश: Hereditary, by village line. राजधानी: Namsang, Borduria, Paniduria and the other Nocte villages
The wangham Wancho village chief शासक In continuous use
The Wancho equivalent, concentrating authority in a hereditary office in the same way and over groups of villages rather than one. It remains a living institution. The comparative detail in the published record is thinner than for the Nocte, and the differences between the two systems are better described from the communities themselves than from the colonial sources.
राजवंश: Hereditary, by village line. राजधानी: Longding, Wakka, Niausa and the Wancho villages
The Naga kataki Agent of the Ahom state attached to hill villages प्रशासक c. 16th–19th century
The plains state's actual instrument on this frontier. Assamese agents were attached to groups of hill villages to carry messages, manage the khat grants of foothill cultivable land, and receive the annual tribute of mithun, elephant tusks, red-dyed cane, goat hair and salt. The arrangement was a negotiated one, and its repeated breakdown over the salt wells is most of what the Ahom chronicles record about this belt.
राजवंश: An office of the plains administration. राजधानी: The foothill khats
Lotha Khunbao, later Narottam Chief of the Namsangia Noctes शासक Between 1699 and 1745
Received Vaishnava initiation from Ramadeva at the Bali Satra near Naharkatiya and took the name Narottam. The initiation spread through parts of Nocte country afterwards, combined with existing practice rather than replacing it, and it happened through a chief's own journey to a monastery on the plain rather than through any mission sent up.
राजवंश: Namsang chiefly line. राजधानी: Namsang
The Sadiya Khowa Gohain Ahom frontier office प्रशासक 1523–1839
Established by the Ahom king Suhungmung to administer the Chutia country annexed in 1523, and the single most important office on this frontier for three centuries. From 1794 it was held by Tai Khamti chiefs who had come into the Sadiya country from the Bor Khamti; the British abolished it in 1839 in the aftermath of the attack on the station.
राजवंश: Created by the Ahoms in 1523; held by Tai Khamti chiefs from 1794. राजधानी: Sadiya
Chau-rang-pha Khamti chief सेनापति active 1839–1843
Named in the records among the chiefs who organised the attack on the British station at Sadiya on 28 January 1839, in which the position was taken in four simultaneous parties. He is also named among those who conducted the four years of dispersed resistance in the hills that followed.
राजवंश: Tai Khamti. राजधानी: The Sadiya country
Bisa Gam Singpho chief of the Bisa canton शासक active 1820s–1843
The most consequential Singpho chief of the period, and the one who undertook in 1823 to supply tea plants and seeds to Robert Bruce — the identification of the Assam tea plant, and therefore the entire Assam industry, follows from that transaction. He submitted to the Company in 1826, was attacked by a rival chief in 1835, and was convicted of rebellion after 1843 and imprisoned for life at Dibrugarh.
राजवंश: Singpho chiefship. राजधानी: Bisa, on the Buri Dihing
Duffa Gam Singpho chief सेनापति active 1820s–1830s
Refused the engagements of 1826 and operated from the far side of the Patkai for a decade, maintaining connections with the Burmese side and raiding across the ridge. In 1835 he attacked Bisa's village, in which about ninety people were killed. He is the clearest case in the belt of a chief whose base was on the other slope of the same hills.
राजवंश: Singpho chiefship. राजधानी: Beyond the Patkai