Nāgavaṃśī of Chotanagpur

A long claim

The Nāgavaṃśī house traces itself to Phaṇi Mukuṭ Rāy, said to have been born of a nāga and raised by a Munda chief, and its traditional chronology begins in the early centuries CE. Documentary evidence begins very much later, and the early portion of the genealogy should be read as a dynastic charter rather than a record.

What the tradition does register accurately is the political character of the plateau: a Hindu ruling house superimposed on Munda and Oraon communities with their own village institutions, in a relationship that was negotiated rather than simply imposed.

Mughals and British

The Mughals brought Chotanagpur under tribute in the seventeenth century, and Durjan Sal was imprisoned at Gwalior for twelve years before being restored — an episode the family tradition dwells on. The British took the region in the late eighteenth century, and the raja became a zamindar under the Permanent Settlement.

That change was consequential. The conversion of a customary chieftaincy into landlord tenure over communities holding land by clan right produced a century of agrarian revolt in Chotanagpur — the Kol insurrection of 1831, the Sardari movement and Birsa Munda's rising of 1899–1900 — and eventually the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which protected tribal land rights and remains in force.

The estate was abolished in 1952.