Jaintia Kingdom
The Jaintia Kingdom was a matrilineal kingdom in present-day some parts of Bangladesh's Sylhet Division, India's Meghalaya state and Nagaon, Morigoan district of Assam. It was partitioned into three in 630 AD by Raja Guhak for his three sons, into the Jaintia Kingdom, Gour Kingdom and Laur Kingdom. It was annexed by the British East India Company in 1835. All the Khasi (Pnar) Rajahs of the Jaintiapur Kingdom are from the Syiem Sutnga clan, a Pnar clan of the Khasi tribe which claims descent from Ka Li Dohkha, a divine nymph. One theory says that the word "Jaintia" is derived the shrine of Jayanti Devi or Jainteswari, an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga. Another theory says that the name is derived via Pnar (the language of the rulers) from Sutnga, a settlement in the modern day Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya. The Pnars (also called Jaintia) and War, speak Mon-Khmer languages that are related to Khasi. The Jaintia Kingdom extended from the east of the Shillong Plateau of present-day Meghalaya in north-east India, into the plains to the south, and north to the Barak River valley in Assam, India. The winter capital located at Jaintia Rajbari, Jaintiapur, now ruined, was located on the plains at the foot of the Jaintia Hills; it appears there may have been a summer capital at Nartiang in the Jaintia Hills, but little remains of it now apart from the Nartiang Durga Temple and a nearby site with many megalithic structures. Much of what is today the Sylhet region of Bangladesh and India was at one time under the jurisdiction of the Jaintia king. In ancient times, Austroasiatic tribal migrations from Southeast Asia during the Holocene period to what is now known as the Khasi and Jaintia Hills. The tribe split into two; modern-day Khasi which was the religious class, and the modern-day Pnar which were the ruling class. According to the legend constructed by the Brahmin pandits, the hero of Hindu mythology, Arjuna travelled to the Jaintia to regain his horse held captive by a princess, a story mentioned in a Purana or Hindu epic known as the Mahabharata.