From Nagadee to Jotedar: The Burdwan Raj and the Origins of the Aguris

The Aguris appear to descend from the Nagadee forces, the cash-paid army the Burdwan Raj raised and maintained during the 18th century as a reaction to certain external threats from other principalities and the Maratha Bargi raids. As the East India Company wound that army down between 1763 and 1809, its soldiers turned to the land and, within a century, became the dominant landholders of Burdwan.

The argument in brief

Five points tie the Aguris to the Burdwan Raj's army rather than to an ancient pedigree.

1. A Burdwan community. In 1872–1921, 73–87 per cent of Bengal's Aguris lived in Burdwan district, the Raj's heartland, not across Bengal as settlers from a Mughal provincial army would.
2. Descended from the Nagadees. After 1696 the Raj raised an army paid in cash, not land: hired soldiers without local holdings. Regional histories describe the Nagadees as largely Aguri.
3. A Rajput link. A section of the Aguris took the sacred thread at marriage, as the Rajputs of UP and Bihar did.
4. Soldiers turned landholders. As the army was wound down, military service became jotes, and jotes became jotedar dominance.
5. The Chandimangal couplet proves nothing earlier. Its standard edition rests on a manuscript dated 1700, and its Aghari is only assumed to mean the Aguris.

Timeline

Read the timeline as text

Nagadee force, 1696–1809

The Aguri record begins as the Nagadee army forms
Burdwan Raj, Nagadee forces and Aguris, 1657–1931 (one row per date, not to scale)

Date	Burdwan and the Raj	Nagadee forces	Aguris
1657	Abu Rai made chowdhury and kotwal of Rekhabi Bazar
1689	Aurangzeb’s farman confirms Krishnaram Rai as zamindar
1696	Sobha Singh’s revolt; Krishnaram Rai killed	Raj turns to a standing army paid in cash (inferred)
1700			Earliest firm date for the Chandimangal’s Aghari couplet
1702	Kirtichand’s reign, 1702–40: the estate grows into a “virtual Hindu kingdom”
1742–51		Nagadees defend the estate against the Maratha raids
1750s			Bharatchandra’s Vidyasundar mentions Aguris in Bardhaman
1760	Mir Qasim cedes Burdwan to the East India Company	About 10,000 Nagadees fight a Company force at Akna
1763		Resident John Johnstone cuts the force	As the force shrinks, its soldiers move onto the land
1770	Bengal famine; deaths in the estate “not severe”
1780s		Remnant still guards the Burdwan treasury
1809		Nagadee arrangement ends	Former soldiers emerge as jotedars of 30–100 acres
1862–72	Burdwan fever epidemic
1872			Census: 70,606 in Bengal, 85% in Burdwan
1874			“Ugra Kshatriya” appears in Lal Behari Day’s novel
1881			Census: 78,349 in Bengal, 73% in Burdwan
1888			Ugra Kshatriya Samiti founded at Burdwan
1891			Risley: the bulk are “fairly prosperous cultivators”
1911			Census: 79,272 in Bengal, 84% in Burdwan
1921			Census: 68,816 in Bengal, 87% in Burdwan
1931			Census returns the caste as Ugra Kshatriya

Every firmly dated Aguri record falls after the 1696 revolt that, on this article's reading, created the Nagadee force. The shaded band marks the force's life, to 1809.

1. The Burdwan Raj and the founding of the Nagadee forces

The Raj was built by the Kapoors, Punjabi Khatris from Lahore. Sangam Rai settled near Burdwan as a trader; in 1657 Abu Rai became chowdhury and kotwal of Rekhabi Bazar; and in 1689 Aurangzeb's farman confirmed Krishnaram Rai as zamindar of pargana Burdwan (Wikipedia; Purba Bardhaman district). The farman also authorised him to raise an army (McLane 1993).

In 1696 Sobha Singh, zamindar of Chitua and Barda, rose against the Raj with the Afghan chief Rahim Khan of Orissa. Krishnaram Rai was killed in battle, his family captured (Wikipedia) and his palace seized (McLane 1993). Satyabati, the Raja's daughter, killed Sobha Singh, and the Mughal prince Azim-us-Shan finally crushed the rebels outside Burdwan (Peterson 1910, p. 27, via Wikipedia). The Raj's own troops had failed to protect the Raja. This article treats the revolt as the moment the Raj chose a standing army paid in cash from its treasury and answerable to the ruler alone. The Nagadee forces were the Raj's answer to the disaster of 1696.

Wars of expansion

Under Kirtichand (r. 1702–1740) the estate grew into what John McLane calls "a virtual Hindu kingdom within the weakening provincial Mughal hegemony" (McLane 1993, ch. 6), and it grew by conquest. Kirtichand fought the Rajas of Chandrakona and Barda near Ghatal and took their lands, seized the Balghara estate near Tarakeswar, and added the parganas of Chitua, Bhurshut, Barda and Manoharshahi, registering himself at Murshidabad as their proprietor. His "boldest achievement" was the defeat of the powerful Raja of Bishnupur, which he marked with a victory gate, the Baraduari, at Kanchannagar (Peterson 1910, p. 28, via Wikipedia). His successor Chitrasen Rai (r. 1740–1744) added the parganas of Mandalghat and Arsha (Peterson 1910, p. 31), and in 1744 took Gopbhum, the Sadgop kingdom whose last king had died fighting the Marathas (Wikipedia, citing Atul Sur). Wars on this scale needed a standing army. They were the Nagadees' wars, fought by the cash-paid Aguri soldiers.

The Maratha raids, 1742–1751

Then the estate itself became the battlefield. Raghuji Bhonsle of Nagpur claimed chauth, a quarter of Bengal's revenue, and Alivardi Khan's seizure of the Nawabship in 1740 gave him allies among Alivardi's enemies (Wikipedia). In April 1742 Raghuji's diwan, Bhaskar Pandit, led 10,000–20,000 Maratha horsemen into Bengal. On 15 April they caught Alivardi at Burdwan with 3,000–4,000 cavalry and 4,000–5,000 musketeers, surrounded his camp, looted his baggage and cut off his supplies, and he had to fight his way out to Katwa. From June, Katwa was the Maratha headquarters, and the raiders, the bargis, plundered Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore, Nadia and Murshidabad (Wikipedia; Purba Bardhaman district). Vaneshwar Vidyalankar, a pandit at the Burdwan court, called them "niggard of pity, slayers of pregnant women and infants, of Brahmans and the poor" (Sarkar 1964, p. 55). On 27 September Alivardi crossed the Ganga at Uddharanpur and fell on Bhaskar's camp while he celebrated Durga Puja; by December the Marathas had been driven back beyond Chilka.

Bhaskar returned in 1744. To end the invasions, Alivardi took the advice of his Afghan general Mustafa Khan and invited him to a parley. At Mankara, at the end of March 1744, Bhaskar and 21 of his commanders were cut down in the Nawab's tent, and Bhaskar's head was brought to Alivardi (Wikipedia, citing Sarkar). The killing enraged Raghuji, whose raids came every year until 1751, when Alivardi bought peace with chauth of 12 lakh rupees a year and gave up effective control of Orissa. The Dutch put the dead in Bengal and Bihar at about 400,000 (Wikipedia). The Nagadees acted as defensive guerrilla forces and treasury guards, protecting the western borders of Bengal from devastating Maratha cavalry raids. Through that decade the Nagadees defended the estate (McLane 1993).

The last battle, 1760

Three years after Plassey, in return for the Company's backing, Mir Qasim ceded Burdwan, Midnapore and Chittagong to the East India Company on 27 September 1760. At 5,174 square miles, Burdwan was reckoned the most productive district of the subah (Peterson 1910, pp. 31–32, via Wikipedia). The Mughal prince Shah Alam was then invading Bihar, and the Maratha chief Sheo Bhat made neighbouring Bishnupur his base (Bankura district). Maharaja Tilakchand (r. 1744–1770) chose to fight. With the zamindar of Birbhum he met a Company force under Martin White on 29 December 1760 at a crossing of the Banka river near Sangotgola, outside Burdwan (Purba Bardhaman district); it is also called the battle of Akna (Firminger 1917). About 10,000 Nagadee infantry took the field (Dutta 2023, p. 300, citing Halder 1982), but "White easily defeated the forces of Burdwan and Birbhum" (Mandal 2025).

It was the Raj army's last battle. With the Nawab himself having signed the district away, Burdwan's soldiers still took the field against the Company. Dutta's sources call the Aguris "the bulk of the nagdees" (p. 299).

2. A cash army of hired men

The Nagadees were paid in cash because they had no land to serve from.

Nagadee (also nagdee, nagdi) comes from nagad, cash. Bengal's older retainers served in return for land (jagir, chakran); the Nagadees drew salaries from the Maharaja's treasury. Their upkeep exceeded Rs 3 lakh a year, and about 10,000 Nagadee infantry fought a Company force under Martin White in 1760 (Halder 1982 and the Burdwan settlement report of 1940, cited in Dutta 2023, pp. 299–300).

This article reads the cash pay as the mark of hired Aguris with no local holdings. Dutta's sources call the Aguris "the bulk of the nagdees" (p. 299). The force had an up-country core of Rajputs, Bhumihars, Pathans and Afghans (Chatterjee 1986). Up-country recruits were familiar in eighteenth-century Bengal: hired matchlockmen were called Buxarries, "natives of Buxar" in Bihar, and Clive raised 200 of them in 1757 ("Buxerry", dictionary entry).

3. A Rajput link: the thread at marriage

One Aguri custom points to the Rajputs of Bihar and eastern UP. In 1891 Risley found that a section of the Aguris took the sacred thread at marriage rather than in childhood (vol. I, p. 12). Bhojpuri Rajputs did the same: they "shuffle on the janeo in a rough-and-ready fashion when a boy gets married" (vol. II, p. 191).

The shared custom links part of the Aguri community with the Rajputs of the Bhojpuri belt of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, perceived by the locals as people from Agra, i.e. Aguri.

4. From soldiers to landholders

The Company ran the Nagadees down over half a century, and their soldiers moved onto the land.

John Johnstone, the first Company Resident at Burdwan, cut the force in 1763. The rest policed robber bands from the Birbhum and Bankura jungles and still guarded the Burdwan treasury in the 1780s; the arrangement ended in 1809 (Halder 1982 and the settlement report, pp. 22–23, cited in Dutta 2023, p. 300). Other accounts describe a sudden disbandment (McLane 1993; Firminger 1917) and, without a source, a planned settlement of soldiers on frontier jotes; the regional sources describe gradual cuts and land acquired "through various means, including deception and trickery" (Dutta 2023, p. 300).

Many former Nagadee soldiers of the Aguri community joined a new stratum of powerful peasants, each holding 30 to 100 acres (Dutta 2023, p. 307, citing Halder 1982). By 1891 Risley found that "many of them hold estates and tenures of various grades, and the bulk of the caste are fairly prosperous cultivators" (vol. I, p. 13). The tie to the Raj endured. At Kshiragram, where Ugra Kshatriyas held the larger part of the land, each of their nine lineages sent a representative to the rituals of a temple rebuilt around 1730 under Maharaja Kirtichand and run from the Raj's temple office (Togawa 1996, ch. 1).

Do the numbers add up? They do if settlement began soon after 1696. The projection below starts in 1700 and grows the community year by year. It assumes wives aged 15–24 at settlement and a life expectancy of 25.5, Davis's figure for Indian women in 1872–91. It adds extra deaths for the Maratha raids (5%), the 1770 famine (5%; famine deaths in the Burdwan estate were "not severe") and the Burdwan fever of 1862–72 (10%).

The rates are realistic: India's natural increase in 1881–91 was 0.8% a year, from about 49 births and 41 deaths per 1,000 (Davis 1944, p. 262). At that rate about 8,000 settling couples reproduce the 1872 count: four-fifths of a force the size recorded in 1760, leaving room for men who went home. The model assumes a single founding group and ignores later recruits.

5. Why Burdwan matters

Aguris are concentrated where the Burdwan Raj ruled.

Census figures as tabulated in Dutta 2023, Table 13.1; Risley's 1872–81 table shows the same pattern (vol. I, p. 13). Most of the rest lived in neighbouring Bankura.

Theories set aside.

• Migration with Man Singh. A tradition brings the Aguris with Man Singh's Mughal army (Bhaumik 2023, p. 48). Man Singh, subahdar of Bengal from 1595 to 1606, campaigned from Orissa to Dhaka (Wikipedia). His soldiers would have settled across Bengal, not in one district that became an estate's heartland half a century later, and no record of a local settlement exists.
• Khatri–Sadgop unions. W. B. Oldham's 1891 theory (summarised in Bhattacharya 1896, p. 156) rests on unrecorded "admissions".

6. The Chandimangal couplet

The couplet cited for a sixteenth-century Aguri presence is firmly dated only to about 1700.

Mukundaram's Chandimangal, composed in the later sixteenth century, contains a couplet Dutta quotes as Aghari nibase pure / apnar brtti kare / anuchit na kare kakhano: "the Aghari dwell in the town, follow their own calling, and never do wrong". He cites Sukumar Sen's edition, pp. 82 and 135 (Dutta 2023, pp. 301, 319). McLane uses the poem, dated 1589, to argue that Aguris were present "almost certainly" before the Khatris (McLane 1993, p. 157, via Wikipedia).

Two points undercut that use. Sen's edition "was based on a manuscript dated 1700" (Famine & Dearth project), so the couplet is firmly attested only from about 1700. And the word is Aghari, which Bhattacharya knew as the name of a separate people of Chota Nagpur and the Central Provinces (1896, p. 157); reading it as the Burdwan Aguris is an assumption.

Sen is also said to have found the couplet missing from the oldest manuscripts and added in eighteenth-century Burdwan copies to flatter Aguri patrons (Famine & Dearth project; Chettry 2022). Neither the project's translation page nor Chettry's abstract mentions this; Sen's notes on the manuscripts would settle it. The next mention, in Bharatchandra's Vidyasundar (1750s), is set in Bardhaman itself (Bhaumik 2023, p. 48).

Sources

Primary and early sources

• Risley, H. H. The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vols I–II. Calcutta, 1891. vol. I; vol. II
• Bhattacharya, J. N. Hindu Castes and Sects. Calcutta, 1896. GIPE scan
• Day, Lal Behari. Bengal Peasant Life (1878; first published as Govinda Samanta, 1874), 1916 reprint. archive.org
• Mukundaram, Chandimangal, ed. Sukumar Sen (Sahitya Akademi). Famine & Dearth project, University of Exeter: "Translation Chandimangal" and Bengali text.
• Firminger, W. K., ed. The Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company, 28 July 1812. Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co., 1917.
• Oldham, W. B. Some Historical and Ethnical Aspects of the Burdwan District. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1891.
• Peterson, J. C. K. Bengal District Gazetteers: Burdwan. Calcutta, 1910 (cited via Wikipedia, "Bardhaman Raj").

Scholarship

• McLane, J. R. Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal. Cambridge University Press, 1993. DOI
• Dutta, A. K. "Prosperity, Dominance, and Social Mobility." In Explorations in Colonial Bengal, 297–324. Orient BlackSwan, 2023. Used for Halder (1982), the Burdwan settlement report (Hill and Banerjee 1940), Mitra (1953) and the 1921 and 1931 censuses, none yet examined directly. Orient BlackSwan
• Bhaumik, S. The Changing World of Caste and Hierarchy in Bengal. Routledge, 2023. Routledge
• Togawa, M. A Sakta-Pitha in Bengal. PhD thesis, University of North Bengal, 1996. NBU repository
• Chatterjee, Gouripada. Midnapore, the Forerunner of India's Freedom Struggle. Mittal Publications, 1986.
• Chettry, Aniket Tathagata. "The Textual Representation of Kingship and Authority in the Chandimangal of Mukunda Chakroborty." The Medieval History Journal 25, no. 1 (2022). SAGE
• Davis, Kingsley. "Demographic Fact and Policy in India." Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1944), p. 262. PDF
• Life expectancy in high-mortality populations, citing Davis (1951), Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Table
• Sarkar, Jadunath. Fall of the Mughal Empire, vol. I, 1739–1754. 3rd ed. Orient Longman, 1964 (cited via Wikipedia).
• Mandal, Sanghapriyo. "Conflict and Collaboration: Burdwan Raj and Its Relationship with the British (1757–1947)." Journal of Historical Studies and Research, 2025. PDF

Reference

• Wikipedia: "Bardhaman Raj", "Aguri (caste)", "Gopbhum", "Man Singh I", "Maratha invasions of Bengal", "First Maratha invasion of Bengal", "Third Maratha invasion of Bengal", "Bhaskar Ram Kolhatkar", "Great Bengal famine of 1770".