AV Dinar - Kaivartas of Varendra

The Kaivartas were a fishing and boatman caste who seized control of the Varendra region of Bengal — roughly the northern Bengal delta — in a period of dynastic instability that followed the fragmentation of the Gupta imperial system. Their coinage is poorly documented in the written record, which makes numismatic evidence nearly the sole surviving trace of their political authority during this window. The chronological range assigned to this issue spans nearly a century, and tightening that window remains an open problem in the study of early medieval Bengal.