Indian History Quiz: The Ahom Kingdom and Medieval North-East India

Sukaphaa was a Tai prince from the upper Irrawaddy region who crossed the Patkai hills with a small following and founded the Ahom kingdom in 1228, settling at Charaideo near present-day Sivasagar; Assam keeps his memory as Asom Divas on 2 December.

Sukaphaa settled at Charaideo near modern Sivasagar in 1228, and even after the administrative capital shifted the site remained the ritual centre of the dynasty, where the kings and queens were buried under earthen mounds called moidams; the Charaideo moidams were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024.

The Ahom administration graded its officers by the number of paiks, the men liable to compulsory service, placed under them, and the Hazarika commanded a thousand, the name itself coming from the word for a thousand.

Suhungmung, better known as the Dihingia Raja, ruled from 1497 to 1539, annexed the Chutiya kingdom of the upper valley in 1523, broke Kachari power, and was the first Ahom king to take a Hindu title, Swarganarayan, which marks the dynasty's entry into the wider Indian religious world; the Bengal…

Pratap Singha, also called Susenghphaa, who ruled in the first half of the seventeenth century, created the Borphukan as viceroy of the lower Brahmaputra valley with his seat at Gauhati, and the Borbarua as the chief executive and judicial officer of the upper valley.

Lachit Borphukan commanded the Ahom forces in 1671 and destroyed the Mughal flotilla at Saraighat near Gauhati by fighting a cavalry army on water during the rains; his birth anniversary is kept as Lachit Divas on 24 November, and the best passing cadet of the National Defence Academy receives a…

Mir Jumla, Aurangzeb's governor of Bengal, marched up the valley in 1662, occupied the capital Garhgaon and forced the Ahom king Jayadhwaj Singha to accept the Treaty of Ghilajharighat in 1663, under which the Ahoms paid a heavy indemnity, ceded territory and gave hostages.

The treaty of 1826 ended the First Anglo-Burmese War, and by it Burma gave up its claims over Assam, Manipur, Cachar and Jaintia and ceded Arakan and Tenasserim, so Assam passed to the East India Company and six centuries of Ahom rule came to a close.

The Buranjis are the official and family histories kept by the Ahom state and its nobles, written first in the Tai Ahom language and script and later in Assamese, and they are the main written source for the political history of the Brahmaputra valley between the thirteenth and the nineteenth…

Chilarai, whose given name was Shukladhwaj, was the brother and commander of the Koch king Nara Narayan, the son of the founder Biswa Singha, and his campaigns in the sixteenth century carried Koch power across the lower Brahmaputra valley before the kingdom split into Koch Bihar and Koch Hajo.

Sankardeva, who lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, preached the Ekasarana Dharma, devotion to a single god without caste barriers or elaborate ritual, composed the Kirtan Ghosa and the Borgeets, created the one-act Ankiya Naat plays, and established the satra monasteries and the namghar prayer halls that still organise…