Ahom Kingdom and Medieval North-East India: Exam Notes

The Brahmaputra valley kept its own line of kings while the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals ruled the north Indian plain, and examiners have begun to ask that story directly. The Ahom kingdom lasted almost six hundred years, from 1228 to 1826, longer than any single dynasty of medieval India, and it is remembered for two things above all: an administration built on compulsory service rather than on cash salaries, and a run of victories over Mughal armies that no other regional power managed. Around it stood the Koch, Kachari, Jaintia, Tripura and Manipur kingdoms, each with its own chronicle and its own capital, and together they make up the medieval history of the North-East.

Sukaphaa and the founding of the kingdom

The Ahoms were a Tai people from the upper Irrawaddy country. Their leader Sukaphaa crossed the Patkai hills with a small following and founded the kingdom in 1228, settling at Charaideo near modern Sivasagar, which stayed the ritual capital and the royal burial ground. Sukaphaa's policy was absorption rather than conquest: he married into the Borahi and Moran communities and encouraged his followers to do the same, so that the Tai minority melted into the local population within a few generations. The Assamese word Ahom, and the name Assam itself, derive from this ruling group. Assam observes Sukaphaa's memory as Asom Divas on 2 December. The kings took the title Swargadeo, the lord of heaven, a translation of the Tai Chaopha, and the capital moved over the centuries from Charaideo to Garhgaon, then to Rangpur under Rudra Singha, and finally to Jorhat.

The paik system and the great offices

The Ahom state ran on the paik system. Every able-bodied man between about sixteen and fifty was a paik, registered in the state's rolls and bound to serve the king with his labour or his arms in rotation, receiving land to cultivate instead of pay. Four paiks made a got, and one man from each got served at a time while the other three worked his fields. The officers were graded by the number of paiks under them.

Above these stood the council of great nobles. Sukaphaa created two offices, the Burhagohain and the Borgohain; Suhungmung added the Borpatrogohain, completing the three gohains. Pratap Singha, who ruled in the first half of the seventeenth century, created the Borphukan, the viceroy of the lower valley who sat at Gauhati, and the Borbarua, the chief executive and judicial officer of the upper valley. The census of paiks and of cultivated land was revised in great surveys, and the Ahom chronicles, the Buranjis, were kept continuously, first in the Tai Ahom language and script and later in Assamese. No other Indian region has a comparable series of official chronicles for the medieval centuries.

Suhungmung and the great expansion

Suhungmung, also called Dihingia Raja, who ruled from 1497 to 1539, is the turning point. He annexed the Chutiya kingdom of the upper valley in 1523 and broke the Kachari power, pushing the kingdom west and south. He was the first Ahom king to take a Hindu title, Swarganarayan, which marks the beginning of the kingdom's absorption into the wider Indian religious world. His reign also saw the first Muslim invasion from Bengal turned back: Turbak, the Bengal commander, was defeated and killed in 1532-33 and the Ahoms pursued his army to the Karatoya river.

The Ahoms against the Mughals

Mughal pressure came through Bengal. In 1662 Mir Jumla, Aurangzeb's governor of Bengal, marched up the valley, took Garhgaon and forced the Ahom king Jayadhwaj Singha into the humiliating Treaty of Ghilajharighat in 1663, which cost the Ahoms tribute, territory and hostages. The recovery was swift. The Ahoms lost a pitched battle at Alaboi in 1669, but in 1671 Lachit Borphukan destroyed the Mughal flotilla of Raja Ram Singh I of Amber at Saraighat on the Brahmaputra near Gauhati, using the river and the rains against a cavalry army. Saraighat ended Mughal ambitions in the valley for good, and Lachit's birth anniversary is kept as Lachit Divas on 24 November; the best passing cadet of the National Defence Academy receives a gold medal in his name.

The neighbouring kingdoms

West of the Ahoms lay the Koch kingdom, founded by Biswa Singha early in the sixteenth century and brought to its height by his son Nara Narayan with his brother and general Chilarai, before it split into Koch Bihar and Koch Hajo. The Kachari or Dimasa kingdom shifted its capital from Dimapur to Maibang and then to Khaspur. The Jaintia kings ruled from Jaintiapur in the Khasi-Jaintia hills, Tripura was ruled by the Manikya dynasty whose chronicle is the Rajmala, and Manipur by the Meitei kings of the Ningthouja line, whose chronicle, the Cheitharol Kumbaba, is one of the longest court records in Asia; their king Pamheiba, known as Garib Niwaj, made Vaishnavism the state religion in the early eighteenth century. Before all of them, ancient Kamarupa had been ruled by the Varmans, of whom Bhaskaravarman was Harsha's ally and Xuanzang's host.

Religion, monuments and decline

The great religious movement of medieval Assam was the Ekasarana Dharma preached by Srimanta Sankardeva, who taught devotion to a single god without caste or ritual, wrote the Kirtan Ghosa and the Borgeets, created the one-act Ankiya Naat plays and the satra and namghar institutions that still organise village religious life; his chief disciple Madhavdeva wrote the Naam Ghosa. The Ahom kings left the Rang Ghar at Sivasagar, a brick pavilion built in the eighteenth century and often called one of Asia's oldest surviving amphitheatres, the Kareng Ghar and Talatal Ghar at Rangpur, and the great tanks of Sivasagar and Joysagar. The royal burial mounds, the moidams of Charaideo, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024. The kingdom's end came from inside: the Moamoria rebellion from 1769 wrecked the paik system, the Burmese were invited in and then stayed, and the First Anglo-Burmese War transferred Assam to the British by the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826.