Kamarupa

Varman, Mlechchha and Pala dynasties, mentioned in the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta, visited by Xuanzang.

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Kamarupa

Varman, Mlechchha and Pala dynasties, mentioned in the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta, visited by Xuanzang.

Anjali Choudhury
Through the Ages

The Kingdom and Its Culture

Through the Ages

1. Origins and Myth

From Pragjyotisha to Pushyavarman

Kamarupa was the first great kingdom of the Brahmaputra valley. It held the valley for nearly eight centuries, from about 350 to 1140, and at its height its writ ran from the Karatoya river in the west to Sadiya in the east, reaching at times into North Bengal and Sylhet. No later power before the Ahoms matched that reach. Before it was history, though, it was myth, and the two were never wholly separated. Every historical dynasty of Kamarupa traced itself back to the same legendary king, so the kingdom always told its origin and its history as one story. What follows sets out both the myth and the moment the record becomes historical.

Pragjyotisha, the place of eastern light

The land’s oldest name is Pragjyotisha, glossed by tradition as the place of eastern light. It is this name, not Kamarupa, that appears in the Mahabharata and the Puranas. In that epic tradition the king of Pragjyotisha is Bhagadatta, a great warrior who fights on the Kaurava side at Kurukshetra, and his father is Naraka, born of the Earth and slain, in the tradition the texts preserve, by Krishna. From Naraka every later line of the valley claimed descent. None of this is documented history, and it must be read as the charter myth it is. Yet it is the charter on which the kingdom’s self-understanding was built, and the link was made late and deliberately. Only in the seventh century did Bhaskaravarman formally tie the Kamarupa of the kings to the Pragjyotisha of the epics, tracing his own line to Bhagadatta and Naraka. The land would answer to three names across three ages, Pragjyotisha, then Kamarupa, then Asam (today's Assam), and the procession of those names is itself a way of telling the valley’s history.

The Three Names of the Land

Myth and the sacred valley

Pragjyotisha, Kamarupa, Asam. A valley that has worn three names across three ages, each with its own legend, from the place of eastern light to the name the whole country carries still.

A traditional Indian miniature painting of the battle: Krishna and his queen Satyabhama mounted on the eagle Garuda confront the demon-king Narakasura, who rides a war-elephant amid a press of elephants and warriors before his cityA traditional Indian miniature painting of the battle: Krishna and his queen Satyabhama mounted on the eagle Garuda confront the demon-king Narakasura, who rides a war-elephant amid a press of elephants and warriors before his city
Plate 1.Krishna slaying Naraka. Krishna and his queen Satyabhama, mounted on the eagle Garuda, fall upon Naraka before his eastern stronghold. In many tellings it is Satyabhama who strikes the demon-king down.Photograph: India (Delhi Agra area) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

The goddess at the root

Bound into the founding myth is the cult of the goddess. The hill of Kamakhya stands on the Nilachal above the Brahmaputra, and it was the seat of a Sakta goddess-worship older than any dynasty. The later Sanskrit texts of the valley, the Kalika Purana and the Yogini Tantra, fixed that worship in writing and tied it to the land’s kings. The very name Kamarupa, the form of desire, belongs to this Sakta and Tantric world. The valley kept a legend of how it came about. After the death of Sati, Shiva sank into a penance so deep it frightened the gods. They sent Kamadev, the god of desire, to break it, and Shiva’s wrath burned Kamadev to ash. Only when Kamadev’s widow Rati pleaded did the god relent. He granted that desire be reborn in this very land, and there recover his lost form, his rupa. From kama and rupa, the place where desire got its form back, the land took its name. Myth, goddess and kingship were a single knot at the root of the state, and that knot is examined in the chapter on Religion and Script.

Naraka, King of Pragjyotisha

Myth and the sacred valley

Before there was history there was a demon-king, born of the Earth, who nearly won the goddess of the hill with a staircase built in one night, and asked with his dying breath to be remembered in lamps.

The historical threshold

The myth gives way to record in the middle of the fourth century. The Allahabad pillar inscription of the Gupta emperor Samudragupta, composed around 350, lists Kamarupa among the frontier kingdoms, the pratyanta states, that paid him homage and tribute. Beside it the pillar names a second valley kingdom, Davaka, generally placed in the Kapili valley of central Assam, a neighbour whose absorption would be one of Kamarupa’s first recorded acts of growth. That single external notice is the firm ground on which the kingdom’s recorded history stands. It is contemporary with the founder of the kingdom’s first historical dynasty, Pushyavarman, who took the throne about 350 and tied his line genealogically to the Naraka of the myth. From that point the kingdom can be followed reign by reign through its inscriptions. The next chapter, on the Varman dynasty, takes up the line Pushyavarman founded.

A tall polished sandstone column standing on a stepped plinth among trees, a small figure at its base for scaleA tall polished sandstone column standing on a stepped plinth among trees, a small figure at its base for scale
Plate 2.The Allahabad pillar, where the record begins. The Allahabad pillar, inscribed with Samudragupta's eulogy, which names Kamarupa among the frontier kingdoms paying the Guptas homage.Photograph: Rust, Thomas Alfred (1841 - 1904) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

2. The Varman Dynasty

Samudragupta's tributary to Bhaskaravarman, c. 350 to 650

The Varman dynasty was founded by Pushyavarman around 350. It was the first historically attested royal line of Kamarupa, and it ruled for some three centuries from the capital at Pragjyotishpura, the modern Guwahati. Pushyavarman was a contemporary of the Gupta emperor Samudragupta, whose Allahabad pillar inscription names Kamarupa as a tributary frontier state. The dynasty he founded is known to us in unusual detail, because its own kings recorded their ancestry. In their copperplate grants the Varmans traced their line back to the legendary Naraka and his son Bhagadatta. Modern scholars read that pedigree as a claim of legitimacy rather than plain descent, but it shows how the house wished to be seen.

A dynasty that wrote down its line, c. 350 to 518

Almost everything we know of the Varman succession comes from two copperplate grants, the Dubi and Nidhanpur plates, issued late in the dynasty by Bhaskaravarman. They list the kings in order from Pushyavarman onward. After Pushyavarman came Samudravarman, Balavarman, Kalyanavarman, Ganapativarman, Mahendravarman, Narayanavarman and Bhutivarman, and the line ran on through Chandramukhavarman, Sthitavarman, Susthitavarman and Supratisthitavarman to Bhaskaravarman, about a dozen rulers in all. Most of these reigns are names with little narrative attached, but they are not gaps. They are the steady three centuries in which a frontier kingdom became a power worth the notice of Kanauj and China. The first recorded growth came early. Under Kalyanavarman, in the earlier fifth century, the kingdom is understood to have absorbed its neighbour Davaka, the other valley state Samudragupta’s pillar had named, folding the Kapili country of central Assam into Kamarupa.

A dark rectangular copperplate covered edge to edge in rows of engraved early eastern-Brahmi letters, the surface worn at the left edgeA dark rectangular copperplate covered edge to edge in rows of engraved early eastern-Brahmi letters, the surface worn at the left edge
Plate 1.A copperplate of Bhaskaravarman’s Nidhanpur grant, the record that carries the Varman line. A plate of Bhaskaravarman's seventh-century Nidhanpur grant, its rounded Kutila letters the stage of eastern Brahmi from which the Assamese script descends.Photograph: Bhaskarbhagawati · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The early Varmans ruled as subordinates within the Gupta orbit. As Gupta power faded, they claimed a rank of their own. The grants credit the middle kings of the line with the ashvamedha, the horse-sacrifice by which an Indian king proclaimed paramount status. Readings of the plates differ on exactly which kings performed it, but Mahendravarman is credited with two of the rites, and the tradition remembers Bhutivarman too as a sacrificer. However the count is settled, the rites and the imperial titles that came with them mark the moment Kamarupa began to think of itself as an empire rather than a frontier tributary.

Bhutivarman and the wars with Gauda, c. 518 to 600

The first reign with real substance is that of Bhutivarman (about 518 to 542), also called Mahabhutavarman. Under him Kamarupa grew strong and its reach spread. The Nidhanpur plate records his gift of land in the Chandrapuri visaya, generally placed in the Sylhet region, and with the imperial rites his house had claimed, Kamarupa now stood as a settled power in the eastern valley.

Its rise ran up against the powers rising west of it, above all the kings of Gauda in Bengal, and the generations after Bhutivarman were shaped by that rivalry. Two generations on, his great-grandson Susthitavarman faced two of those western powers at once. The first blow came from far up the Ganges plain. Mahasenagupta, the Later Gupta king of East Malwa, carried his arms all the way to the Brahmaputra, the Lauhitya of the inscriptions, and defeated Susthitavarman on its banks. The Aphsad inscription records that victory. Gauda struck in the same years, and on that invasion the king died. His two sons, Supratisthitavarman and the young Bhaskaravarman, met the enemy elephant-force, were captured and carried off to Gauda. They later won their kingdom back, seemingly on a promise of allegiance. Supratisthitavarman reigned only briefly and died without an heir, and the throne then passed to his brother. The surviving brother, Bhaskaravarman, would turn Kamarupa’s continuing struggle with Gauda to his advantage.

An ink rubbing of a large stone inscription, twenty-eight dense lines of late Gupta-era letters reading white on black, the lower left corner of the stone broken awayAn ink rubbing of a large stone inscription, twenty-eight dense lines of late Gupta-era letters reading white on black, the lower left corner of the stone broken away
Plate 2.The Aphsad inscription, which records the defeat on the Lauhitya. The Aphsad inscription of the Later Gupta king Adityasena, in an early estampage. Its lines record Mahasenagupta's victory over Susthitavarman on the banks of the Lauhitya, the oldest outside notice of a battle on the Brahmaputra.Photograph: Fleet, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Bhaskaravarman, Harsha and Xuanzang, c. 600 to 650

The dynasty reached its height under Bhaskaravarman (about 600 to 650), the last and greatest of the Varmans. Like his brother before him he never married. He allied with Harsha of Kanauj against Sasanka of Gauda, whose kingdom the two courts pressed from either side, and the alliance carried Kamarupi power as far as Karnasuvarna in Bengal. From that camp he issued the Nidhanpur grant. His court received the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang around 643, and Xuanzang’s record in the Da Tang Xiyu Ji is among the earliest external descriptions of the valley, its people, climate and the king himself. Bana’s Harshacharita describes the embassies and gifts that passed between the two courts.

Traditional East Asian painting of the monk Xuanzang walking with a wicker pack of scriptures on his backTraditional East Asian painting of the monk Xuanzang walking with a wicker pack of scriptures on his back
Plate 3.The pilgrim Xuanzang. The Tang monk Xuanzang as the travelling pilgrim, a wicker frame of scripture bundles roped to his back, in the standard East Asian image of the scripture-seeker.Photograph: Unknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Xuanzang Visits Kamarupa

Kamarupa and the early west

Around 643 CE a Chinese monk who had walked the width of Asia reached the court of Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa, and left the earliest eyewitness account of Assam.

Bhaskaravarman died childless, and with him the Varman line effectively ended around 650. A short-lived successor, remembered as Avantivarman, seems to have followed. He was soon ousted by Salastambha, who founded the line treated in the next chapter, the Mlechchha dynasty.

3. The Mlechchha Dynasty

Haruppeswara and the eastward shift, c. 650 to 900

The childless Bhaskaravarman ended the Varman line around 650. The throne of Kamarupa then passed to Salastambha, who founded a new line, unrelated to the Varmans. How exactly he came to power is not recoverable from the record. His house ruled for some two and a half centuries, into the early tenth. The name it carries is not its own. Mlechchha was the label of later Sanskrit writers, a word of disdain for the non-Brahmanical. Salastambha was very likely a chief of the local peoples, probably the Bodo-Kachari. Some scholars read the very name Mlechchha as a Sanskritising of Mech, the Bodo group. Salastambha's rise is a reminder that the Sanskritic kingship of Kamarupa always sat on an indigenous base.

The eastward shift to Haruppeswara

The Mlechchha kings moved the centre of the kingdom eastward. They fixed their capital at Haruppeswara, on the Brahmaputra near present Tezpur, and the shift mattered. It pulled the kingdom’s weight from the Guwahati country up into the central valley, the same middle reach that holds the great scatter of early Kamarupa stone sculpture, from the Varman-age doorframe at Da Parbatia to the carved remains on the Bamuni Hills. That body of work is treated in the chapter on Material Culture. The Mlechchha capital simply rose in the country that had long been this art’s home. Tezpur kept its legends too. The fortress hill of Agnigarh above the town carries the old Pragjyotisha tale of Banasura’s daughter Usha, her love for Krishna’s grandson, and the war of fire it kindled.

A long carved architectural member from the Bamuni Hills, a row of standing celestial figures alternating with turned colonnettes, the stone resting among the conserved fragments of the mound.A long carved architectural member from the Bamuni Hills, a row of standing celestial figures alternating with turned colonnettes, the stone resting among the conserved fragments of the mound.
Plate 1.Carved figures from the Bamuni Hills, above the Mlechchha capital country. A row of celestial figures between slender colonnettes on a carved member from the Bamuni Hills, apsaras worked with notable softness and movement.Photograph: Jyotirmoi Borah · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The line through its grants, c. 650 to 900

Like the Varmans, the dynasty is known mainly through its copperplates, above all the Hayunthal and Tezpur grants. These preserve the succession: Salastambha, Vijaya, Palaka, Kumara, Vajradeva, Harshavarman, Balavarman, and, after an obscure stretch in the record, Harjaravarman and Vanamala. The most striking of the early kings was Harshavarman, who reigned in the first half of the eighth century. Tradition credits him with a wide reach into the western plains, but he is remembered above all for his fall. He was defeated and, by most accounts, killed by Yasovarman of Kannauj, a victory bound up with the campaigns the Prakrit poem ‘Gaudavaho’ celebrates, though the poet never names the fallen king. It marks the limit of Kamarupa’s early expansion westward, and a period of weakness followed before the house recovered.

A pear-shaped copperplate seal with a handle, an elephant emblem in the upper field and three lines of engraved legend belowA pear-shaped copperplate seal with a handle, an elephant emblem in the upper field and three lines of engraved legend below
Plate 2.The elephant seal that fastened the grants. The seal of a Kamarupa copperplate grant, the elephant emblem of the kings above the royal legend. Every dynasty of the kingdom sealed its grants with the same device, and the plates such seals fastened carry almost all its history.Photograph: Bhaskarbhagawati, after K.L. Barua, Early History of Kamarupa (1933) · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The recovery shows in the later reigns. Harjaravarman issued the Hayunthal plates around 825, took full imperial titles, a sign that the kingdom had regained its standing, and dated his grants in a regnal era of his own. His successor Vanamala (about 832 to 855) is known from the Tezpur grant. He rebuilt the great temple of Hataka-Sulin Siva and made lavish grants of land and villages to Brahmins. That temple has never been identified on the ground, but Siva worship never left the Tezpur country, where the Mahabhairab shrine still crowns its hill. These reigns are the high tide of the Mlechchha age.

White-spired Siva temple with a gilded ornamented porch and a paved courtyardWhite-spired Siva temple with a gilded ornamented porch and a paved courtyard
Plate 3.The Mahabhairab temple at Tezpur, Siva’s worship alive in the old capital country. The Mahabhairab temple at Tezpur, a Siva shrine on a low hill near the Brahmaputra, its white tower rising above a gilded carved porch.Photograph: BhuyanBhaskar · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The close of the line

After Vanamala the dynasty ran on through Jayamala (Virabahu), Balavarman III and, by most reckonings, a last king Tyagasimha around the turn of the tenth century. These later reigns are thinly documented. Balavarman III’s Nowgong grant is among its final records, and after it the copperplate trail that carries the whole dynasty grows faint. The line faded in the political disorder of the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and the end came without a clear heir. Tyagasimha is said to have died childless, and with him the male succession of the house failed. The throne then passed to Brahmapala, who was chosen not by descent but by an election of the leading chiefs of the kingdom. It is the next dynasty’s own grants that describe this choice, so the story of the founding survives mainly in the record of the house that gained by it. That election marks a clean break, and Brahmapala stands as the founder of the Pala dynasty.

Facsimile of a copperplate engraved with twelve numbered lines of script, a ring hole at its left edge, titled The Nowgong copper-plate of Bala VarmanFacsimile of a copperplate engraved with twelve numbered lines of script, a ring hole at its left edge, titled The Nowgong copper-plate of Bala Varman
Plate 4.The Nowgong grant, near the end of the copperplate trail. The Nowgong copperplate of Balavarman, photo-etched for the Asiatic Society in 1897. The grant is among the last records of the Mlechchha house, and the copperplate trail fades soon after it.Photograph: Survey of India Offices, Calcutta (photo-etching, 1897) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

4. The Pala Dynasty

The last classical house, c. 900 to 1100

Around 900 the throne of Kamarupa passed to Brahmapala, who founded the line called the Palas of Kamarupa. They shared a name with the great Pala emperors of Bengal, but no blood, and the coincidence runs deeper than the name. Both lines began with an elected king. By the account their own grants give, the Mlechchha dynasty failed of an heir and the chieftains raised Brahmapala to the throne, much as the Bengal Palas remembered the election of their own founder Gopala. The new house descended from neither of the lines it replaced, and its grants make no such claim. What it did claim was the older and grander legitimacy of descent from Naraka and the Bhauma line, the same ancient charter of the land that every Kamarupa dynasty before it had invoked. A usurping or elected house, unrelated to its predecessors, still anchored its right to rule in the myth. Brahmapala’s dynasty would rule for roughly two centuries, from about 900 to about 1100, the third and last of Kamarupa’s classical houses and the last centralised power to hold the whole valley before its long fragmentation.

Durjaya and the line of kings, c. 900 to 1100

The succession is well recorded by the standards of early Assam. Brahmapala reigned about 900 to 920, then Ratnapala, Indrapala, Gopala, Harshapala, Dharmapala and finally Jayapala, whose reign closed around 1100. The seat of power moved with them. Brahmapala held the older capital in the Tezpur country that the Salastambha kings had used. His son Ratnapala shifted the centre of gravity downstream, building a new fortified city in the North Guwahati country and naming it Sri-Durjaya, the unconquerable. Later Dharmapala ruled from Kamarupanagara in the same stretch of the north bank.

A dark copperplate photographed in 1897, fourteen lines of raised script and a ring hole at its right edgeA dark copperplate photographed in 1897, fourteen lines of raised script and a ring hole at its right edge
Plate 1.A grant of Indrapala, issued from Sri-Durjaya. The Gauhati grant of Indrapala, turned up by a farmer’s plough in the Kamrup country in the 1860s. Its verses name the fortified city of Sri-Durjaya as the seat of the king.Photograph: Survey of India Offices, Calcutta (photo-etching, 1897) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Ratnapala was the strongest of the line, and his long reign runs from about 920 to 960. He is known chiefly from his copperplates, the Bargaon grant of his twenty-fifth regnal year and the Sualkuchi grant of his thirty-sixth, both issued from Durjaya. The Bargaon plate praises him in the high style of the age, calling him a terror to the kings around him. By tradition preserved in a later Pala grant he defeated the Bengal Pala ruler Rajyapala and pushed his arms toward the Ganges, though the epigraphs’ grander boasts are the ordinary flourish of court poetry. He built Siva temples across the kingdom and endowed Brahmins on a grand scale. Indrapala, Gopala and Dharmapala continued the line of pious, grant-making kings, whose copperplates are the backbone of the period’s history. These are not empty names. The inscriptions are issued in an ornate Sanskrit and a maturing eastern script, and they set out in detail the agrarian order, the temple economy and the administration of a settled classical kingdom.

The last flowering

Under the Palas the valley reached the last flowering of its classical culture. The temple complex at Madan Kamdev, north of Guwahati near Baihata Chariali, is their most astonishing surviving monument, a dense scatter of carved stone spread over roughly half a kilometre. Excavators have dated its ruins to the tenth through twelfth centuries, the Pala age and a little beyond. Its carving is the work of a flourishing late temple-building tradition, and the full range of its sculpture is treated in the chapter on Material Culture. It was in this age, too, that the Kalika Purana fixed the worship of Saktism at Kamakhya in its classical form, a settlement treated in the chapter on Religion and Script.

Circular stone plinth and scattered carved blocks of the ruined Madan Kamdev temple complex in a landscaped clearingCircular stone plinth and scattered carved blocks of the ruined Madan Kamdev temple complex in a landscaped clearing
Plate 2.Madan Kamdev ruins. The ruined temple complex at Madan Kamdev near Baihata Chariali, its carved stone spread over half a kilometre, dated to the tenth through twelfth centuries of the Kamarupa Palas.Photograph: Bhaskarbhagawati · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons
Carved sandstone block showing a seated deity within a pillared niche and figural relief panels, recovered from Madan KamdevCarved sandstone block showing a seated deity within a pillared niche and figural relief panels, recovered from Madan Kamdev
Plate 3.Madan Kamdev sandstone sculpture. A carved sandstone block from Madan Kamdev: a seated figure in a pillared niche below a panel of smaller figures, in the eastern Indian school of late Kamarupa temple sculpture.Photograph: Bhaskarbhagawati · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The fall of the house

The dynasty’s later reigns ran under growing pressure from Bengal, where the emperor Ramapala had revived the fortunes of the other Pala line. In the early twelfth century that pressure broke the kingdom. Jayapala’s line did not survive the invasions and governorships that followed, and the throne the Kamarupa Palas had held for two centuries was gone by the second quarter of the twelfth century. How the conquest unfolded, and what became of the valley afterward, is the subject of the next chapter, on Decline and Fragmentation.

5. Decline and Fragmentation

From Ramapala's conquest to Kamatapur, 1100 to 1257

The end of Kamarupa was a slow unravelling rather than a single catastrophe. The last strong ruler of its final line was Dharmapala, who kept his capital at Kamarupanagara, near modern North Guwahati. His successor Jayapala, the last known king of the line, gave way around 1100. The pressure came from Bengal, where Ramapala had revived Pala power and pushed east into the western Kamarupa country. In the decades that followed, the valley passed to Bengal-appointed governors. Timgyadeva held the west from about 1110 until 1126, then rebelled and ruled as an independent king, and after him Ramapala’s heirs sent Vaidyadeva, who took the grand title Maharajadhiraja, issued grants in the old Kamarupa style, and in his turn declared himself independent, holding the western country into the 1140s. The centralised kingdom had held the valley for nearly eight centuries. It broke apart in the years around 1140, and what followed was not a clean succession. It was a long, open interregnum in which the old name outlived the old state.

The successor mosaic

No single dynasty replaced Kamarupa. The kingdom dissolved into a mosaic of medieval polities, each holding a stretch of the old realm, and power now ran in many small channels rather than one. In the west, one kingdom would harden into Kamata, later ruled by the Khen kings, whose last ruler Nilambar was overthrown by the Bengal sultan Alauddin Husain Shah at the close of the fifteenth century. Across the central plain a line of chiefs sometimes called the lunar dynasty, remembered by names such as Rayarideva, Udayakarna and Vallabhadeva, held the north-bank country through the later twelfth century, and the Sylhet country in the south had its own rulers. In the east, rising peoples would later found their own states, the Chutia in the Sadiya country and the Kachari south of the river. Between these named powers, much of the central valley fell to local landholders, chief among them the Bhuyans, a loose confederacy of petty chiefs who held their own tracts and answered to no single crown. Their scattered lordships are a fair picture of the whole age. Authority was parcelled out, not concentrated, and no court in the valley could now claim the reach that Dharmapala’s line had once held.

The Turkic invasions, 1206 to 1228

Into this openness marched the first Muslim army to reach the valley. In 1206 Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, fresh from the conquest of Bengal, led a force north through the Kamarupa country toward Tibet. The campaign ended in catastrophe. On its retreat, his army was destroyed by the terrain, the people and the monsoon rivers, a disaster recorded in the Persian chronicle the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri. The king credited with breaking the retreating column is Prithu, who held the western valley in these years. This episode is the first entry of the Delhi powers into the eastern frontier, and the valley’s reputation as a graveyard of invading armies begins here.

A gold coin showing a horseman with a raised mace on the obverse and a Devanagari legend on the reverseA gold coin showing a horseman with a raised mace on the obverse and a Devanagari legend on the reverse
Plate 1.Coin of Bakhtiyar Khalji. Gold coin of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, struck in Bengal around 1204-1206, whose army marched north through the Kamarupa country toward Tibet in 1206.Photograph: CNG Coins · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

Khalji’s own coinage survives him, struck in Bengal in the two years before the march. It carries a horseman with a raised mace, the image of a conqueror at the height of his power, only months from the river that destroyed his army. The river-disaster of 1206 is told in full as a lore.

Bakhtiyar's March to Tibet

Kamarupa and the early west

In 1206 Bakhtiyar Khalji led ten thousand horsemen toward Tibet. A few months later, after the mountain roads, local resistance and floodwaters closed around them, barely a hundred returned.

The valley kept its own record of that deliverance. On a granite outcrop at Kanai-boroxi-bowa in North Guwahati, a Sanskrit line cut in the Saka year 1127, 1206 in the common era, records simply that the Turks who had come to Kamarupa met their destruction.

The rock-cut Kanai Boroxi inscription of 1205-06 CE, lines of old characters within a carved border on the graniteThe rock-cut Kanai Boroxi inscription of 1205-06 CE, lines of old characters within a carved border on the granite
Plate 2.The rock that records the Turks’ destruction. The inscription cut into the granite, recording in Saka 1127 (1205-06 CE) the destruction of the Turks who had come to Kamrup.Photograph: Pinakpani · CC BY · Wikimedia Commons

The armies out of Bengal came again within a generation. Around 1226 Ghiyasuddin Iwaz of Gauda pushed up the valley and reached, by some accounts, as far as the Nagaon country, where the Gachtal inscription is read as recording his defeat. He fell back toward Lakhnauti and was soon captured and killed by Nasiruddin Mahmud, the son of Sultan Iltutmish. Nasiruddin then turned the Delhi power on Kamarupa itself. In 1228 he drove through the Jalpaiguri country against Prithu, who was defeated, captured and killed, and a tributary ruler was set up in his place. Even that arrangement dissolved within a year or two, for Nasiruddin himself died in 1229 and Bengal fell into political chaos, leaving the valley to its local lords. The king who had broken Bakhtiyar’s retreat thus fell to the second wave of the same power, and his death closed the first chapter of the valley’s long resistance.

The threshold of the medieval age

Out of this long fragmentation the medieval order of the valley took shape. In the west the change was decisive. A ruler named Sandhya, seated at the old Kamarupanagara, beat back a Bengal invasion under Malik Ikhtiyaruddin Iuzbak around 1257. By the usual account Sandhya retreated to the hills, flooded the plains by cutting the dykes when the spring rains came, and cut the invader’s supply lines until Iuzbak was killed. Survey histories credit that campaign with the first mosque raised in Assam and the first reading of the khutbah there, before the flood undid the occupation. Around this time Sandhya shifted his capital west to Kamatapur, near modern Cooch Behar, and took the title Kamateswara. The kingdom he founded there is remembered as Kamata, and that move west, away from the ancient seat, marks the true close of the classical age.

In the east the change was just as lasting. From the hills over the Patkai, the Ahoms came down under Sukaphaa in 1228, the very year of Prithu’s fall, and began building the state that would dominate the next six centuries. That story is taken up in the volume on the Ahom kingdom. Kamarupa’s own legacy, its Sakta geography and its script, outlived them all. The chapter on Religion and Script sets this out.

The Kingdom and Its Culture

6. Material Culture

Stone, brick, and the economy of the grants

Ancient Kamarupa speaks to us in three records: the stone of its temples and sculpture, the rare metal of its coins, and the written copperplate of its grants. What they say is not always what the written sources do, and in places the material record is the only witness to the kingdom’s art and economy. This chapter gathers that record, from the earliest surviving carved stone of the sixth century to the profuse temple sculpture of the kingdom’s last centuries.

The temples and their sculptors

Little of Kamarupa’s architecture survives intact, but what does is eloquent. The finest early witness is the carved doorframe at Da Parbatia near Tezpur, generally dated to about the sixth century CE. Its jambs carry finely cut creepers, lotus stems and rosettes, and at their base stand the river-goddesses Ganga and Yamuna, haloed and holding garlands, with attendants and flying geese around them. The idiom is unmistakably that of Gupta-classical north India, and the figures are often called the oldest and finest specimen of the sculptor’s art in Assam. The doorframe also tells us how these temples were built. Excavation revealed a small square sanctum with a circumambulatory passage and a front hall, the walls of brick with the doorway and sill cut in stone. Brick core and stone dressing is the pattern across the region, and it is one reason so little stands today. A later brick temple raised over the Gupta ruins in the Ahom period was thrown down by the 1897 earthquake, which is how the old doorframe came again to light.

Carved stone doorframe at Da Parbatia, with river-goddess figures at the base of the jambsCarved stone doorframe at Da Parbatia, with river-goddess figures at the base of the jambs
Plate 1.The Da Parbatia doorframe. The carved stone doorframe at Da Parbatia near Tezpur, its jambs flanked by the river-goddesses Ganga and Yamuna, among the earliest sculpture in the northeast in the Gupta idiom of the sixth century.Photograph: কুমুদ ঘোষ · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

By the kingdom’s later centuries the tradition had matured into full stone temple-building, and its richest surviving expression is Madan Kamdev north of Guwahati, a ruin-field of a principal temple and many smaller shrines spread across a forested hill. The sculpture there is dated to roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries, the age of the Pala dynasty, and its dense, sometimes erotic carving has earned the site comparison with Khajuraho. The plan and iconography, however, draw on a distinctly Kamarupi vocabulary rather than a borrowed one. It is in such sculpture, more than in standing buildings, that Kamarupa’s art is richest, ranging from the Gupta-influenced refinement of Da Parbatia to this profuse, crowded carving of the Pala centuries. The excavated idols include a six-headed Bhairava and a four-headed Siva, embracing Uma-Maheshvara figures, Ganesha, Surya, Saraswati and Vishnu, alongside the wish-tree Kalpavriksha and a crowd of attendant and animal figures, all carved in the rounded, ornate manner of the eastern Indian school.

A wide view of the excavated circular stone plinth of the principal Madan Kamdev temple set in a cleared garden: a low ring of recovered carved blocks and foundation stones laid out on a brick apron, ringed by trees with a small open shelter behindA wide view of the excavated circular stone plinth of the principal Madan Kamdev temple set in a cleared garden: a low ring of recovered carved blocks and foundation stones laid out on a brick apron, ringed by trees with a small open shelter behind
Plate 2.The circular plinth of the principal temple at Madan Kamdev. The excavated circular plinth of the principal shrine, its ring of recovered blocks laid out on the hilltop, the ground plan of the lost temple still legible.Photograph: Bhaskarbhagawati · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The same late efflorescence shows at the Bamuni Hills near Tezpur, though most of its Pala-age carving now survives as scattered blocks. Further west, the rock-cut and stone images at Surya Pahar in Goalpara carry the tradition to the kingdom’s edge, with Saiva, Vaishnava, Sakta and even Buddhist and Jain associations layered on one hill. This body of work is also the firmest evidence for the deep entrenchment of the Sakta and Saiva worship treated in Religion and Script. The prominence of Bhairava, of Siva in his many forms and of the great goddess in stone matches what the inscriptions and the cult of Kamakhya tell us in words.

Rounded votive stupas cut from dark granite boulders on a cleared slope, a white stone path winding down into a green valley under a golden evening skyRounded votive stupas cut from dark granite boulders on a cleared slope, a white stone path winding down into a green valley under a golden evening sky
Plate 3.Rock-cut stupas at Surya Pahar, the kingdom's western edge. The cleared slope of Surya Pahar at day's end, rounded votive stupas carved from granite boulders, a paved path winding down into the valley.Photograph: Vikramjit Kakati · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

Capitals, coinage and the economy of the grants

The kingdom moved its seat more than once, and each capital leaves a different kind of trace. Under the Varman dynasty the centre was Pragjyotishpura, identified with the older core of Guwahati. The Mlechchha line ruled from Haruppeswara near Tezpur, and the Palas held court at Durjaya and later Kamarupanagara in the North Guwahati country. The clustering of the surviving stonework around Tezpur and Guwahati follows this movement of the court. Urban life is harder to read than temple art, because so little has been excavated and published. What is known points to riverside settlement strung along the Brahmaputra, with the great narrows at Guwahati as the recurring strategic and religious hub, and much of what we say about Kamarupa’s towns rests on inference from the grants rather than from the spade. The clearest exception is Ambari, in the heart of Guwahati, where digging has yielded the sculpture of the capital’s later centuries, among it a many-armed Durga of the goddess-centred school.

A grey stone stele of the many-armed goddess Durga slaying the buffalo demon, her lion and the demon figures at her feetA grey stone stele of the many-armed goddess Durga slaying the buffalo demon, her lion and the demon figures at her feet
Plate 4.A Durga from the Ambari digs, sculpture of the capital city. A many-armed Durga slaying the buffalo demon, recovered at Ambari in Guwahati, a work of the goddess-centred sculpture that Kamarupa's Sakta world produced.Photograph: Nabajit Deori, Chabina Hassan, Y. S. Wunglengton · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

On coinage the record is, candidly, thin and debated. Kamarupa does not appear to have left the abundant struck coinage of some contemporary kingdoms, and even the exceptions are contested. A scatter of gold dinars of Sasanka of Gauda, the old enemy of the Varman kings, is attributed by some numismatists to a mint in Assam, and that borrowed money is the nearest thing to a coinage the classical valley has yielded. The economic life of the kingdom is therefore reconstructed as much from the copperplate land grants as from money. Those grants are the single richest economic source the period gives us. They describe a wealthy agrarian state built around temple and Brahmin endowment. Kings gave away villages, tanks and wastelands to Brahmins as tax-free holdings, the brahmadeya or agrahara grants, and made comparable endowments to temples. The plates record a working revenue system behind those gifts. Cultivators paid a land tax, those without proprietary right paid an additional cess, toll-keepers levied duties on merchants who plied keeled boats on the rivers, a sign of real riverine trade, and the crown appears to have held a monopoly over the working of copper. The grants also show a surveyed and classified countryside, arable land, wasteland and untaxed unsurveyed tracts each named and treated differently. That precision, more than any hoard of coins, is what tells us Kamarupa was a settled fiscal state and not merely a loose overlordship. The relative absence of a large coin record is itself a fact about how that economy worked, resting on land, produce and labour rather than on struck metal.

Both faces of a debased gold coin, Siva seated on the bull Nandi on one side and Lakshmi seated on a lotus flanked by small elephants on the otherBoth faces of a debased gold coin, Siva seated on the bull Nandi on one side and Lakshmi seated on a lotus flanked by small elephants on the other
Plate 5.A dinar of Sasanka, the contested edge of the coin record. A dinar of Sasanka of Gauda, Siva on the bull Nandi, Lakshmi on the lotus behind. Numismatists attribute some coins of this type to a mint in Assam, the nearest thing to money of its own the classical valley has yielded.Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons
Estampage of a copperplate densely engraved with lines of eastern Brahmi-derived script, a ring hole at the right edgeEstampage of a copperplate densely engraved with lines of eastern Brahmi-derived script, a ring hole at the right edge
Plate 6.A land grant in the old Kamarupa style, the Kamauli plate of Vaidyadeva. The Kamauli grant of Vaidyadeva, the governor sent from Bengal who declared himself king. Issued in the old Kamarupa style, it is among the last records of the classical kingdom.Photograph: Arthur Venis · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

7. Religion and Script

The goddess and the letters that outlived the kingdom

Two of Kamarupa’s most enduring legacies are invisible in any single monument. They are systems rather than objects. The first is a religious landscape, layered and Sakta-dominated, that still shapes Assam. The second is a script, descended from the Brahmi of the inscriptions, that became the writing of the whole eastern region.

The Sakta heartland

Kamarupa was, above all, Sakta country. The worship of the goddess was focused on Kamakhya on the Nilachal hill, and it gave the kingdom a Sakta religious identity that outlasted every dynasty. That identity was woven into the dynastic myth itself. The early kings traced their descent from Naraka and his son Bhagadatta, styling themselves the Bhauma, the earth-born, a lineage that tied the throne to the soil and its goddess, so the kings, whatever their personal leanings, were patrons and protectors of the goddess cult by the logic of their own descent. It was around the Pala centuries that the Kalika Purana, composed in the region, fixed that worship in Sanskrit and set down the rite of the Kamakhya shrine, and the later Yogini Tantra carried the same tradition into medieval times.

The Kamakhya temple complex seen from above: the curved copper-and-terracotta roof of the front hall, the beehive shikharas with red subsidiary domes behind, stone steps descending at left, framed by green treesThe Kamakhya temple complex seen from above: the curved copper-and-terracotta roof of the front hall, the beehive shikharas with red subsidiary domes behind, stone steps descending at left, framed by green trees
Plate 1.Kamakhya temple, Nilachal hill. The Kamakhya temple complex on the Nilachal hill at Guwahati, seat of the goddess cult that gave Kamarupa its enduring Sakta identity.Photograph: GeetMaanu · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

Yet the kingdom was never Sakta alone. Alongside the goddess ran strong Saiva and Vaishnava currents, the Vaishnava one still visible at the Hayagriva Madhava temple at Hajo. The tolerance of this order is caught in an outside witness. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who visited the court of Bhaskaravarman in the seventh century, records a king who, though no Buddhist himself, received him with honour and left every faith its place. The copperplate grants tell the everyday version of the same story, the steady endowment of Brahmins and temples that was the kingdom’s characteristic religious act. The result was the layered, goddess-centred but many-stranded religious order that the medieval and modern valley inherited. Kamakhya is counted among the great Sakta pithas revered across the subcontinent, and its hill still draws pilgrims from far beyond Assam. The goddess-centred order did not fade with the kingdom. It passed on to the states that rose after, so that the Koch and the Ahom rulers in their turn became patrons of the same shrine, and the pilgrimage geography the Kalika Purana had fixed proved more durable than the dynasties that endowed it.

A weathered stone temple wall: a lobed niche holds a relief of two figures seated in a chariot, beside a pierced lattice window, above bands of geometric carving and a basal row of carved elephants with marigold offeringsA weathered stone temple wall: a lobed niche holds a relief of two figures seated in a chariot, beside a pierced lattice window, above bands of geometric carving and a basal row of carved elephants with marigold offerings
Plate 2.Carved wall, Hayagriva Madhava temple, Hajo. Carved stonework on a wall of the Hayagriva Madhava temple at Hajo, where the Vaishnava current of Kamarupa's religious landscape is still visible.Photograph: Jyotishmita Bhagawati · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The making of a script

The other legacy is written. The copperplates of Kamarupa are engraved in an eastern variety of Brahmi, descended through the Gupta letters. Their forms evolve across the centuries, and they document the gradual emergence of the script that would become the shared Assamese-Bengali writing system. That evolution can be read plate by plate. The earliest specimens are the fifth-century rock inscriptions at Umachal and Nagajari-Khanikargaon, which carry letters close to the eastern Gupta hand of Samudragupta’s own age. The great grants of the seventh century, the Dubi and Nidhanpur copperplates of Bhaskaravarman, show the rounded Kutila forms then spreading through the east. Later plates of the Pala kings, such as the Bargaon and Subhankarapataka grants, carry the letters further still. By the Kanai-boroxi-bowa rock inscription near Guwahati, dated to the Saka year 1127 (1206 CE) and cut to record the destruction of the Turks, they have moved within reach of a recognisably proto-Assamese stage. From that stage grew the letters that would carry Assamese and its books.

A printed chart of twelfth-century letterforms, each early letter shown above its modern Assamese equivalentA printed chart of twelfth-century letterforms, each early letter shown above its modern Assamese equivalent
Plate 3.The letters of the twelfth century, beside their modern Assamese forms. The shape of the letters in the twelfth century, traced from the grant of Vaidyadeva and set above their modern Assamese equivalents, from Sarbeswar Sarma Kataki’s 1936 study of the old script.Photograph: Sarbeswar Sarma Kataki, Asamiya Prachin Lipi (1936) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Also from this age16

The places, communities, faiths, and traditions rooted in this age. Open any for its full wiki article.

A brass plate of lit oil lamps, marigolds on leaves, and burning incense, an offering during a festival celebration at Hajo
Place

Hajo

Hayagriva Madhava temple, Powa Mecca and Buddhist associations make Hajo a rare confluence of pilgrimage.

The Kamakhya temple complex lit at night: a cream-and-gold mandapa with a red-banded base in front, dark stone beehive shikharas of the sanctum and subsidiary shrines rising behind, stone steps descending at left
Place

Kamakhya Temple

One of the oldest and most revered Shakti peethas, perched above Guwahati on the Nilachal hill, drawing pilgrims from across the subcontinent.

Aerial view of the white ribbed dome of the Umananda temple rising from a small forested island, the Brahmaputra and its sandbars around it
Place

Umananda Temple

On Peacock Island in the Brahmaputra opposite Guwahati. The shrine was raised by Ahom king Gadadhar Singha in 1694, on a site of much older Saiva worship.

The red-painted octagonal Siva temple at Basistha, its ribbed polygonal sikhara crowned by a gold finial, framed by trees against a blue sky
Place

Basistha Temple

Mythologically associated with sage Vasistha. The present stone temple was built by Ahom king Rajeswar Singha in 1764 in a wooded gorge where three streams meet.

The white dome and sloped red-brick wings of the Guwahati Planetarium under a deep blue sky, lawns and a round mosaic fountain in front
Place

Guwahati

The oldest continuously settled city in the region and today the metropolis of northeastern India.

The brick-red ribbed beehive dome of the Navagraha temple rising above the green slope of Chitrasal hill, with smaller shrines beside it
Place

Navagraha Temple

A Saiva-Sakta temple of the nine celestial bodies on Chitrachal hill, long held to be the seat of astronomy that gave Guwahati its old name, Pragjyotishpura.

The laterite-red stone Hayagriva Madhava temple at Hajo in warm evening light, its curved carved shikhara tower beside the lower hall, framed by green trees under a deep blue sky
Place

Hayagriva Madhava Temple

The stone temple on Manikut hill at Hajo, one of the region's oldest Vaishnava shrines, and held by some Buddhist traditions to mark the site of the Buddha's nirvana.

Young women in red-and-cream mekhela sador dancing in a ring in a village yard, with male drummers at the edge
Community

The Assamese (Asamiya)

The caste-Hindu Assamese mainstream: the composite, Assamese-speaking community that forms the demographic and cultural core of the valley.

Temple sanctum draped in red and gold-sequined cloth: three gilded thrones bearing deity figures behind a central decked sheaf-like form, with brass lamps, a copper kalash and a copper offering plate set on a marble platform in front.
Faith

Saktism

The goddess-worship tradition of the Kamakhya peetha, one of the oldest and most important Sakta sites in South Asia, and the tantric currents that have shaped religious practice across the region for at least two millennia.

Black book cover printed with the Assamese title Iyaruingam and the author's name, with a woven tribal-textile motif running diagonally
Language

Assamese

The easternmost Indo-Aryan language, the lingua franca of the Brahmaputra valley, with a literary tradition reaching back to the medieval period.

An ivory-white Assamese mekhela sador draped on a stand, its white field scattered with small woven motifs in red, green and gold
Craft

Pat: the Bridal Silk

The white, glossy pat, the mulberry silk that completes Assam's three-silk triad with muga and eri, the cloth of weddings and ceremony.

Rolled bolts of eri silk fabric in cream, mustard, pink, teal, ochre and green stacked on a shelf
Craft

Eri: the Peace Silk

Assam's warm, matte eri, the non-violent 'ahimsa' silk spun without killing the moth, rooted in Bodo tradition.

A rearer holds a tray of muga silkworms against the trunk of a host tree in an open Assam farm
Craft

Muga: the Golden Silk

Assam's golden muga silk, found almost nowhere else on earth, prized for a lustre that deepens with age.

Cream cotton gamosa with a woven red floral and peacock motif and a red-striped border
Craft

The Gamosa

The red-bordered white cloth that is towel, gift, garment, prayer-cloth and the de-facto flag of Assamese identity.

Black-and-white close portrait of an elderly sadhu with a long white beard and weathered face gazing toward the camera at the Ambubachi Mela
Festival

Ambubachi Mela

The tantric pilgrimage festival at Kamakhya. The temple closes for three days when the goddess is said to menstruate.

A round phulam japi faced in woven bamboo with a red rim, a green-and-red appliqué star, small mirrors and sequins, set against a deep maroon backdrop
Craft

The Japi

The conical hat of bamboo and tokou-palm leaf, the plain field hat of the cultivator and the gilded phulam japi of welcome and ceremony.

From the lore8

The lore that runs through this page. Each piece weaves several people, places and kingdoms into one, follow any of them and keep pulling the thread.

Naraka, King of Pragjyotisha

Myth and the sacred valley

Before there was history there was a demon-king, born of the Earth, who nearly won the goddess of the hill with a staircase built in one night, and asked with his dying breath to be remembered in lamps.

The Three Names of the Land

Myth and the sacred valley

Pragjyotisha, Kamarupa, Asam. A valley that has worn three names across three ages, each with its own legend, from the place of eastern light to the name the whole country carries still.

Bakhtiyar's March to Tibet

Kamarupa and the early west

In 1206 Bakhtiyar Khalji led ten thousand horsemen toward Tibet. A few months later, after the mountain roads, local resistance and floodwaters closed around them, barely a hundred returned.

Xuanzang Visits Kamarupa

Kamarupa and the early west

Around 643 CE a Chinese monk who had walked the width of Asia reached the court of Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa, and left the earliest eyewitness account of Assam.

The Son of Brahma

Myth and the sacred valley

India's great rivers are goddesses. The Brahmaputra alone is a son, born of the creator in a sage's hermitage and released to the plains by an axe that had killed a mother.

The Night of Saraighat

The Ahom wars

A dying general, a wavering fleet, and the river that kept Assam free of the Mughals.

Itakhuli, 1682

The Ahom wars

Saraighat is the battle the songs remember. But the river gate it defended was sold to the empire eight years later by Lachit's own brother, and it was won back for good in 1682, at a rock called Itakhuli.

Mir Jumla's Retreat

The Ahom wars

In 1662 Aurangzeb's ablest general took the empty Ahom capital and thought he had won Assam, until the monsoon, the floods and the fever rotted his army to nothing.

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