In the autumn of 1661 Aurangzeb sent his ablest general to break the Ahom kingdom. Mir Jumla, governor of Bengal, drove up the Brahmaputra with twelve thousand horse, thirty thousand foot and a fleet of more than three hundred war-boats, crewed in part by European gunners. He found the capital empty, plundered it, and thought the war won. Within a year that same army was rotting in the rain, and Mir Jumla was dying on the way home. This is how the monsoon undid an imperial conquest, and set the score that Saraighat would settle a decade later.
The emptied capital
This was not a river battle of the kind that would later decide Saraighat. Mir Jumla had named his price before marching: Kamrup, a royal daughter and tribute. King Jayadhwaj Singha answered that he had taken Kamrup from the Koch and owed the empire nothing. In December 1661 Mir Jumla took Koch Bihar without a fight, renamed it Alamgirnagar for Aurangzeb, and turned east. The army came on using the Brahmaputra as a road. The fleet moved with the land force, and the forts along the valley fell one after another. The defence was rotten from within as well. The king had set an outside officer over his hereditary commanders, and the slighted nobles gave up forward posts without a fight. By early February 1662 Mir Jumla held Guwahati. The one hard fight on the way east came at Simalugarh, the strongest fort the Ahoms had, stormed in the last week of February. Its twin at Samdhara on the north bank was abandoned without a blow. In early March the Ahom fleet tried the old way, a night attack on the moored Mughal ships at Kukurakata. It broke against the European gunners, and the navy was destroyed as a fighting force in a single night. After that the Ahom line was gone. The king gathered what he could into a thousand boats and fled for the hills of Namrup. The officers stripped Garhgaon of what still could be moved. Not all of it could.
On 17 March 1662 Mir Jumla rode into the timber capital of the Tai-Ahom and found the palace empty. The buranjis would remember Jayadhwaj as the king who ran. What the court had left behind was vast: eighty-two elephants, three hundred thousand rupees in coin, hundreds of great guns, powder, boats from the riverside yards, and storehouses of rice enough for years. The invaders plundered the fort-village. They opened temples and, by the record that survives, broke into royal burial mounds for what still lay with the dead. Mir Jumla treated the spoil as imperial property and settled into the palace to winter there and finish the conquest. It was the deepest humiliation the kingdom had yet suffered.
The palace in these two plates is not the one Mir Jumla emptied. That capital was built of timber and is long gone. The brick Kareng Ghar on the ground today is a later rebuilding, raised by Rajeswar Singha in 1752, ninety years after the sack.
Broken by the rains
The Ahoms had never meant to meet the empire on open dry ground. Under Atan Burhagohain they turned to daga-juddha: night raids, ambushes and the cutting of supply lines. Then the rains of 1662 came early and did not stop. The flooded country drowned the roads that had brought the army in. Imperial cavalry floundered in mud and standing water. Grain could not get through. The peasants had already gone up into the hills, where the Naga villages sheltered them, and came down only to cut their rice. By summer the garrisons at Garhgaon and the outpost at Mathurapur were half starving. The king came down from the hills to direct the fight, and through July his commanders pressed a siege on Garhgaon itself. For months Delhi had no certain word of the army that had walked into the capital that spring. In Hindustan, by the Persian account, their kinsmen gave them up for dead and performed the funeral rites of living men.
Then came the fever, worse than the hunger. A wasting sickness ran through the camps, and dysentery with it. Men died in their tents without a blow struck. Cholera tore through Mathurapur so hard that the fit were moved into Garhgaon, and took the infection with them. In the besieged capital the soldiers ate their horses, then leaves and grass. The sickness did not spare the Ahom villages either. By the accounts that survive, whole divisions lost two-thirds of their strength, most of it to disease and starvation rather than to battle. Mir Jumla himself was ailing. He held on until the floods fell back in late September and a thin trickle of provisions reached Garhgaon. The back of the occupation was already broken. He had taken the country and he could not hold it. The Persian munshi Shihabuddin Talish rode with that army, and his Fathiyya-i-Ibriyya remains the closest witness we have.
The price of peace
Neither side could endure another season of it. By the year’s end the king’s own commander-in-chief, Baduli Phukan, had gone over to the enemy after a quarrel at court. In January 1663 the two sides came to terms at Ghilajharighat. The treaty made the Ahom king a vassal in the Mughal style. The Ahoms ceded everything west of the Bharali river on the north bank and the Kallang on the south. Guwahati went with it. They paid at once in gold, silver and forty war-elephants, with a far larger silver and elephant levy due within the year, and twenty elephants every year after that. Six sons of the chief nobles went as hostages. Hardest of all, Jayadhwaj sent his daughter Ramani Gabharu, a girl of six, and a niece from the Tipam house, to the imperial court. Ramani was raised as Rahmat Banu Begum and later married to Aurangzeb’s son Muhammad Azam Shah. The king did not long survive the shame. He died later that year, by tradition of grief.
Mir Jumla led what remained of his army back down the valley toward Bengal. At Guwahati he left Rashid Khan as faujdar of the recovered Kamrup frontier, with a garrison and war-boats to hold the door. The fever he had carried out of the flooded country went with him. He died on his boat on 30 March 1663, within weeks of the treaty that was supposed to crown his victory. His tomb is kept, by tradition, on a hillock at Mankachar, at the western door of the valley he could not hold. He had taken the Ahom capital, plundered it, and won a princess for the emperor’s house. It had cost him his army and his life. And the humiliation of Ghilajharighat did not break the kingdom. It hardened it. The charge passed to Chakradhwaj Singha, who swore he would rather die than live as a foreigner’s subject. Guwahati would be retaken. The account opened in the rains of 1662 would close on the water below Guwahati in the spring of 1671.
The Night of Saraighat
A dying general, a wavering fleet, and the river that kept Assam free of the Mughals.
