Storied Assam

Stories

The stories woven through Lore. Each piece runs through its real people, places and ages, and completes what the facts begin.

Chronicles

Narrative history: the kingdoms, wars, lives and reforms that made and unmade the valley over two thousand years.

A woman in a traditional Assamese mekhela sador seated at a wooden handloom, a red-and-white gamosa taking shape in the warp before her

Chronicles

Woven in a Night

An Ahom noblewoman could not weave her husband the armour-cloth that was held to make a warrior unkillable. When he fell, she armed a band of women and rode to the war herself.

Weathered stone victory pillar of 1589 Saka on a black plinth with bilingual cast-inscription plaques at Sukreswar park, Guwahati

Chronicles

The Night of Saraighat

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

A large domed granite boulder with a small dark marker plaque fixed above a bordered incised inscription panel

Chronicles

Bakhtiyar's March to Tibet

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.

A bronze standing statue of the monk Xuanzang holding a ringed monk's staff and prayer beads on a stone plinth

Chronicles

Xuanzang Visits Kamarupa

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.

Three-quarter view of the Kareng Ghar at Garhgaon, the tiered brick Ahom palace seen from the front-left across lawns and flowering shrubs, brick paths converging toward it under a cloud-streaked sky

Chronicles

Mir Jumla's Retreat

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.

A Mughal miniature painting of Prince Muhammad Azam Shah in grey mail armour riding a rearing bay horse with a gold-embroidered caparison, a lance over his shoulder and a tiny army in the green distance below

Chronicles

Itakhuli, 1682

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.

Portrait of Maniram Dewan, a turbaned man with a moustache in a dark high-collared coat

Chronicles

The Burmese Days

One nobleman's grudge invited three Burmese armies over the eastern mountains, in a terror remembered as the Manor Din that ended six centuries of Ahom rule.

A long, curving green grass-covered earthen rampart sloping down to a still moat-pond at dusk, with a line of trees and paddy fields on the far bank under a pale sky

Chronicles

Husain Shah at Kamatapur

In 1498 the sultan of Bengal stormed the impregnable fortress-capital of the Khen kings and ended the last great power of the valley's old west. But the country he won proved impossible to hold.

A royal maidam at Charaideo — a large grass-covered hemispherical burial mound with a domed brick pavilion on top and a vaulted brick entrance ramp, framed by a row of tall conifers

Chronicles

The Last Rites of an Ahom King

By night a dead Swargadeo left the capital in secret and was laid under earth with the world of his life, while the living kept feeding the dead who had become gods.

Legends

Myth, legend and spiritual roots, from a demon-king to a goddess who bleeds.

Turbulent blue waters of the Lohit rushing past a rock face at Parshuram Kund

Legends

The Son of Brahma

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.

Elevated daytime view of the Kamakhya temple complex: the curved copper-coloured roof of the natamandira in front, the beehive shikhara and tiered red turrets rising behind, framed by green trees

Legends

The Three Names of the Land

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 worn stone stepped path descending through bare trees on the Nilachal hill, flanked by railings, with a rest shelter and two distant walkers, in black and white

Legends

Naraka, King of Pragjyotisha

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.

An Indian miniature painting: a crowned king with a fan of many arms sits enthroned in a white pavilion among horned asura attendants, while demon musicians play in the courtyard outside

Legends

The Fort of Fire

A princess dreamed of a prince she had never met. Her father raised a wall of fire to keep him out, and Tezpur became the city of blood.

Field Notes

Place, nature and short research: the valley's land and sanctuaries as they are met and felt.

Mughal miniature of Babur and his party hunting a rhinoceros with elephants and spearmen

Field Notes

Bringing Back the Rhino

Hunted to a few hundred animals and worth more dead than alive, the one-horned rhino was hauled back from extinction in Assam.