There is a kind of cloth in the old Ahom world that no loom could make by daylight. It had to be begun and finished inside a single night. The cotton was ginned, the thread spun, the warp laid, and the whole length woven through before the next dawn touched it. A wife made it for her husband when he went to war. Over it she spoke the words that turned cloth into armour. The Assamese called it the kavach kapor, the armour-cloth. The belief that went with it was absolute. A warrior who wore one into battle could not be beaten. It had to be his own wife’s work, and the work of a single night. He would come home. This is the story of Mula Gabharu, who could not weave one in time, and of what she did instead.
The cloth that was not woven
Around 1532 the Sultanate of Bengal sent a Turco-Afghan commander named Turbak up the valley against the Ahom king Suhungmung. Turbak came with cavalry, elephants and guns of a kind the valley had barely seen. The first encounters went badly for the Ahoms. That campaign is told in Consolidation. Mula Gabharu’s husband was the Borgohain Phrasengmung, one of the great hereditary councillors of the kingdom.
Turbak’s invasion took the Borgohain to the war. Mula Gabharu was of royal blood herself, by tradition a daughter of the king Supimphaa and a sister of Suhungmung. When Phrasengmung was called to the front, she was unwell. She could not do the night’s work the armour-cloth demanded. The ginning, the spinning, the weaving and the consecrating all had to be finished between dusk and dawn. She could not. So her husband rode to war without the one thing held to make an Ahom warrior unkillable. He did not come home. Phrasengmung Borgohain fell in the hard fighting against Turbak. He was one of several Ahom commanders killed in a run of defeats that nearly cost the kingdom its army. To Mula Gabharu the reason was not in doubt, and it was not the enemy’s guns. He had died because she had failed to weave his cloth. The grief and the guilt were one thing. Almost no woman of her rank and century answered them as she did. She did not go behind the walls to mourn. She decided to go to the war herself.
The band of women
Mula Gabharu raised a company of women like herself, armed them all, and led them out toward the front. They were the wives and daughters of the other noble households of the court. Those houses had sent husbands and sons to the war too. Tradition keeps a few of their names, Jayanti, Pamila and Lalita. Mula Gabharu took up the hengdang, the long single-edged sword of the Ahoms. By tradition she rode to the field on an elephant, in the place a commander rode, her company behind her. She was a widow with no training in arms, at the head of a band of women who had none either. They were walking into a war the kingdom’s trained men were losing, and they knew it.
The buranjis remember what the sight of that company did. Noblewomen riding to the fight are said to have shamed the beaten, wavering ranks into standing again. Mula Gabharu fought, by every account, with a courage that had nothing to do with skill. By tradition she cut her way forward until she reached Turbak himself. He was a trained soldier at the height of a winning war, and he killed her. She fell where she stood, in the fighting that tradition places at Kachua. The women who had ridden out with her fell around her. She had perhaps gone expecting it. The army she rode to join had already been broken by powder, and she knew very well what guns could do to her.
Mula Gabharu’s death was not the end of the story but its hinge. The fury that followed is remembered as part of what put the Ahoms back on their feet. Within the year they turned the war and killed Turbak. She is among the earliest women the valley remembers by name for dying in arms. Her name is still spoken as an emblem of valour among the Tai-Ahom and the wider Assamese.