When a Swargadeo of the Ahom kingdom died, the court did not mourn him in the open. It did not move him in daylight either. By night the body of the god-king left the working capital on a road kept secret on purpose. The road ran east to Charaideo, the first seat Sukaphaa had fixed on a low green ridge in the mid-thirteenth century. There the ancestors of the dynasty already lay under earth. The hills, the maidams and what they hold are told on that page. This lore is the rite itself: how a king was carried into the dark, and what belief walked with him under the mound.
A king laid down with his world
A dead Swargadeo was borne from the capital of the day, from Garhgaon in the earlier centuries and later from Rangpur near modern Sivasagar, along a road north of the royal palace that the living were not meant to learn. The body was bathed at a tank reserved for that one purpose, then carried on to Charaideo for the long rituals that committed it to the mound. The secrecy was ceremony and statecraft both. A dead king left the kingdom briefly without a settled head, and the road that carried him was worth guarding against an enemy or a rival prince who might read a funeral as an opening. The custom behind that road was not Hindu. The Ahoms had carried it across the Patkai from the Tai world to the east, where the dead of the Tai-Ahom were laid in the ground rather than given to fire. At Charaideo that interment became kingship’s deepest rite. A dead Swargadeo went into the earth with the things a life had needed: food and drink, dress and ornament, weapons, the implements of daily use, and the betel and areca of the tamol-pan. All of it was set down in the belief that the dead king went on using them in the country beyond death.
Here the record turns harder, and honesty asks that the seam be shown. By a tradition long repeated, the king did not go down alone. The chronicles and the older accounts hold that in the early centuries living attendants were sealed into the maidam with their dead master. His servants and caretakers, his horses and his elephants were laid in chambers of their own, so that he should not lack a household in the afterlife. Some tellings put the number of the buried living at no fewer than ten. This is the part of the story to weigh with care. The claim of live burial sits in oral memory and the chronicle tradition more firmly than in any document that can be dated. It should be read as the custom a people remembered rather than a thing finally proven. What is not in doubt is the principle behind it. A god-king crossed into death as he had lived, with his goods, his beasts and the people of his service gathered around him.
The ancestors who became gods
Burial was only the beginning of the relationship between the Ahoms and their dead. In their belief the dead did not simply depart. The Tai held that a person, once dead, remained an ancestor for a season and then passed into godhood. The living owed that ascent its rites. From this grew the ancestor-worship at the centre of the Tai-Ahom rites. Its greatest public expression was Me-Dam-Me-Phi, whose very name means offerings to the dead who have become gods. The Ahom kings performed it after victories in war and for the safety of the state. The priests welcomed the spirits with rice, fowl and the rice-beer of the country, fed them, and bade them farewell. The maidams of Charaideo and the festival are two halves of one faith. The mounds held the ancestors. The rite fed them.
The faith did not hold unchanged forever. As the dynasty drew Hindu learning and Hindu priests into its court through the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the rite of the dead began to turn from earth toward fire. Rudra Singha, who reigned from 1696 until his death at North Guwahati in 1714, leaned late in life toward Shaktism. By tradition the abolition of live burial belongs to that same turn. With Hinduisation the body itself was no longer laid whole in the ground. It was burned by Hindu rite, and only the ashes and bone were carried up to Charaideo to lie beneath the mound. By tradition Rudra Singha’s own remains went east this way after his cremation. The brick burial chamber was by his reign no novelty. What was new under the mound was the rite. The king was interred not as a body laid down whole with his world but as a handful of ash. The older kings still rest as bodies laid down with their world. The later ones rest as handfuls of ash.
