By the middle of the seventeenth century the Ahom kingdom had ruled the upper Brahmaputra valley for more than four hundred years. Now it faced the most powerful empire on earth. The Mughals under Aurangzeb controlled almost the whole subcontinent. They wanted the valley too. The contest came to a head on the river near Guwahati in the spring of 1671. The battle turned on a single dying commander, Lachit Borphukan. He rose from a sickbed to save a kingdom that was slipping away from him in the water.
An empire on the river
The Mughals had tried before and never managed to hold Assam for long. They would march in, burn the capital, and sign a treaty. Then they would lose everything again to flood, disease and the Ahoms’ long war of patience. In 1662 Mir Jumla, Aurangzeb’s governor of Bengal, drove farthest of all. He took the Ahom capital at Garhgaon and forced king Jayadhwaj Singha into the hills. By the Treaty of Ghilajharighat the Ahoms gave up Guwahati and paid a crushing indemnity. How that occupation collapsed on the road home, and how Mir Jumla died in the retreat before he could enjoy the treaty, is told in the lore below.
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.
The treaty still stood after Mir Jumla was gone. Guwahati remained in Mughal hands, and the kingdom still carried the shame of Ghilajharighat. The next king, Chakradhwaj Singha, resolved to undo that settlement. He declared that he would rather die than remain the subject of a foreign power. Beside him the Burhagohain Atan Burhagohain rebuilt the army and the war-fleet that would have to take back what the treaty had given away. In 1667 that resolve reached the river. Lachit Borphukan, governor of the western frontier, retook Guwahati and drove out the Mughal officer who held it. Guwahati was the gateway where the river narrows. Whoever holds the banks holds the door to the upper valley. A cast victory pillar of that year, still kept beside the Brahmaputra at Sukreswar, names him as Namjani Barphukan, son of Momai Tamuli, victor of the war against the Yavana.
Aurangzeb answered by sending Raja Ram Singh I of Amber, a Rajput prince and one of his ablest generals. Ram Singh left Delhi in late 1667. He reached the Assam frontier at Rangamati only in early 1669, with a force the contemporary reckonings made enormous. It brought a core of his own troopers, then tens of thousands of infantry, some eighteen thousand horse, Koch archers and shieldmen, war-boats and heavy guns. On paper it was no contest. The Ahoms had a fraction of the men and none of the empire’s weight of metal. What they had was the river gate at Guwahati. Lachit meant to hold that gate on broken ground and on the water, where imperial cavalry could not decide the war. The clash that ended it would not come until March 1671. For nearly two years before that night Ram Singh’s army sat at the door of the valley and tried, by land, by intrigue and at last by water, to force it open.
The night on the water
In that long war the Ahoms paid once for leaving the water. In August 1669 they were drawn onto the open plain at Alaboi, north of the river, into the pitched land battle the Mughals wanted. Ram Singh’s Rajput horse cut them apart in a single afternoon. Tradition counts the Ahom dead in the thousands. After Alaboi Lachit held still harder to the terrain he had chosen from the start. He kept the banks behind earthen ramparts, and he kept the fleet in the pinch between the temple hill of Aswaklanta on the north bank, the Nilachal on the south, and the rock of Umananda in the current. At Guwahati the long tank of Dighalipukhuri kept the connection between city and fleet. Tradition holds that it once joined the river and served as a dock for the war-boats.
In the middle of March 1671 Ram Singh forced the river fight on which the valley’s freedom turned. Chakradhwaj was by then dead, and his brother Udayaditya Singha sat on the throne. Fresh Mughal war-boats and the imperial admiral Munnawar Khan had come up to break Guwahati. The long stand at the narrows came to its head at Saraighat. By then Lachit was mortally ill. He could barely stand, and he watched the opening of the action from the gatehouse of his fort. As the Mughal fleet came on toward the sandbanks off Andharubali, the nerve of the Ahom oarsmen failed. Part of the flotilla began to slip downstream. The gateway Lachit had held for years was about to open. That was the hour that mattered, not the first day of the war but the day the defence of the river would hold or break. He would not lie in the fort and watch the kingdom fall. He called for boats and had a man named Nadai of Kharangi carry him down to the water and aboard. He took only six war-boats. By the chronicle’s account he went among the wavering men and shamed them back to their oars, shoving some bodily into the river. To the men slipping away he put the question Assam still repeats. The king had put the people in Lachit’s hands so that he might fight the enemy. Was he now to abandon that charge and go home to his wife and children? He answered it himself. He took his six boats and rowed straight at the imperial fleet.
The turning men turned again and followed him. The whole flotilla closed. In the narrow water off Amrajuli, on the north bank opposite the Kamakhya hill, the Ahom craft swarmed the larger Mughal vessels. They bridged the river with their own boats to trap the enemy front and rear. They rammed and boarded ships that could not manoeuvre in the press. The triangle of water between Itakhuli, Kamakhya and Aswaklanta filled with men and boats until there was scarcely room to row. Then Munnawar Khan, sitting at his hookah, was shot dead from behind, and the imperial fleet lost its head and its order at once. The armada broke apart on the current. What followed was Ram Singh’s retreat. The Ahoms pushed the beaten force west to the Manas, the old frontier. Ram Singh left Kamrup for Rangamati in early April 1671 and did not return. Tradition keeps the sting of that withdrawal in a report he is said to have sent to the emperor. He had not been fighting an ordinary people, but a land whose soldiers knew the water as their own weapon, and a country an imperial army would find hard to take again. Whether every word of that report is sound, the meaning held. The river had turned the imperial campaign around. The cost on the water was heavy on both sides. The Mughals lost three of their high nobles and some four thousand men beyond the drowned and the boarded. Mindful of Alaboi, Lachit did not chase the beaten fleet onto the open land where the cavalry could turn and kill. He had won the fight the only way it could be won.
After the river
Saraighat was the turning point in the long Mughal contest, though the door would change hands once more. Guwahati was surrendered to the Mughals in 1679 through the treachery of Laluksola Borphukan. It was won back for good at the Battle of Itakhuli in 1682, on the hill that later carried the temple of Sukreswar, under forces acting in the name of Gadadhar Singha.
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.
After that the Manas River stayed the western boundary for the rest of the Ahom period.
Lachit did not live long after the victory. He died in April 1672 at Kaliabor, about a year after the battle. The Tai-Ahom buried him beneath a maidam at Meleng, near Jorhat. He is today the most honoured soldier in Assamese memory. Each year the finest cadet passing out of India’s National Defence Academy receives the Lachit Borphukan gold medal in his name. In Guwahati the statue at Lachit Ghat faces the same stretch of river he once held.
