Sivasagar is the town the Ahom kingdom built for itself at the height of its power. A dense concentration of that kingdom’s monuments can still be seen here today. Once called Rangpur, it was the Ahom capital through the golden age of the eighteenth century. To this day it is laid out around a vast sheet of water, the Sivasagar or Borpukhuri tank, that gives the town its name. Within a short radius of that tank stand the greatest survivals of Ahom Assam: the pleasure-pavilion, the palace-fort and the soaring temple. A little beyond lies the royal necropolis where the dynasty had begun. To walk Sivasagar is to read six centuries of Ahom rule written on the ground in brick and water.
From Charaideo to Rangpur
The kingdom whose capital this became had begun far to the east, on a low hill above the upper-Assam plain. At Charaideo, a short way from the later town, the first Ahom king established his seat in the thirteenth century. The hill remained the dynasty’s sacred origin and its royal cemetery for nearly six hundred years. Here the Swargadeos and their queens were laid under the great vaulted earthen mounds, the maidams, that have lately won the site recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage place. From that beginning the kingdom spread across the valley, its living capital shifting down the generations until, from 1540, it settled at Garhgaon. Having thrown back the Mughals for good, the kingdom turned its long-hoarded resources to splendour, and at the turn of the eighteenth century the great builder-king Rudra Singha moved the seat of power a little west, from Garhgaon to a new city at Rangpur. Through his reign and those of his sons, among them Pramatta Singha, the court raised the monuments that still define the town. That building age is told in The Stone Capital. So the Sivasagar country came to hold two capitals within a single morning’s reach: a capital of the living at Rangpur, and a capital of the ancestors at Charaideo, where the kingdom buried its dead at its birthplace even as it built its palaces in the new town.
The monuments of the capital
The new capital took both its shape and its name from a single great tank at its centre. The Sivasagar, or Borpukhuri, was excavated in the 1730s and consecrated as the sea of Shiva. It was the work of Bar Raja Ambika, the queen of Swargadeo Siva Singha, and its waters, some hundreds of acres of them, are held above the level of the surrounding town on raised embankments. On its bank Ambika built the temples for which the tank is famous: the towering Sivadol, among the tallest Shiva temples in India, with its companion shrines to Vishnu and the goddess, the Vishnudol and the Devidol. This was a deliberate work of royal piety and public engineering together, contemporary with the years when the Ahom court had made the Sakta and Saiva Hinduism of the plains the religion of the state.
The Borpukhuri sat at the heart of a capital engineered in water as much as in brick. The Ahoms were master builders of tanks, and around their seat they dug some of the largest rectangular reservoirs in India. The greatest of these outlying tanks is the Joysagar, reckoned among the largest man-made sheets of water anywhere, which Rudra Singha dug in memory of his mother Joymoti. The Rudrasagar and the Gaurisagar tanks lie nearby, each consecrated with temples on its bank. Such a tank was never only a work of piety or display. In a country of flood and shifting rivers it was at once a reservoir, a fishery, a flood-defence and the focus of a planned town. The Ahom capital was in a real sense a landscape engineered in earth and water as much as built in brick.
Around the Sivasagar tank stand the great secular monuments of the dynasty, best taken as a single circuit of the kingdom’s works. Close by is the Rang Ghar, the two-storeyed oval grandstand from which the court watched its buffalo-fights and festivals. Near it stands the Talatal Ghar, the multi-storeyed palace-fort with its famous underground floors. A little out is the Kareng Ghar, the surviving brick palace of the old capital at Garhgaon. Taken together they make Sivasagar less a town with some old buildings than an open-air capital of a vanished kingdom, the one place where the scale and confidence of Ahom Assam can be walked through in an afternoon.
Visiting
Sivasagar lies in upper Assam. It is reached easily by road from Jorhat and Dibrugarh, both with airports and railheads, and is the natural base for the whole cluster of Ahom monuments. For all its antiquity it is a living town, the headquarters of a district in the oil and tea country of upper Assam. The town itself, the tank and the Sivadol can be seen on foot. The Rang Ghar, Talatal Ghar, Garhgaon and Joysagar are a short drive apart and make a comfortable day, with Charaideo a half-day excursion to the east. The cooler, drier months from November to March are the best time. Then the upper-Assam plain is green after the harvest, and the monuments can be explored without the heat and high water of the monsoon. Treat the whole circuit as one trip. Start at the tank and the Sivadol in the town, link the Rang Ghar and Talatal Ghar to the palace at Garhgaon, then carry on east to the maidams of Charaideo where the kingdom began.
