For first 300 yrs of their history, Ahoms were more Thai than Indian. Here’s how they changed

Describing Turks as aliens but Ahoms as nationalists erases all their complexities.

Illustration by Ramandeep Kaur | ThePrint

Last year, I saw with great interest the Assam government’s advertisements all over Delhi, casting the Ahom general Lachit Borpukhan as a Hindu warrior who defeated “Muslim invaders”. This portrayal of India’s Northeast as fundamentally Hindu has continued into the recent past—especially in Manipur, where online campaigns have sought to paint Kukis as “Christian terrorists”.

The history of the Ahoms is more complex than what Assam’s ruling party claims. Understanding their rise to power brings up challenging questions about immigration, religion, and “Indianness”. As we’ll see, through much of their history, the political culture of the Ahoms had much more in common with their neighbouring Thais than with the ancient Sanskritised kingdom of Kamarupa, whose territories they assimilated.

Parallel histories in Northwest and Northeast

In last week’s Thinking Medieval, we traced the rise and fall of the Kamarupa kingdom. Kamarupa, based in the Lower Brahmaputra Valley, deftly presented itself as both Sanskritic and intertwined with the indigenous populace. By the 13th century CE, it had collapsed in the wake of regional crises, creating a power vacuum. Raiding attempts by Turks were driven off by local lords. During this political void, the Tai-Ahoms, an offshoot of the Mao-Shan peoples of Upper Burma, marched into the Upper Brahmaputra Valley. Meanwhile, two other tribal confederations came to rule in the erstwhile Kamarupa kingdom—the Khens, probably from Burma, and the Koches, hailing from the Bhutan foothills.

These groups illustrate the dynamics of late medieval Northeast India—a crossroads akin to Northwest India. Just like the Northwest, the Northeast was never static, witnessing constant migration, invasion, assimilation, and innovation. In one of the strangest examples of parallels in history, the infamous Turkic raider Bakhtiyar Khalji, writing on his failed expeditions in Assam, remarked in the Iabaqat-i-Nasiri that these tribal groups “all have Turk countenance”. Ethnically, culturally, and religiously, they were a world apart from what we imagine as “Hindus” today.

The rise of the Ahoms

In his 1988 PhD thesis titled Ahom State Formation in Assam: An Enquiry into the Factors of Polity Formation in Mediaeval North East India, historian Romesh Buragohain reconstructed the rise of the Ahoms through buranjis—historical chronicles maintained by the Ahoms in line with Southeast Asian and possibly Chinese traditions. Sukapha, the Mao-Shan prince who led the Ahom peasant-warriors as they settled in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley, was as ruthless as any of his Turkic contemporaries. In the Ahom Buranji and Purani Ahom Buranji, he is described as murdering opponents after luring them to feasts, butchering Nagas, and even feeding their remains to their relatives (of course some of this must be political hyperbole).

The Tai-Ahoms also preserved their ties to their ancestral homeland, leading some scholars to describe them as part of mainland Southeast Asia. In The Ahom Political System: An Enquiry into the State Formation Process in Medieval Assam (1228–1714), historian Amalendu Guha shows that the Ahoms staunchly adhered to their customs, speaking their Tai language and script well into the 17th century. They also ate beef and possessed an ideological justification for their supremacy.

It was believed that the Lord of Heaven had sent the Tai ruling clans to order the earth and cultivate the fields. Therefore, a crucial dynamic of Tai-Ahom power was the expansion of wet-rice agriculture in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley, for which they levied the labour of subjugated tribes. Armed Tai-Ahoms formed the backbone of the military and held rights and duties towards the king; ministers chosen from elite clans dominated the state. In general, they constituted a small ruling class over a large population of subjugated locals, though of course many Tai-Ahoms, often married to locals, also cultivated the rice-fields. This fostered “Ahomisation”, causing numerous local groups, including the Nagas, Morans, and Barahis, to embrace Tai-Ahom cultural and religious ideals. Non-Tai groups such as the Khasis, who still practised shifting cultivation, were pejoratively referred to as “kha”—culturally inferior foreigners.

By the late 15th century, the Ahoms confronted their last rivals in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley—the Chutias, a tribal confederation that had Sanskritised centuries ago through contact with ancient Kamarupa. With the emergence of the Ming dynasty in China, the Chutias had even acquired gunpowder through trade, notes historian Sun Lichen in Military Technology Transfers from Ming China and the Emergence of Northern Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390–1527). Defeating them not only gave the Ahoms gunpowder weapons, which they produced and deployed in infantry formations with great discipline, but also doubled their territories. This brought a large number of Hindus under their rule. It was only then, in the early 16th century, that the Ahoms embraced Sanskritic court culture. They adopted the title of Svarga Deva, denoting ‘Lord of Heaven’, and claimed descent from Indra, the Vedic Lord of Heaven. Both these moves appear to have translated the East Asian notion of divine heavens into a local context, endowing Ahom rule with legitimacy in the eyes of their Hindu subjects.

With their ambitions growing, the Ahoms now turned to the Lower Brahmaputra Valley. The next century would see them confront South Asia’s greatest superpower, the Mughals, and establish the territorial borders of what we now call Assam.

Conclusion: Who is “Indian”?

Today, it is commonplace to view the Turkic invasions of Northwest India as a rupture with the past—the ascent of a hostile, foreign ruling class motivated by religious fanaticism. However, the Ahoms offer a challenging counter-narrative from the Northeast. While the Ahoms did not claim religious motives for their aggression, they shared numerous traits—culinary preferences, historical and ideological traditions, political culture, use of violence, and distinct self-perception—with their Turkic counterparts. The point of this comparison is not to “denigrate” these fascinating peoples but rather to question our preconceived notions of them. Are medieval Turks inherently alien simply because they attacked elite temples, even though popular Indian religion assimilated Islamicate ideas? Conversely, are medieval Ahoms laudable heroes, despite their use of violence and coercion against indigenous populations?

Ultimately, however, these debates are pointless. History was made by complicated individuals with no obligation to conform to our biases. It is silly to reduce medieval politics to categories of “indigenous” and “foreign” when nation-states had not yet emerged, or to expect anything less than ruthlessness from armed men with ideological convictions and no accountability. To turn these ruling minorities into representatives of entire cultures is ridiculous. To label one group as alien while venerating another as heroic does injustice to both, because it does not allow them to be complex human beingsnarratives. Instead, this approach continues to oversimplify our messy history into binaries that only serve opportunistic politicians.

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti.

This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.

(Edited by Prashant)