When we think of India’s crossroads, it is most often the Northwest that springs to mind. It is, in today’s political imagination, the gateway through which “invaders” entered the subcontinent. Yet, geographically, one could say that the exact same applies to the Northeast. The arrival of the Tai-Ahom peoples in the 13th century CE, and the many Sanskritised polities that preceded them, challenge our understanding of medieval migrations, conquests and rivalries.
The rise and fall of Kamarupa
In the late 4th century CE, amid the ruin of the Kushan Empire and its consumption by new local powers, a poet and military commander came to what was called Prayaga, where the Ganga and Yamuna rivers met. Here, an ancient pillar erected by the half-forgotten Gangetic emperor Ashoka still stood. The commander ordered the inscription of a great Sanskrit eulogy to a new Gangetic emperor, Samudragupta. This might seem like a strange place to begin the story of Assam, but it is the first known literary mention of a kingdom that would later dominate the Brahmaputra river valley: Kamarupa.
Kamarupa was one among many new polities – stretching from the frontiers of South Asia deep into Southeast Asia and possibly as far as Borneo – that used the newly-emerged Sanskritic court culture to launch themselves into the circulatory systems of ideas, goods, and personnel that came to dominate much of Asia through the medieval period. Its earliest kings, as we saw in an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, claimed descent from the demon Naraka, son of the god Vishnu and the earth-goddess Bhu. This simultaneously linked them to Gangetic Vishnu-worshipping traditions and local goddess worship. By 600 CE, by which point the medieval period had begun in earnest, Kamarupa had also come to neighbour many other kingdoms in the marshy, heavily forested Ganga-Brahmaputra delta. Most important among them was Gauda, on the Padma River at the edge of present-day West Bengal and Bangladesh.
As historian Suchandra Ghosh writes in Kamarupa and Early Bengal: Understanding Their Political Relationship, Gauda and Kamarupa would have a long-running rivalry, each seeking to conquer and defeat the other and penetrate the forested hinterland for resources. The first known instance of this was in the early 7th century when the powerful Gauda ruler Shashanka attacked Kamarupa’s capital and captured two princes. After Shashanka’s death, one of those princes managed to occupy the former’s capital, but it was not to last. Kamarupa occupied an enviable geopolitical position in the lower Brahmaputra valley, capable of harnessing flows of horses and precious woods into Tibet and Yunnan. But it lacked the extensive irrigation systems and wet rice cultivation of the Gangetic Plains. And the resources of the Gangetic Plains were frequently harnessed by the rulers of Gauda, especially the imperial Pala dynasty that emerged in the 8th century, keeping up a relentless pressure on Kamarupa.
Over subsequent centuries, Sanskritic culture gradually began to penetrate deeper into the Brahmaputra valley, writes historian Nayanjot Lahiri in her paper, The Pre-Ahom Roots of Medieval Assam, and her book, Pre-Ahom Assam: Studies In The Inscriptions Of Assam Between The Fifth And The Thirteenth Centuries AD. Tracts of land, usually under cultivation by peasants descended from various Mikir, Kuki, Khasi and Khachari tribes, were granted to Brahmins. A Sanskrit-based administrative and political apparatus spread, with large fortified cities, Buddhist stupas, and temples to Shiva and Vishnu. All of these aided Kamarupa’s ongoing confrontations with Bengal. One of these kings, for example, claimed that he to have “[the Kamarupa king] then took his place at the head of a cluster of boats, covered by fluttering golden wheels and chowries (yak-tail fans) and in no time defeated him (the Bengal king) and annihilated him along with his fame.”
Simultaneously, older tribes and clan-based organisations persisted, with groups such as the Chutias of the upper Brahmaputra valley forming large hill-forts and towns. The exploitation of forest resources grew more effective, with a dazzling variety of plants appearing in inscriptions and poetry by the 11th century. Around this time, however, political disaster struck Kamarupa, which at this point was centred in present-day Nagaon district. Its ruling dynasties faded from the inscriptional record, for reasons that are unclear. It appears that a class of local lords called Bhuyans or Bhuyan rajas effectively monopolised local surpluses for themselves.
Neighbouring Bengal, meanwhile, was in the throes of an even more serious crisis, which we explored in last week’s edition of Thinking Medieval. The vassal lords of the imperial Pala dynasty became so powerful that they essentially acted like independent kings, only obeying the monarch when promised bribes, gifts and exceptions that further consolidated their grip on power. After a devastating rebellion in their core territories, the weakened Palas sent lords to take over what remained of Kamarupa. These men then began to rule it independently, squabbling and partitioning the Brahmaputra valley with minor kings. By the 12th century, a new era had dawned in present-day Assam: one where many petty kings and tribal groups ruled side by side, without an overarching central power.
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Two expanding peoples
Equally significant events were unfolding at the subcontinent’s frontiers. The 12th century saw the great radiation of two groups of peoples, one in the Northwest, and one in the Northeast. The first were the Turks. The second were the Ahoms. Both brought with them new State structures, a will to rule and battle, and a complex relationship toward local practices. But while the Turks encountered—with fire, sword, and horse-archer—the brilliant urban cultures of the Gangetic Plains, the Ahoms entered a relatively decentralised situation, and would remain just one power among many for the next 300 years.
The spread of Turkic power was rapid and brutal, decisively upsetting the balance of power that had hitherto divided the Gangetic Plains. Once again, a new Gangetic empire emerged: that of the Delhi Sultanate. In Bengal, the moribund successors of the Pala empire, with their mighty landlords and vassals, were violently extinguished, replaced with new State structures. Interestingly, even this new Bengal-based State was locked in the geopolitical rhythms of ancient Kamarupa and Gauda.
Throughout the 13th century CE, as the Palas had before them, the Turks sent expeditions into the Brahmaputra. But they were repeatedly driven back, as they completely lacked the naval expertise that had characterised early medieval warfare in the region. A couple of terse inscriptions dating to 1206 and 1257, located near Guwahati and Nagaon, respectively, only say that the “Turuskhas” (Turks) and “Yavanas” (foreigners) came to Kamarupa and perished. The Ahoms had little to do with this, having settled upriver at present-day Sivasagar in 1228. The battles appear to have been conducted entirely by local lords.
And so the 13th century saw the arrival of two “foreign” powers in the Brahmaputra valley. In subsequent centuries, the nature of Bengali Turkic and Ahom power would change drastically: the former transforming from gangs of armed men to an urban, bureaucratic State, the latter from a single tribe to a flourishing, warlike confederation. The Bengal Sultanate would dramatically change its religious policies, just as the Ahoms would gradually incline toward Hinduism. When the most spectacular clashes of Bengal and Assam took place under the Mughals and Ahoms in the 1600s, it was really the culmination of 1,000 years of geopolitical rivalry that endured through political, ethnic and religious transformations. We will explore this in future editions of Thinking Medieval.
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 Zoya Bhatti)