The Ahom rulers and the Jaiñtia ones were often friends and sometimes enemies. An inevitable repetitiveness creeps into the records of how they fell out and made up over the centuries that the Mughals were on the distant throne of Delhi. “The historian dies of sheer boredom” declared Vladimir Nabokov once, in a poem on the killing tediousness of the march of history. Following this long-drawn waxing and waning between the larger kingdom and its southern, smaller neighbour, the historian starts at the very least to nod off.
But a couple of lines describing the fallout of one battle, in 1708, between the Ahom king Rudra Singha and the Jaiñtia king Ram Singha, brought me awake. Ram Singha had sworn loyalty to the Ahoms rajas yet harboured a renegade king, Tamradhwaj of the Kachari kingdom. The Ahoms go to battle against both Kachar and what was then known as “Jayantia,” both kings are routed, captured, and produced before Rudra Singha near a town called Biswanath on the banks of the Brahmaputra where he had set up court.
While Tamradhwaj was all subservience, records a court chronicler, and prostrated himself before Rudra Singha, promising he would be a tributary forever, the Jaiñtia Ram Singha was less forthcoming and refused to salute an equal, that is, another monarch. A minister in the Ahom court placed a beam in the gate house chest high so Ram Singha would be forced to bow as he entered the audience hall. “Ram Singha not only avoided this by a slight twist of his waist, but displayed an independence of spirit in his conversation with the Ahom monarch,” writes the historian JN Sarkar. Eventually Ram Singha died while held at the court – of small pox. What immediately fascinated me was Sarkar’s reference to a painting that depicted this whole business of the one proud and the other pliant king.
The main source for the six-hundred-year-long career of the Ahom kingdom and its dealings with its neighbours, from the 13th to the 19th centuries, are the court chronicles or buranjis inscribed on oblong folios made from bark or cotton. They were written first in the Ahom language and the Tai-Ahom script, and the medium later changed to Assamese after the royalty started to be drawn to Hinduism from the 17th century.
The painting I am after appears in an illustrated manuscript, goes a footnote in Sarkar, and was also reproduced as a frontispiece in the Jayantia Buranji or JB. Published in 1937, the JB was put together by well-known School of African and Oriental Studies-trained historian Dr SK Bhuyan, one among several such compilations he made by excerpting from and collating those older chronicles. (Strangely though, this kingly conturbation is not described in the JB but presumably pops up in one of the other buranjis on Ahom-Jaiñtia relations that Sarkar was drawing on.)
The JB is the main source for Ahom-Jaiñtia relations from the early 1600s to the mid-1700s and quotes from a range of manuscripts of a buranji nature. It’s mostly narrated through a reproduction of written letters and verbal messages between kings, their emissaries, ministers, border guards and other top guns. It’s the main source for Ahom-Jaiñtia relations from the early 1600s to the mid-1700s. (Also included are exchanges between the Ahoms and the smaller kingdoms of Khyrim – with its capital at Nongkseh in today’s West Khasi Hills – and Cherra.)
In recent years the S.K. Bhuyan Memorial Trust has been putting out English versions of his buranjis. The English JB, translated by Anil Kumar Boruah, appeared in 2022 so it’s only now that those interested who can’t read Assamese – including the many in Jaiñtia Hills or elsewhere in Meghalaya whose history it is – can directly access this vital record.
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Asking around among friends in the know in Guwahati, led me recently to the government-run Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies. In the compound, under monsoon patter, was a black marble bust on a pedestal of the doyen SK Bhuyan. I pause there in homage – along with much else, he gave us access to the writings of those old-time scribes. With me is the young history scholar and buranji enthusiast Upasana Hazarika. All I want is a peek at the painting of that unbending king. Its symbolism intrigues d me as much as the fact that the episode was thought worthy of immortalising. The manuscript in question is called Sankhachur Badh Kavya.
Assam has had a medieval tradition, related to the Jain and Mughal, and perhaps even the earlier one in Bengal, of scribes at court or in monasteries illustrating religious or secular texts with miniature painted scenes. The buranjis, Upasana tells me, were usually written on sancipat, made from the bark of the sanci or agar tree – aloeswood. Their contents were considered state secrets however, so this category of texts is usually left unillustrated. So the painting I’m after would seem like an exception – a record of a court scene.
Upasana often works at this archive, so the official in charge produces without fuss, swathed in red cotton, the Sankhachur Badh Kavya, a stack of 18th century folios with text and art combined, each arm-long and narrow as a handspan. The story these bark pages are telling is an episode from the Bhagvata Puranas about a demon called Sankhachur, his run-in with the gods, his pious wife Tulsi, and his being vanquished thanks to divine trickery performed on Tulsi. It’s all framed with episodes from the Ramayana. The paintings glow with detail thorough the plastic film in which they’ve been unthinkingly smothered – the block-printed flowers in the sleeve of a bolster that Tulsi lays on a bed; the blue-black of Vishnu’s skin, same as his eyes. Siva Singha, son of Rudra Singha, commissioned this manuscript in 1726, so it could, in theory, feature our Jaiñtia king.
Upasana goes through each folio carefully, decoding the images for me and translating the text. We come to the last one showing Siva Singha in court with his queen. But sadly no sign anywhere of Ram Singha.
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The JB on its own can, admittedly, start to tire, if not confuse – all those many missives going back and forth that sound so much the same. Read alongside texts like The Comprehensive History of Assam edited by HK Barpujari, where Sarkar’s chapter on the Jaiñtias appears, and also Namita Catherine Shadap-Sen’s Origin and Early History of the Khasi Synteng People, this kingly exchange starts to come to life. (Shadap-Sen’s book in particular, based on her PhD thesis written at the University of London in the late 1960s, I told in high regard for the way she takes in every source and treats each with an unusually beady eye.)
The kings of Jaiñtia were busy in trade, intermarriage, political alliances, repeated battles and ready truces, accompanied by much exchanges of gift-bearing envoys, with the Ahom, Koch, Kachari, Tipperah, and Dimarua kings. At the beginning of the 18th century, when our battle took place, the JB records the extent of the Jaiñtia kingdom as bounded by the rivers of Kopili in the east, to the north Gobha Sonapur; the Barak to the south, and Brahmaputra in the west. This last is possibly off the mark; it would indicate that they ruled over the Khasi and Garo Hills as well, which they didn’t. “We assume that this boundary was merely theoretical,” writes Shadap-Sen.
The whole region was a playing field not quite level since the Ahoms usually called the shots. The Kacharis and Kochs come next, kingdoms to the east and north of Jaiñtia. And over all of these lay the heavy hand of the Mughals. The Ahom kings spent much of the 1600s fending off repeated invasions by the Mughals greedy for aloeswood and for the gold reputedly mixed in the sandy banks of the great river. Mir Jumla, the famously methodical Mughal general and governor of Bengal, acting on Emperor Aurangzeb’s orders, managed to hold down the kingdom for a couple of decades mid-century but eventually it seemed Assam could not and would not be conquered.
After their final defeat of the Mughals, the Ahoms started to consider themselves no less invincible than their former foes. Rudra Singha, the king to whom Ram Singha wouldn’t bow, had imperialist ambitions. He sent emissaries to rajas across eastern and northern India, trying to create a pan-Hindu front to take on the Mughals, though he died, in 1714, before this could be got off the ground. It remains a tantalising historical what-if.
The Jaiñtias and Khasis were relatively small but not insignificant players, wholly involved in the hectic political currents of this early modern period. Though subdued by other kingdoms occasionally, they had never been colonised – till the British takeover in the 19th century. Their trade with the Ahoms, though periodically interrupted by disputes, was as important as that with the Bengalis. Cotton, iron, beeswax, ivory and paan leaves from the Jaiñtia kingdom, as well as limestone, oranges and betel-nut from the Khasi side, made their way out and were exchanged for salt, tobacco, rice, dried fish and goats, cottons and silks. Khasi merchants bought goods from the Jaiñtia and Kachar kingdoms as well as silk items from Assam to sell in the plains of Sylhet. The Jaiñtia kings could go to war with the Ahom kings over the control of the passes that gave their merchants access to the markets of the plains on the Assam side. They also at least on one occasion complain that the routes to pilgrims have been blocked, suggesting that the Jaiñtia populace visited temples in the plains, among them perhaps the famous Shakti shrine of the Kamakhya.
Yet the Jaiñtias sympathised with the Ahoms in their fight against the Mughals. In their letters the standard assurance given is that they are family with the Ahoms, united in their opposition to a common enemy, even as they sometimes made up their own minds about the latter. A Jaiñtia king might feel impelled to attack Sylhet in Mughal-controlled Bengal, at the same time sending occasional tributes to whichever general was heading the province at the time, thus rousing the suspicion of the Ahoms. By the early 18th century, the death of Aurangzeb and the weakening of the empire had started to produce some anxiety among the nawabs of Bengal about raids from the hillmen of “Jayantia” and they supported the Ahoms in their confrontation with them.
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The letters in the JB have a wonderfully exalted tenor of noblesse oblige and dignity – as often as not, injured dignity. The standard invocations to kings which herald the correspondence are in Sanskrit, the rest of the text in Assamese. But, point out the editors of the English translation series, words from other languages were mixed in – Jaiñtia, Tripuri, Persian, and Ahom. The Jaiñtia kings too presided over multi-lingual courts – they communicated with their neighbours in Assamese and their scribes must have known some Sanskrit and Persian too, while the language of administration appears to have been Bengali.
Friendship on both sides is sworn for eternity – even if the Lohit flows eastward, even if the sun rises in the west, even if Drona loses in battle, even if the egret turns black, even if the crow turns white, the cordiality between us will never cease go the usual, easily broken, promises. Threats too can be conveyed in metaphor and couched in politesse. In 1707, on the eve of our battle, a certain barphukan or Ahom minister writes to the Ram Singha asking why he holds the Kachari king. The latter had just clashed with the Ahoms and been defeated. (And then went, goes one account, to seek refuge with the Jaiñtias and was imprisoned by them.) After the lofty salutations to Ram Singha’s “noble qualities” and his being “the protector of all forms of art”, the barphukan writes that while it is justified, “that the Kachari king has been held hostage by you, because if he is an enemy of your friend [i.e. the Ahoms], then he is also your enemy. But now you must release him immediately or you will suffer from the same consequences of committing a crime that is as heinous as killing a cow or a Brahmin. We will not be accountable for this crime.”
All the same he includes gifts with the letter, modest in comparison to those that accompany overtures – scented arum and four knives. In reply, Ram Singha says the Ahoms are the betrayers, for threatening war when the Jaiñtias were only, as agreed, helping. “You have violated this long-standing agreement based on truth and we are not responsible for this wrongful act of yours.” But he too sends gifts alongside – a bamboo container and a bow and arrow set. The exchange in weapons is presumably not an indicator of hostility – just a sampling of what each side considers precious.
The lists of gifts usually appended to the letters tell us what else is held dear: cotton fabric, woven baskets and mats, pieces of iron, paddy grinding blocks from the Jaiñtia side while the Ahoms would send back cotton fabrics too as well as silk, musk, chillies, animal hides, and pepper. Women are another, only somewhat more exalted, article of exchange. In times of peace, girls from the Jaiñtia royal household are voluntarily offered in marriage to the Ahoms to signal goodwill. After the 1708 battle, Rudra Singha demands them. “They must also bring along with them the three beautiful daughters about whom we have heard,” he orders his ministers with reference to the two captured kings.
Further, the increasingly self-important Rudra Singha also orders the confiscation of the icon of the Jaiñtias’ patron deity, Jayanti Devi, as well as other auspicious articles like a conch shell and a Lakshminarayan saligram, the latter associated with Lord Vishnu. While these sacred items are being transferred, a prince from the Jaiñtia side intercepts and makes off with them – for they also signal kingly power and he maybe wants to stake a claim. He is supported by a bunch of chieftains but can’t stand up to the Ahom forces. The stash of Jaiñtia “national treasures” disappears and is never found. But in time friendly relations between the two sides resume.
The Jaiñtias come across as dynamic – following Hinduism as well as their own traditions, such as the heir apparent being a nephew from the sister’s side, rather than a son. Given the proximity to Muslim Bengal, Islam took root too among a section of the people. There is a story some historians recount about one Fatah Khan, a Muslim heir to the throne – son of the king’s sister who had been married off to the Nawab of Dhaka – and his popularity with some factions at court which apparently led to his being put to death by a devout Hindu Jaiñtia king. Though it may have a grain of truth to it the details of this story cannot be corroborated, writes the ever alert Shadap-Sen.
***
At the archive in Guwahati, Upasana and I look through an old-time, handwritten buranji, one of the several SK Bhuyan would have drawn on to write his JB. This, as she explained, is just text. I’m left with no other clues to the location of the two captive kings’ painting so it’s a mystery I need to put off for another day. For the time being I make do with the reproduction that appears at the start of JB, the Assamese edition from 1937; there’s a copy of it in the archive.
We gaze at the image on the glossy page. It’s a perfectly balanced one: there’s King Rudra Singha at an elevation on his canopied seat, dressed in yellow and blue, two courtiers to the right all in white, one holding up a fan, the captured kings on the left, both in red shawls, the Kachari leaning forward to touch the king’s feet, the Jaiñtia only slightly bent and somewhat glowering. Everyone is wearing turbans after the Mughal fashion, which doesn’t surprise. The Ahoms resisted the Mughal advance but very much copied Mughal style, including kingly decorum and dress. The Jaiñtias in turn imbibed all this from the Ahoms.
There’s something deeply poignant about this painting – the Jaiñtia king who took on a mightier power and died far from home, the king with the valiant streak who was also, no doubt, taking on a Mughal-inspired attitude of kingliness then au courant. It’s also a painting that captures a high point – the slide would soon follow. By the middle of that century Ahom governance had become so byzantine and the kings so prone to the factionalism of their ministers, that the whole thing was bound to crumble at the slightest touch of English pressure from the one side and Burmese from the other – at least that’s one view in the history books.
The first reports about the rulers of Assam written by British observers are in a tone shockingly at variance with the hauteur of that early 1700s painting. In the 1790s Ahom king Gaurinath asked for East India Company help in coping with sundry antagonists. A Captain Welsh led a contingent into the kingdom and wrote back to his seniors, of Gaurinath, that he is “not capable of transacting any kind of business himself. He is either praying or washing and when he is not to be seen he is intoxicated with eating opium. His ministers are a set of villains drawing different ways.”
We have in writing a portrait of a ruler of the Jaiñtias too from the same years as the Welsh report. Robert Lindsay, both East India Company official and fortune hunter, no conflict between these roles in those days, is stationed in Sylhet and invited by the Jaiñtia king Chhatra Singha to a meeting. He makes a stately approach in a river fleet, comes abroad the Englishman’s boat for some polite small talk, then invites Lindsay to a shikar or hunting party watched by hundreds of his subjects, armed with shield, sword, bow and arrow. These men are dressed in “the hill costume” writes Lindsay, but the hookah-smoking king whose bearing impresses him “wore the Mogul dress and arms”.
The king holds his own in this meeting but his power is already being challenged by the Company. Eventually, Lindsay’s successors will get the upper hand over the Jaiñtia kingdom – and over every other nearby kingdom they once lived in such close contact with. But that’s another, much better-known, story.
