Lachit Borphukan (c. 1622 to 1672) is the most celebrated soldier in Assamese memory. He was the Ahom commander who destroyed the river fleet of the Mughal empire in 1671. The battle was fought in the narrows of the Brahmaputra at Saraighat. His victory secured the valley's independence for the rest of the Ahom period. His name is now a byword in Assam for resolve in the face of overwhelming odds. It also stands for the principle that no kinsman is greater than the country.
A soldier of the paik state
Lachit, born by tradition around 1622, was a son of Momai Tamuli Borbarua, the great administrator who systematised the Ahom paik levy. The paik levy was a rotational service. It turned the kingdom's peasantry into its army and its labour force. Lachit was raised inside the machinery of that state, and he rose through a succession of its offices before he ever held a command. He served as a scarf-bearer to the king and as superintendent of the royal household horses, and held further ranks in the kingdom's officialdom. War on the western frontier later raised him to the command on which his fame rests.
In 1667 the Ahom king Chakradhwaj Singha was determined to throw off the Mughal occupation of lower Assam. He appointed Lachit the Borphukan, the viceroy and supreme commander of the western frontier at Guwahati. This was the exposed marchland where the Ahom kingdom met Mughal Bengal, and it had changed hands repeatedly. Lachit moved at once. Late in 1667 he stormed the key fortified post at Itakhuli on the river and drove the Mughal faujdar back to the Manas, the old boundary. The recovery of Guwahati was a deliberate provocation. Everyone understood the empire would answer it in force. Behind the front stood Lachit's civil counterpart at court, the senior minister or Burhagohain Atan Burhagohain. He held the administration of the kingdom together through the long war.
The empire's answer, and discipline above kin
Aurangzeb sent a large army against Assam. It was led by the Rajput general Ram Singh I of Amber, son of the famous Mirza Raja Jai Singh. The army came with cavalry, artillery and a river fleet. From 1669 the two sides fought a long war of attrition through the hills, forts and channels around Guwahati. The Ahom strategy was to refuse open, mounted battle, in which Mughal numbers and horse told. Instead they bound the war to the river and the broken country. There Lachit's stockades and boats had the advantage. The campaign was not a single triumph. It was years of manoeuvre, raids and stalemate.
It did not go all one way. In 1669 the Ahom army was drawn into a pitched land engagement at Alaboi. It suffered a heavy defeat, and tradition records losses running into thousands of men. The reverse confirmed Lachit's conviction that the valley's fight had to be made on the water, not the field. Ram Singh could not force a decision, so he also tried what arms could not. He offered terms, and he tried to sow distrust between the Borphukan and his king. He sent letters designed to make Lachit look like a man open to a bribe. The Ahom command held.
The temper of that command survives in the most famous episode of Assamese military lore. The Mughals were pressing, and a defensive rampart at Guwahati was left half-built through the night. Lachit is said to have found his own maternal uncle, the officer in charge, asleep at the work. He is said to have beheaded him on the spot, with the words that no uncle is greater than the country. Whatever its exact truth, the story has carried his name for three centuries. It stands as the measure of duty placed above blood.
Saraighat, 1671
The decision came in March 1671 in the river narrows at Saraighat. The spot lies below the north-bank temple of Aswaklanta and within sight of the islet shrine of Umananda. There the Brahmaputra pinches narrow enough to be defended. Lachit was by then mortally ill and could barely stand. The Mughal fleet pressed forward, and part of the Ahom navy began to give way in panic. He is said to have had himself rowed out into the battle from his sickbed, to shame and rally the wavering boats. In the close fighting on the water the Mughal navy was broken. The victory ended the most serious attempt the empire ever made on the valley. Guwahati and lower Assam stayed Ahom. The battle itself, the dying general and the night on the river is told in full as a story.
The Night of SaraighatA dying general, a wavering fleet, and the river that kept Assam free of the Mughals.Read the story →Lachit died about a year after the battle, in April 1672 at Kaliabor, his health broken by the campaign. He was buried beneath the Lachit Maidam near Jorhat, the burial mound his king raised for him. His memory has only grown. The best passing-out cadet of the National Defence Academy receives the Lachit Borphukan gold medal in his name. His statue stands in the Brahmaputra at Guwahati. His stand at Saraighat is taught across Assam, and increasingly across India, as the measure of duty to the land above self.
