Saktism is the worship of the Goddess as the supreme divine power. It is the oldest and deepest religious stratum of the Brahmaputra valley, and Assam is one of its great heartlands. Its centre is the temple of Kamakhya, on the Nilachal hill above Guwahati. Kamakhya is reckoned among the oldest and greatest of the fifty-one Shakti peethas, the seats where parts of the body of the goddess Sati are held to have fallen. The cult of the Goddess has shaped the valley’s religion from before the historical record to the present day.
Across India, Saktism divides broadly into two great streams. One is the Srikula, the family of the gentle Tripura Sundari, strongest in the south. The other is the Kalikula, the family of the fierce Kali, which dominates the east and north-east. Assam belongs firmly to this second, Kali-centred stream. Its Goddess is worshipped in her powerful and terrible forms, and her worship carries the strong tantric colour of the eastern tradition.
An ancient, layered cult
The classic study of Kamakhya argues that beneath the Sanskritic Sakta cult lies something far older. This is a non-Aryan mother-goddess and fertility worship. It was the kind widespread among the indigenous, Tibeto-Burman peoples of the region. Strikingly, the tradition itself preserves this memory. Both the Kalika Purana and the Yogini Tantra state plainly that the religion of the Kamakhya seat is of Kirata origin, that is, of the hill and forest peoples rather than the Brahmanical mainstream. By tradition the Garos, Koch, Rabha and other communities once worshipped on the hill, and the goddess has been linked to a much older tribal mother-deity. Over time this stratum was absorbed into Brahmanical Hinduism and given a Puranic genealogy.
On this reading the Saktism of Assam is not an import laid over a blank ground. It is a fusion, an indigenous Goddess re-clothed in Sanskrit. The moist rock-cleft at Kamakhya’s heart is older than any text that explains it. There is no image in the inner sanctum. What is worshipped is a natural fissure in the rock, kept damp by an underground spring, honoured as the yoni of the Goddess. Myth says the temple marks the spot where that yoni of the dismembered Sati fell to earth. That myth gave the ancient seat its place in the pan-Indian Goddess geography. The founding of Assamese Saktism is thus a process of layering rather than a single act.
The texts and the rites
The carved walls of Kamakhya hold the Goddess in her many forms in stone.
Assam was not only a centre of Goddess worship. It was also a place where her scriptures were made. The Kalika Purana and the Yogini Tantra are two of the major texts of the eastern Sakta and tantric tradition. Both are held to have been composed in this country, and they fix Kamakhya at the centre of the Goddess’s world. The Kalika Purana in particular is the great ritual manual of the seat, and it is generally dated to about the tenth century.
On the Nilachal hill the Goddess is worshipped not alone but as a circle of forms. The ten Mahavidyas, the “great wisdoms” of the Sakta tantra, are each present here, several housed in their own shrines around the main temple. They run from Kali and Tara through Tripura Sundari, Bhuvaneshwari, Bhairavi, Chhinnamasta, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi and Matangi to Kamala. Having the whole set gathered on one hill is rare, and it marks Kamakhya as a complete map of the Goddess in her many aspects. Her worship has long included the sacrifice of goats and buffalo, understood within the tradition as an offering the Goddess receives, though female animals are by custom spared. The rites embrace both the “right-hand” path of open, orthodox worship and the secret “left-hand” path of the tantric adept.
The kingdom's religion
Through the whole age of kingdoms, Saktism was the religion of power. Kamarupa was Sakta country, and its kings were patrons and protectors of the Goddess. The temple at Kamakhya was thrown down during the medieval invasions from Bengal. It was rebuilt by the Koch king Naranarayan in 1565, in the distinctive hybrid dome style, since called the Nilachal type, that still stands (its destruction and rebuilding are told on the temple’s own page).
The Ahom monarchy, Tai in origin, Hinduised over time. From the late seventeenth century its kings drew close to the Sakta cult of Kamakhya. Rudra Singha resolved to take Sakta initiation and invited a leading priest from Bengal, but died before it could be done. His son Siva Singha carried the resolve through, becoming the disciple of that priest, Krishnaram Bhattacharya of the Parbatiya Gosain line, and pressing Saktism as in effect the state religion. Later Ahom kings added to the temple complex on the hill. The Goddess cult thus runs as a continuous thread of royal devotion through dynasty after dynasty. Alongside it flowed the very different current of neo-Vaishnavism, and the two traditions coexisted, sometimes in tension and sometimes in accommodation. But Saktism is the one religious tradition every great valley kingdom embraced.
The tantric centre
Assamese Saktism is also distinctively tantric, and Kamakhya is among the foremost centres of the esoteric stream of Goddess worship in all of India. For the tantric adept the hill is not merely a temple but a place of power, a seat where the disciplines of the tradition can be pursued at their source. It has long drawn practitioners of the demanding “left-hand” path from across the subcontinent, ascetics and sadhus among them, for whom the shrine of the menstruating Goddess is the supreme field of practice. The valley's Sakta texts, made here, are as much manuals of this discipline as they are works of devotion.
The tradition's public face is the great annual Ambubachi gathering, which draws hundreds of thousands to the hill for the days when the Goddess is held to menstruate, the sanctum then closed and reopened with the distribution of red-stained cloth as her blessing. Around that festival, and through the year, Kamakhya remains a working centre of tantric sadhana rather than a monument to a closed past. The scholar Hugh Urban has placed the temple at the very centre of his study of Tantra and its modern politics, tracing how its esoteric reputation has been both guarded and reshaped in the present. Texts, rites and site run together here as at few other places: the Kamarupa centuries, the temple on the Nilachal hill, and the festival of Ambubachi form one continuous tantric tradition.
