Lachit Borphukan Took Guwahati Back in 1667, Held It for Two Years Against the Mughal Army Aurangzeb Sent Under Raja Ram Singh and Won the River Battle of Saraighat in 1671

In August 1667 the Ahom king Chakradhwaj Singha sent an army down the Brahmaputra under a newly appointed commander, Lachit Borphukan, to take Guwahati back from the Mughals. By early November the city was in Ahom hands. Aurangzeb sent Raja Ram Singh of Amber to recover it, and for two years after Ram Singh reached the frontier in February 1669 the Ahoms kept Guwahati. In March 1671 Ram Singh’s army withdrew to Rangamati after the river battle of Saraighat.

Lachit lived from 24 November 1622 to 25 April 1672, according to the Government of India’s release for his 400th birth anniversary. The title borphukan (also spelled barphukan) went to the army commander who also governed the Ahom kingdom’s western territory, according to Bhuyan, and Gait says Guwahati became its headquarters once the city was retaken.

From the king’s stables to supreme command

Lachit was the youngest son of Momai-tamuli Barbarua, who had led the Ahom armies in earlier wars with the Mughals and settled the 1639 treaty with the Mughal commander Allah Yar Khan, according to S. K. Bhuyan’s 1947 biography. A barbarua was the Ahom kingdom’s chief executive officer and chief justice in one.

Bhuyan names three offices Lachit held before 1667: superintendent of the royal horses, commander of the levy stationed at Simaluguri near the capital, and head of the guards who walked beside the king’s sedan, a post he compares to a present-day inspector general of police. Bhuyan adds that during Mir Jumla’s invasion Lachit had engaged the invading army at Dikhowmukh with some success.

In Gait’s 1906 history the command of the 1667 expedition went to Lachit, son of the Bar Barua, who was appointed Bar Phukan. Golap Chandra Barua’s English translation of the Ahom-Buranji records the same: the king made Lachit and the Kaliabaria Phukan commanders-in-chief of the whole army.

Guwahati, taken back in 1667

Mir Jumla, the Mughal governor of Bengal, had invaded Assam and withdrew in February 1663, according to Sarkar, and Mughal thanadars (garrison commanders) held Guwahati afterwards. Early in 1667 the thanadar, Syed Firuz Khan, wrote to Chakradhwaj demanding the unpaid balance of the indemnity from that war. Gait says the king chose to fight against the advice of his nobles, after the Ahom priests read the omens as favourable.

That August the army set out. At the first assault, Gait writes, the Mughal outposts at Kajali and Bansbari fell, and Guwahati and Pandu were taken after a siege of two months. Jadunath Sarkar, whose history of Aurangzeb draws on Persian chronicles and the Ahom buranjis, dates the fall of Guwahati to about the beginning of November and says Firuz Khan was defeated and taken prisoner on the bank of the Manas river. Captured officers were sent to the capital at Garhgaon and the ordinary soldiers were killed, Gait records.

Guwahati became the Borphukan’s seat, and the Ahoms fortified Pandu and Srighat. Gait and Sarkar both say the news reached Aurangzeb in December 1667 and that he put Raja Ram Singh, son of Mirza Raja Jai Singh, in command of an imperial army to win the city back.

The army Aurangzeb sent

Ram Singh reached Rangamati in February 1669. He travelled with Rashid Khan, a former thanadar of Guwahati, and Gait and Sarkar both record that the two quarrelled until Ram Singh cut his tent ropes and ordered him out of the camp.

Two sets of numbers exist for the Mughal force. Gait, citing the Alamgirnama, the court history of Aurangzeb’s reign, gives 18,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry with 15,000 archers from Koch Bihar. Sarkar, citing the same chronicle, gives 4,000 troopers in Ram Singh’s own pay, 1,500 gentleman-troopers and 500 artillerymen, with the same 15,000 archers, and adds that the Mughal river fleet counted about 40 vessels. Sarkar says the Ahoms, whom he describes as a nation in arms, could put 100,000 men in the field when fully mobilised, and that on the water the advantage now lay with them.

There is reason to believe, Sarkar writes, that Aurangzeb sent Ram Singh to Assam as a punishment for secretly helping Shivaji escape from Agra in 1666. The sources on that escape are set out in the article on Shivaji Maharaj.

Two years of defence

Ram Singh opened with letters. In Barua’s translation of the buranji, Lachit answers the Mughal envoys that “whomsoever God grants victory that party will gain.” Gait reads the Ahom replies as a way of buying time while the defences were finished.

Bhuyan sets out what the defences were. Earthen ramparts on the plain had a soldier every nine feet, and on the hills one every thirteen and a half feet. Each commander held a fixed stretch with his own men, guns and bastions, and the arrangements were written down as a staff manual. An Assamese chronicle quoted by Bhuyan says Lachit had his own maternal uncle executed when a rampart at Amingaon was not finished in time, saying that his uncle was not greater than his country, and the rampart is still called Momai-kata-garh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi retold the episode in his 25 November 2022 speech, which the Press Information Bureau published.

Fighting went both ways. The first two battles, near Tezpur in early April 1669, went against the Ahoms, Gait writes, but they won a naval engagement soon afterwards and drove back an attack on their fort at Rangmahal. Ram Singh fell back to Hajo.

Ram Singh then proposed a duel with the Ahom king. Barua’s translation gives the king’s reply: the Mughal commander was a mere servant with no umbrella over his head, the Ahom sign of royalty, so he would not fight him. Chakradhwaj died in April 1670 and his brother Udayaditya Singha succeeded him, Bhuyan writes. Sarkar says the imperial army suffered three serious defeats in the second half of 1670.

Saraighat, March 1671

Saraighat, Bhuyan says, was a name loosely applied to Guwahati and its surroundings, though Sarai itself was a small village now called Amingaon, opposite Pandu. The fighting was on the Brahmaputra, in the triangle between Kamakhya, Itakhuli and Aswakranta.

Bhuyan’s account follows the Assamese chronicles. Ram Singh decided on a river attack when he learned of a gap in the sand rampart at Andharubali and that Lachit was ill. Mughal boats forced the Ahom fleet back to Amrajuri-ghat, and some Ahom crews loaded their boats to retreat. Before that, the chronicle says, Lachit had sent word to the commander at Aswakranta that he would die on the spot rather than abandon his charge. He was carried from his sickbed to a gate-house, boarded a boat with six other war vessels and rowed at the enemy, and the rest of the Ahom fleet followed him in. The chronicle says the Mughal commander Raship Khan was shot dead on his boat, the Ahoms laid a bridge of boats across the river, and the surviving Mughal boats were chased as far as Pandu, about three miles away.

Barua’s translation, a different chronicle, is brief: Raja Ramsing, vanquished, retreated to Rangamati in the Ahom month of Chaitra in 1671. Gait adds that the Garos and the Raja of Rani helped the Ahoms and that Ram Singh, worn down by repeated losses, fell back first to the Haran river and then to Rangamati. Lachit did not let his men harry the retreating army, and Bhuyan quotes him saying he would not tarnish the name of his king and ministers by plundering fugitives.

What the Mughal side wrote

The Alamgirnama treats this war very briefly, Gait says. Its author, Muhammad Kazim, did write a longer description of Assam, which Henry Vansittart translated and Asiatick Researches printed. It says the rulers of Assam had not “bowed the head of submission and obedience” or paid tribute to the most powerful monarch, and that wars against them had baffled rulers styled Conquerors of the World. That passage describes the country and ends with Mir Jumla’s invasion, so it was written before Saraighat.

Bhuyan reports, from a manuscript chronicle, that Ram Singh praised the all-round skill of the Assamese soldiers and said he had seen nothing like it elsewhere in India. No Mughal source in the works cited here carries that remark.

Death and remembrance

According to the Press Information Bureau, Lachit died on 25 April 1672, and PTI’s 2024 report gives his age as 49. He was buried in an Ahom burial mound, a maidam, at Hollongapar near Teok in Jorhat district. The Jorhat district administration says Udayaditya Singha had his remains laid there.

Assam observes his birthday, 24 November, as Lachit Diwas across the state, the President of India’s office records. The same release says the Lachit Barphukan Gold Medal was instituted at the National Defence Academy in 1999 for the best cadet each year, and that a statue of him stands on the Academy’s campus. A Sentinel Assam report on the 130th course in 2016 described the award as going to the “best cadet in officer like quality.”

His 400th birth anniversary year opened in Guwahati in February 2022, with President Ram Nath Kovind present, and closed in New Delhi on 25 November 2022. On 9 March 2024 Prime Minister Modi unveiled a bronze statue of Lachit at Hollongapar, 84 feet tall on a 41-foot pedestal, made by the sculptor Ram Sutar.

Where the sources differ

Dates for Ram Singh’s withdrawal vary. Gait and Sarkar say March 1671, while Bhuyan’s narrative puts the start of the retreat at 23 Chaitra 1592 Saka, about 5 April 1671. The Jorhat district page gives 1672 for Saraighat itself, while every other source cited here says 1671.

The sickbed charge, the astrologer who counselled delay, and the execution of the uncle come from Assamese chronicles gathered by Bhuyan. The passages of Barua’s translation and of Gait’s history covering these years do not carry them.

Ahom reverses are part of the record too. Bhuyan, following the chronicles, describes a heavy Ahom defeat at Alaboi in which about 10,000 soldiers died. The President’s release dates it to 1669, repeats the figure, and says the Assam government decided to observe 5 August as Alaboi Sangram Diwas. Gait writes that after one engagement Ram Singh routed the Ahom army and the Barphukan lost his ships, for which the king severely censured him.

What came after

Lachit’s elder brother succeeded him as Barphukan. Between 1670 and 1681 the Ahom throne changed hands several times, and Gait records, in what he calls the Ahom version, that in March 1679 a later Barphukan surrendered Guwahati to the Mughals. After Gadadhar Singha became king in 1681 the Ahoms retook the city and pursued the Mughal faujdar to the Manas. Gait notes that the Manas was thereafter accepted by both sides as the boundary and that this was the last of the Ahom-Mughal wars.