Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (30 page)

The inside was dark and the humidity must have been close to a hundred per cent. We were pressed up in what can only be described as a throng of people, luckily all patient and good-natured. There was a very dank smell in the air, cut through with the odour of human sweat. A few feet away were strange sculptures, including one of what seemed to be a pregnant woman, bent over and holding a bow and arrow. We shuffled past two great silver doors, each adorned with the image of a lion. The walls were made of stone and utterly smooth from the centuries of people who must have pressed against them as we were doing now. The corridor became narrower and narrower until at the very bottom, with a crush of people behind, and the walls seeming to close in, the only light coming from a few flickering candles, we came to a moist cleft in an exposed part of the bedrock, an almost imperceptible spray of water coming from what must have once been a natural spring. We knelt down and sipped the water and then began our ascent, happy to have had the privilege.

No one knows when the Kamakhya hill and the little spring were first worshipped as a sacred site, and the very early history of the area is hazy at best. Ptolemy, writing from Alexandria in his second-century
Geography
, referred to an ‘India Beyond the Ganges’, perhaps meaning not only Assam but also Burma. The accounts are not particularly flattering. He said that the people of this area were ‘white, with flat noses’, ‘stooping, ignorant, uncultivated, and with a broad forehead’. It was, he said, a place rich in gold, with tigers and elephants and the best cinnamon in the world, with robbers and wild men living in caves, with skin like hippopotamuses, able to hurl darts with ease.

Today there remain people spread in pockets around central and eastern India who speak different Austro-Asiatic languages, such as Munda, that are distantly related to Vietnamese and Cambodian, as well as lesser-known languages such as Mon and Wa in Burma. Scholars believe that in ancient times Austro-Asiatic speakers may have been much more widespread, the arrival of later migrants leaving them in their present scattered locations. Their societies, now forgotten, may have been fairly advanced. Their words for rice farming, for example, have found their way into the eastern Indo-Aryan tongues that arrived later, like Assamese and Bengali, and this suggests it was these Austro-Asiatic speakers who were the agricultural pioneers of the region.

What we do know for certain is that Kamarupa and the western areas of present-day Assam became home to a hybrid of Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, from at least the fourth century
AD
. The centre of the Indian world was then not far to the west, along the middle and lower Ganges, and the kings of Kamarupa were doubtless influenced by the more powerful monarchs and imperial courts next door. And it was from middle India that the great Chinese traveller and Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang came to Assam in the early seventh century, as a guest of the Kamarupa king, Bhaskaravarman, a devout Buddhist himself, who had heard of Xuanzang’s learning and piety. Xuanzang had come to India the long way around–across the deserts of Central Asia and Afghanistan. When he was in Assam, he had been away from home for more than ten years and reflected wistfully on how close he was again to China. But he also felt that it was too difficult and too dangerous to attempt to travel onwards via Assam and Burma to China, and would later return the way he had come. This was at the time when there were already the first little Buddhist and Hindu states along the Irrawaddy River, and just before the emergence of the Nanzhao kingdom in Yunnan. The route eastward from Assam was dangerous, but not closed, and for those living throughout this region, from Bengal to Dali, there was regular if limited contact and commerce. Six hundred years later, Assam would be conquered from the east, by a people known as the Ahom, who would then rule the valley, until they themselves were conquered, first by the Burmese in the nineteenth century, and then by the British East India Company.

The Ahoms had come over the mountains from present-day Burma. Ahom is also pronounced ‘Asom’. It is the same word as ‘Assam’. It is also the same word as ‘Shan’ in Burmese and ‘Siam’, the old name for Thailand. These different names sometimes obscure the fact that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was a vast expansion of people speaking very closely related Shan dialects, from a core region along what is now the Burma–China border, reaching south to form the Thai kingdoms of Sukhothai and later Ayuthaya, east to found Vientiane, and west to conquer Kamarupa. Much of what is today Assam, northern Burma, western Yunnan, Laos and Thailand came under a medley of closely related ruling elites.

The first Ahom king was Sukaphaa and for centuries to come, until the final extinction of the monarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, he and his heirs styled themselves as the
swargadeos
or ‘gods of heaven’ of Assam. Slowly, they and their court came under Hindu and other Indian influences; within 200 years Ahom ceased being the court language and was replaced by Assamese, an Aryan language related to Bengali and Hindi. But memory of their eastern origin was never forgotten and in the upper Brahmaputra valley Ahom villagers lived much as their not very distant Shan cousins in Burma and elsewhere. Their court maintained systems of government, including the
paik
system of corvée labour, they had brought with them from across the mountains. And they fought little wars against their immediate neighbours, like the hill principalities of Jaintia and Cachar. The zenith of Ahom rule in the seventeenth century was also a period of Burmese imperial expansion, but the Burmese were then focused east towards Laos and Siam. Instead, the threat to Assam when it came, an existential threat, was from the west, from the Mughals who from Delhi had snuffed out the old Bengal sultanate and were moving up the Brahmaputra.

At the time, the Mughals were perhaps second only to China as the greatest power on earth. The founder of Mughal rule in India, Babur, claimed descent from both Genghis Khan and Timur Lang (the Tamerlane of Christopher Marlowe) and had conquered Delhi from Afghanistan. His successors would expand Mughal rule across the subcontinent but failed to take Assam. The Ahoms shaped the limits of Mughal power. The Mughals were used to fighting Hindu kingdoms that had been ground down by decades or centuries of struggle against other Muslim invaders. The Ahoms, however, were fresh and at the pinnacle of their power and presented the Mughals with a very different type of warfare. As in many political systems to the east (such as Burma) the focus of Ahom administration was on the organization of manpower rather than the control of land; this meant they were able thus to mobilize quickly and move entire communities as necessary during conflict. It was something the Mughals had never seen.

From the beginning relations between the Mughals and the Ahoms were hostile. From their strongholds in Bengal, the Mughals quickly moved into what is now western Assam, stationing their forces near Gauhati, then probing and pushing further up the Brahmaputra valley. During the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the early 1600s, the two sides battled almost every year in thick jungle and along the sandbanks of the great river. The Ahoms deployed guerrilla tactics, much like those the Burmese would deploy against the British 200 years later, building makeshift bamboo stockades, setting traps, and launching surprise night-time attacks with their experienced musketeers. They demoralized the Mughals, who referred to the Assamese as ‘black and loathsome in appearance’ and Assam as a land of witches and magic. And, as they moved their cannon and cavalry up the swampy river tracts, the Mughals, more used to the open deserts of western India, blamed the magic of these infidels for their troubles.

The last war came in 1661. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb had appointed Muhammad Said Mir Jumla, the son of a Persian oil merchant and a veteran of the Deccan wars, to be his governor of Bengal. With 12,000 cavalry, 30,000 foot soldiers and hundreds of armed ships, Mir Jumla soon marched north, annexing the nearby kingdom of Cooch Behar, then capturing Gauhati before routing the Ahoms in a big river battle. Within a year he was in possession of the then Ahom capital of Garhgaon, forcing the king and court to flee. He vowed to open ‘the road to China’. The Ahoms then attempted to counter-attack, harassing Mughal lines during the heavy rains, but by early 1663 the
swargadeo
of Assam was forced to sue for peace. His daughter Ramani Gabharu joined the harem of the Mughal emperor (she would later wed prince Azamtara, governor of Bengal), and he was forced to surrender his western districts, as well as elephants and treasure, and become an imperial vassal.

It seemed the end of hostilities, but then suddenly Mir Jumla died of sickness and the Mughals never really followed up with another appointment of similar stature. When the inevitable disputes arose over the treaty and hostilities followed, the Ahoms emerged victorious. Gauhati was retaken. And in 1667, after what was a century and a half of on-and-off warfare, the Ahoms, under their supreme commander Lachit Borphukan, decisively routed a Mughal force under the Raja Ram Singh of Amber.

The Ahoms set the frontiers of Mughal power. From a Delhi and even a Calcutta perspective, power in India is normally seen as shaped from the west, by armies invading across the Hindu Kush. But here the map was being drawn from the east. A hundred years later, in the 1760s, the Burmese at Ava were setting the southwestern frontiers of the Manchu empire, defeating four successive attempts to invade and annex their countries. In this way, these two middle kingdoms–Assam and Burma–prevented, for better or worse, what might otherwise have been a historic meeting-up of Mughal India and Qing China. And when collapse for the Ahoms finally came in the early nineteenth century, it was not at the hands of any Indian power, but from the king of Burma, who had set his sights on the plunder of the Brahmaputra valley.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period when the Burmese kingdom was relishing one military success after another, and Burmese generals, aided by levies of Kachin tribesmen, had marched over the frozen mountains that separated the two countries and then down into the Brahmaputra valley, smashing Ahom defences. After one early invasion, tens of thousands of ordinary Assamese were allowed to be carted away and resettled very close to present-day Ruili on the Burmese–Chinese border. In desperation, the besieged
swargadeo
of Assam, Chandra Kanta Singh, sent his sister Princess Hemo as a gift to the Burmese ruler, to become his concubine, together with a large retinue and fifty war elephants.

The Burmese accepted the gifts but continued their aggression. Burmese royal strategists dreamed of a permanent annexation of Assam and perhaps a drive further west, into the heartland of India. It was at this point that the British East India Company stepped in, declared war on Burma and, after a bloody two-year campaign, sailed up the Irrawaddy and forced a Burmese surrender. Under the Treaty of Yandabo that ended the war, the chastened Burmese were forced to surrender Assam, which then became part of the expanding British Empire.

At first, the British were uncertain about what to do with their new Assamese possession. They had gone around distributing pamphlets stating: ‘We are not led into your country by the thirst of conquest, only by our desire to deprive our enemy of the means of annoying us’, and promised ‘a government adapted to your wants and calculated to promote the happiness of people of all classes’. But then they decided to stay, and when this was followed by resistance, there were violent reprisals. The last king of Assam, Purandar Singh, had initially been kept on as a ‘protected prince’ of ‘Upper Assam’, and given a budget of 50,000 rupees a year. When he went bankrupt, the British launched an investigation, found his court to be a ‘hotbed of corruption and malfeasance’, and in 1838 packed him off into obscurity. In this way the 600-year-old monarchy of Assam came to an end.

The earliest colonial administrators did not have a very favourable impression of many of the people they first met in Assam, especially in the more remote tracts. In 1857 a British soldier wrote about Assam, ‘Though being used lately to see such large tracts of country without dwellings or inhabitants one almost feels disposed to fraternize with the first savage that turns up; and so far as looks go, such of the natives as I saw today, are perfect savages indeed.’ Then they discovered tea.

The belt of territory from Assam to northern Burma to southern China is the only area in the world where tea is a native crop. In the 1820s, Robert Bruce, an employee of the East India Company, saw the plant growing wild not far from Gauhati and enjoyed a cup of tea with some local villagers. This was when tea was already popular in Britain and tea imports from China were weighing heavily on the Company’s exchequers. Specimens of Assamese tea were sent off to the Calcutta Botanical Gardens and by 1835 the Assam Tea Company was established, with big hopes for the future. Soon, Europeans were encouraged to set up vast new tea plantations, and to bring in cheap labour from Bengal and elsewhere in India. It wasn’t easy in the beginning to clear the dense jungle tracts whilst also fending off wild tigers and jungle disease. But soon the industry proved extremely profitable, and the strong and malty tea of Assam (and later of Darjeeling next door) made its way into homes across the British Isles.

Tea was to Assam what rice was to Burma. It was the British Empire’s cash crop and the focus of its official and commercial attention. Other profitable businesses were later identified, notably oil and coal, but more than anything it was tea that drove British interests in Assam. There were few security concerns other than those on the borders with Tibet, and even these were minor compared with those on the Afghan frontier. Colonial policy-makers cared little about Assam’s past or the preservation of its diverse languages or ways of life. Instead they saw an under-populated but potentially lucrative place, lacking people not only through the ravages of the Burmese invaders but also by a string of other little wars against smaller neighbours like Cachar and as a result of earlier nineteenth-century rebellions. Under-population, however, was easy to fix in India. And so, as in Burma, the British encouraged an influx of people from else where on the subcontinent. In Burma the consequences of this demographic change would dominate politics for decades, culminating in the Buddhist–Muslim riots of 1938, the flight of ethnic Indians in the 1940s, and the expulsion of people of Indian descent in the 1960s. In Assam, the politics around demographic change remain central to this day.