You look at Assam before the Ahoms, a period many people hardly know about. Why did this story need to be told?
In December 2021, when I was working at the Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s Office, I attended the Asom Divas celebrations in Dispur, honouring Chaolung Sukaphaa, often called the creator of Bor Axom. When I visited his 100-foot statue in Nazira in 2023, a question occurred to me: Was Assam’s history really only 800 years old?
Something about this did not sit right with me. I have always been sceptical of official versions of history, particularly what I call “day zero histories”, which begin a civilisation’s story at a convenient historical milestone while overlooking everything that came before. I began reading inscriptions, chronicles and historical scholarship to investigate what Assam was like before the Ahoms. I felt that if I had so much to learn about my own land, many others probably did too. That realisation inspired Land of the Eastern Light.
Why did this older Assam of Pragjyotisha and Kamarupa slip from public memory?
Colonial historiography fundamentally altered how we understood the past. It stripped the sacred from the history of India’s indigenous communities, recasting civilisational connections as ethnic distinctions. The colonial project sought to de-Indianise tribal communities, severing their ties with the wider Indic world and hardening divisions between communities that had long shared sacred traditions. This was not merely an academic exercise. A population disconnected from its civilisational roots was easier to govern and, eventually, proselytise.
{{/usCountry}}Colonial historiography fundamentally altered how we understood the past. It stripped the sacred from the history of India’s indigenous communities, recasting civilisational connections as ethnic distinctions. The colonial project sought to de-Indianise tribal communities, severing their ties with the wider Indic world and hardening divisions between communities that had long shared sacred traditions. This was not merely an academic exercise. A population disconnected from its civilisational roots was easier to govern and, eventually, proselytise.
{{/usCountry}}Unfortunately, some regionalist historians continued to view the past through a similar lens. They privileged the ethnic over the sacral, and the regional over the civilisational. In their attempt to construct distinct regional identities, they often neglected or severed the very connections that linked Assam to the wider Indic civilisation. I find this deeply problematic. Assam’s history cannot be understood by isolating it from the rest of India, just as India’s history cannot be complete without Assam.
When you deal with figures like Naraka and Bhagadatta, you are working in that difficult space between myth, memory and history. How do you decide what can be read as history and what must remain legend?
I make a clear distinction between historical evidence and a people’s inherited stories. In my book, I do not treat Naraka and Bhagadatta as established historical figures. But every Kamarupa king, from Bhaskaravarman to Dharmapala (who was an elected monarch), claimed ancestry from them. That makes these figures important to Assamese history, regardless of whether we can establish their historicity.
Ultimately, a people’s past is a collection of its stories. These stories must be told and preserved. Do you know what happens when a people forgets its mythical stories? Look at Egypt, Greece and Rome. When their ancestral deities ceased to be objects of living worship, their old religious traditions gave way to proselytisation. I am not suggesting that mythology is history. I am saying that a people’s stories shape its identity, and we must not lose them simply because we cannot verify every detail. As an author, I may not treat these stories as historical evidence, but I recognise their importance in understanding who we are.
You begin with a past that is partly remembered through texts, inscriptions, sacred sites and oral memory. What kind of source did you trust most while writing this book, and which source made you most cautious?
I have always preferred primary sources like inscriptions, coins, sculptures and chronicles over secondary interpretations. Travelling across Assam and visiting historical sites was an important part of my research. There is something about standing before an inscription or an ancient structure that no book can quite replicate.
I treated oral histories with the greatest care. I did not automatically assume they were true, but neither did I dismiss them. Stories change as they pass through generations, and not every detail can be verified. Yet these stories become part of a community’s identity and how it remembers its past. I wanted to understand them, respect their significance and examine their historical claims against the available evidence.
Bhaskaravarman appears as a major ruler with links to Harsha and the politics of the Gangetic belt. What does his story tell us about Assam’s place in India before the medieval period?
Bhaskaravarman’s story tells us that Assam was anything but peripheral to Indian politics. When Sasanka of Gauda and Devagupta of Malwa captured Kannauj, overthrew Grahavarman and imprisoned his wife Rajyashri, Harshavardhana’s sister, Bhaskara offered Harsha his support. Harsha advanced from the west, while Bhaskara brought his formidable war elephants from the east. Their campaign against Gauda propelled the Kamarupa king onto the wider political stage.
Bhaskara was subsequently received at Harsha’s grand assemblies at Prayag and Kannauj as a recognised sovereign. Bana’s account of the Kannauj assembly places Harsha in the role of Indra and Bhaskara in that of Brahma. That tells you something about the standing he commanded.
Bhaskaravarman also patronised Buddhism, hosted Xuanzang and maintained links with Nalanda, making Kamarupa a vital bridge between India and the world to its east. His diplomatic and cultural networks gave his kingdom considerable geopolitical significance, placing it at the crossroads of the Gangetic plains and Buddhist trans-Asian exchanges.
For me, Bhaskaravarman challenges the idea that ancient Assam was isolated from the rest of India. He was not a distant regional ruler watching history unfold elsewhere. He was one of the people making that history.
Kamakhya is central to Assam’s religious and cultural imagination. But it is also surrounded by Tantra, power, gender, ritual and politics. How did you write about it without making it either too mystical or too sanitised?
I wanted to trace Maa Kamakhya’s evolution through history, rather than treat Her as a timeless, unchanging deity. I look at Her origins as an aniconic war goddess associated with indigenous traditions and cave worship, the sacrificial practices surrounding Her, and Her evolution into a Pala-era Shakti whose worship drew upon both Vedic and Tantric traditions.
Tantra is often either romanticised or reduced to sensational stories about its rituals, including human sacrifice. I wanted to examine these traditions historically: how they evolved, how Tantric texts were codified, and how this changed the Goddess and Her worship over time. My approach was neither to mystify nor sanitise Maa Kamakhya, but to understand Her evolution through the available evidence, however uncomfortable or complex it might be.
The story of Raja Prithu resisting Bakhtiyar Khilji is dramatic. What do the sources say about that episode?
The story is remarkable. Bakhtiyar Khilji marched through Kamarupa towards Tibet, only to suffer a disastrous defeat on the banks of the Brahmaputra, near present-day North Guwahati, at the hands of the ruler of Kamarupa.
To establish what happened, I triangulated indigenous inscriptions, including Kanhai Boroxi Boa and Gachtal, Islamic chronicles such as Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, and British gazetteers. By cross-checking dates recorded in the Saka and Hijri calendars and converting them to the Gregorian calendar, I tested whether the timelines aligned.
I also physically retraced Khilji’s route, from his advance through Kamarupa to his defeat, flight and retreat. Sanjeev Sanyal joined me on this journey, which forms a significant part of the book’s final chapter.
We remember Khilji for the destruction of Nalanda, and there is even a town named Bakhtiyarpur after him. Yet, hardly anyone knows who defeated him, despite evidence in both indigenous and Islamic sources pointing to his defeat near North Guwahati. I find that extraordinary.
How would you respond to readers who may worry that the book is trying to fit Assam’s past into a present-day ideological frame?
I would ask why we apply this suspicion selectively. For decades, we have read our past through colonial, Nehruvian and Marxist historiographical frameworks, often treating their interpretations as established fact. Why should a different interpretation immediately be suspected of ideological manipulation?
We need to understand the distinction between history and historiography. History is what happened; historiography is how we interpret what happened. We can never reconstruct the past perfectly. We have evidence, and we interpret it through a particular lens. Every historian does this, whether they acknowledge it or not. Yet this has gone unquestioned for some because they dominated the academic and popular understanding of our past.
My book uses the same historical evidence but approaches it through a different civilisational lens. My suggestion to readers is simple: examine the evidence, question the interpretation and arrive at your own conclusions. Do not take my word for it. But extend the same scepticism to the historians whose accounts you have accepted for years. A new interpretation should be judged by the strength of its evidence, not dismissed because it challenges an established ideological consensus.
Many histories of the Northeast have either been written from Delhi or through colonial categories like frontier, tribe, borderland and periphery. What did you consciously try to avoid while telling this story?
I consciously avoided viewing Assam through a colonial vocabulary that presents the region as a ‘frontier’, ‘periphery’ or ‘borderland’. These terms create an artificial distinction between a supposed centre and its margins, and were often used to separate the Northeast from the rest of India. What troubles me is that this framing has seeped into our own vocabulary. We routinely use the word ‘mainland’ to denote the rest of India, as though Assam exists outside it.
I wanted to tell Assam’s story on its own terms, without accepting this artificial separation. Assam had powerful kingdoms, sacred centres and intellectual traditions, and was deeply connected to the wider Indic civilisation. Its history should not be treated as an appendix to Indian history, nor should its civilisational connections be overlooked to construct a narrower regional identity.
Assam is India, and India is incomplete without Assam. As someone from the Northeast, I wanted to tell our story in the hope that we may finally see ourselves not as a distant part of India, but as an inseparable part of the civilisation we have helped shape for millennia.
Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi.