your bridge home
True Valor
He found the defensive wall unfinished and his own uncle in charge of that section. He had him beheaded on the spot.
He had his own uncle beheaded for slacking on a wall.
And then he won the battle that kept the Mughal empire out of Assam permanently.
By 1671 the Mughals had taken Guwahati and were pushing up the Brahmaputra. Ram Singh I of Amber was commanding. He was the son of the Mirza Raja Jai Singh who had brought Shivaji to terms.
He had a force the accounts put at tens of thousands. Cannon. And a river fleet.
The Ahom kingdom facing him was not a tribal chiefdom. It had been governing the Brahmaputra valley since 1228. It had a professional bureaucracy, and a written chronicle tradition in the Buranjis.
And it had a system of universal service, the paik system. Under it, every household owed manpower to the state. But it was smaller, and it had just lost Guwahati.
Lachit Borphukan was made Borphukan, the commander of the western frontier, and given the job of taking it back.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.