Dimasa Kingdom: Northeast India’s Forgotten Kingdom
Long before colonial maps carved the Northeast into districts and before the Ahom state became the region’s best-known pre-modern power, another kingdom held the southern bank of the Brahmaputra and the valleys that run south from it. The Dimasa Kingdom—also recorded as the Kachari or Heramba kingdom—ruled from at least the thirteenth century until the British annexed its last territories in 1832. Its capitals moved from the brick city of Dimapur to the hills of Maibang and finally to the plains of Khaspur. Today its name survives in Dima Hasao district and in the living culture of the Dimasa people, yet the polity itself is often treated as a footnote. That neglect is undeserved.
The word Dimasa is commonly explained as “sons of the great river.” Di means water, ma big, sa children; the river in question is the Brahmaputra, called Dilao in Dimasa. The people belong to the Bodo-Kachari ethnolinguistic family and speak a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodo-Garo group. Oral tradition places their ancestors in or near ancient Kamarupa. When they crossed the Brahmaputra, legend says, many were swept away, and those who reached the southern bank took the name that tied them to the river. Later court genealogies, especially after the eighteenth-century turn toward Sanskritic Hinduism, linked the royal house to Hidimba and her son Ghatotkacha of the Mahabharata. That story is a later overlay; the earlier evidence is thinner and more local.
By the time the Ahom leader Sukaphaa entered the Brahmaputra valley in 1228, a Dimasa polity already controlled a substantial stretch of the southern bank, from the Dikhou River westward toward the Kolong and south into the Dhansiri valley and the North Cachar hills. Ahom chronicles call the Dimasa kings khun timisa. Archaeology at Dimapur has produced radiocarbon dates that push occupation of the site back several centuries earlier still. The kingdom’s economic base was wet-rice agriculture in fertile riverine tracts, supported by tanks, canals, and embankments. Society was organised around clans, or sengphong. Later records speak of forty clans whose representatives sat in a royal assembly; seven of those clans are said to have existed already in the Dimapur period.
Dimapur was the first well-documented capital and the kingdom’s high-water mark. It stood on the Dhansiri, enclosed on three sides by a brick wall roughly sixteen feet high and two miles long, with a wide outer ditch and the river itself serving as a southern moat. Ahom writers called it a “brick town.” Inside and around the walls were large tanks—some for drinking, others for irrigation—and a distinctive arched gateway of brick masonry. The most enigmatic remains are rows of carved sandstone monoliths, eight to fifteen feet high, many capped with hemispherical or mushroom-shaped tops. Colonial observers compared them to chess pieces. Their purpose—memorial stones, ceremonial markers, or architectural elements of a vanished palace—remains unsettled. The fifteenth century is sometimes described as a golden age of Dimasa rule. Coins and inscriptions from the early sixteenth century show kings adopting Sanskritic titles even while the court still sat at Dimapur.
Pressure from the expanding Ahom state was constant. After a series of wars in the 1520s and 1530s the Ahoms sacked Dimapur in 1536 and killed the last king who ruled there, Detsung. The court fled south into the hills and established a new capital at Maibang, on the Mahur River in what is now Dima Hasao. The name is often glossed as “plenty of paddy.” From Maibang the Dimasa kings issued coins, fought the Jaintia kingdom, and at times paid tribute to the Koch. Hindu influence at court deepened. Kings took titles such as Herambeswara, “lord of Heramba.” In 1706 the Ahom king Rudra Singha destroyed the Maibang forts. The kingdom survived, but its centre of gravity continued to shift.
In the mid-eighteenth century a marriage alliance with the Koch rulers of Khaspur, near present-day Silchar, brought the Dimasa court into the richer Barak plains. The two kingdoms merged; Khaspur became the last capital. Kings Krishnachandra and Govinda Chandra Narayan formally proclaimed themselves Kshatriya Hindus around 1790. Brahmin priests constructed a more elaborate divine genealogy. The old folk religion, with its tutelary goddess Kecaikhati and a host of local deities, did not disappear; it coexisted with, and in the hills often outweighed, the new court Hinduism.
The final collapse came with the Burmese invasions of the early nineteenth century and the subsequent British advance. After the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826 the East India Company restored Govinda Chandra, the last Dimasa king. He died without a recognised heir in 1830. Citing the doctrine of lapse, the Company annexed the Cachar plains in 1832 and the hills soon after. A Dimasa general, Tularam Senapati, held a hill tract a few years longer. The colonial district of Cachar took its name from the kingdom.
Why did so large a polity fade from general memory? Dimasa kings left few chronicles of their own; most narrative sources are Ahom Buranjis, written by a rival power. Colonial administrators habitually described the peoples of the Northeast as primitive or isolated, an attitude that later Indian scholarship sometimes inherited. The kingdom’s successive retreats—from the Dhansiri valley into the hills and then into Cachar—also made its history look like a story of decline rather than of adaptation.
The Dimasa people themselves did not vanish. They remain the largest community in Dima Hasao and live in parts of Karbi Anglong, Cachar, Hojai, and Dimapur district of Nagaland. They keep a distinctive double-clan marriage system and a language now taught in local schools and used, alongside English, in official work in Dima Hasao. Their principal festival, Bushu Dima, falls in late January after the rice harvest. It is marked by the Baidima dance, the beat of the khram drum and the muri flute, rice beer called judima, and communal feasts. In the plains many Dimasas practise a syncretic Hinduism; in the hills older ancestral and nature rites remain strong.
The physical traces of the kingdom are still visible. The mushroom pillars and brick gateway at Dimapur are protected by the Archaeological Survey of India. Maibang preserves inscriptions; Khaspur retains ruined palace buildings of brick. Together they show that the Dimasa state was not a marginal hill chiefdom. It built planned brick cities, managed irrigation on a scale that supported a substantial population, minted coins, negotiated with neighbouring powers for centuries, and left a people who still speak its language and celebrate its harvest. Recovering that history does not require inventing a golden age. It only requires reading the ruins, the coins, the Ahom chronicles, and the living culture of the Dimasa with equal attention.
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