History of Assam The early history of Assam is obscure, although there are numerous references in the Mahabharata, the Puranas, the Tantras to a great kingdom known as Kamrup that encompassed the Brahmaputra Valley, Bhutan, Cooch Behar, and the Rangpur region in eastern Bengal. Among the early sources of the history of Assam is the writings of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (Hiuen-tsang), who in 640 AD, attended the court of King Bhaskar Barman, an ally of the great Gupta monarch Harsha of Northern India.


Rudra Singha

    
     The Ahom, a Shan tribe from which the name Assam is probably derived, crossed the Patkai Mountains from Burman in 1228 AD and by the sixteenth century had absorbed the Chutiya and Kachari kingdoms of the upper Brahmaputra,subdued the neighboring hill tribes, and integrated the Bhuyans into the administrative apparatus of a feudalistic state. The kingdom of the Ahom reached its height under Rudra Xingha (reign, 1696-1714), the renowned military strategist and patron of the buranji, or Ahom chronicles.During the later half of the sixteenth century, the revered gossain and Assamese cultural hero, Shankar Deva, inspired a popular Vaishnavite movement that sought to reform the esoteric practices of Tantric Hinduism and to limit the prerogatives of the brahmanas attached to the Ahom court.

 
      In 1817, the Burmese took advantage of the dissensions within the Ahom nobility and overran the Brahmaputra Valley. The British drove the Burmese from the Brahmaputra Valley, and under the conditions of the treaty of Yandaboo, between the Burmese and the British, annexed the Ahom kingdom in 1826.
      In 1838, all of northeast India became part of the Bengal Presidency of British India. In 1874, Assam was separated from Begal, and was constituted into a separate province by itself. In 1912, the partition was nullified, and Assam was made a separate provinve once more. Following Indian independence in 1947, the Assamese won control of their state assembly and launched a campaign to reassert the preeminence of Assamese culture in the region. The Indian Government parititioned former Assamese territories into the tribal states of Nagaland,Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur,Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh over the next twenty years.
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