Place · Ahom amphitheatre · India

Rang Ghar, Sivasāgar

/ɹɔŋɡʱɔɹ/

Also known as Rang Ghar, Rangghar, Rangpur

Function

Arts & performance

Patron dynasty

Ahom

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

26.980, 94.630

Worth knowing

Its roof is shaped like an inverted Ahom longboat, and the brickwork is set in a mortar of rice paste, eggs, lime and fish, which is the Ahom building method and is why it is still standing. The pavilion has no seating: the court sat on the upper floor and everyone else stood.

Connections (4)

• Site adjacencyCharaideo Moidams

  Sivasagar's tanks, temples and the Rang Ghar — a two-storey oval pavilion built to watch buffalo fights and games, among the earliest outdoor stadium structures in the subcontinent — are the Ahom capital's public works, and Charaideo forty kilometres away holds the royal burial mounds. The moidams are a Tai burial practice, not an Indian one: the Ahom came from upper Burma in 1228 and kept their own funerary form for six centuries.

• Imperial administration ofSaraighat

  The Ahom state whose capital this was fought the Mughals off repeatedly over seventy years and settled it at Saraighat in 1671, where Lachit Barphukan's river fleet and bank fortifications broke a much larger force. The state's durability rested on the paik system — a labour obligation on every adult male, organised in units, which built the embankments and tanks as readily as it raised the army.

• Site adjacencyTalatal Ghar

  The Talatal Ghar and the Rang Ghar both stand in the Ahom capital at Sivasagar, built in the same eighteenth-century decades — a seven-storeyed palace with three subterranean levels and escape tunnels, and an oval pavilion for watching games and buffalo fights. Both are built in brick with a mortar of rice paste, eggs and lime, which is the Ahom building method and is why they are still standing.

• Same capitalTalatal Ghar

  Rangpur, now Sivasagar, was the Ahom capital from 1699, and both the Rang Ghar pavilion and the seven-storeyed Talatal Ghar belong to it — the public and the private halves of the same court. The Rang Ghar's roof is shaped like an inverted Ahom longboat, which is the clearest surviving architectural trace of a dynasty that arrived from upper Burma in 1228 and never entirely became Indian.

On these journeys

• Ahom

Sources

Wikipedia, “Rang Ghar”. The Ahom buranji chronicles (trans. S.K. Bhuyan); Edward Gait, A History of Assam (1906).

• Wikipedia — Rang Ghar