Place · Ahom palace · India
Talatal Ghar
/tɔlatɔl ɡʱɔɹ/
The Ahom palace at Rangpur, Sivasagar district, Assam, built by king Rajeshwar Singha in 1769 — a seven-storey complex (three visible, four subterranean) with vaulted brick chambers, hidden passages and escape tunnels that connected to the Dikhow river and the Gaurisagar tank. The subterranean levels (talatal — 'below ground') were used as armouries, treasury vaults and refuges during palace coups. Two of the four underground floors remain accessible; the lowest two are flooded and sealed. The palace's structural brick is Ahom-standard, bonded with duck-egg mortar and rice-and-lime cement. Together with the Rang Ghar amphitheatre and the Kareng Ghar main palace, Talatal Ghar is one of the three key Ahom-period structures surviving. UNESCO tentative list since 2014.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Ahom
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.970, 94.620
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyRang Ghar, Sivasāgar
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 capitalRang Ghar, Sivasāgar
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.
- Same capitalKareng Ghar, Sivasagar
The Ahom royal seat moved from the Kareng Ghar at Garhgaon to the Talatal Ghar at Rangpur at the end of the seventeenth century, and both palaces survive within about fifteen kilometres of each other. The capital moved several times over six centuries — Charaideo, Garhgaon, Rangpur, Jorhat — which is normal for the Ahom state and part of why its monuments are scattered across upper Assam rather than concentrated.
- CampaignGaur (Lakhnauti)
The Ahom kingdom's long frontier war was with the Bengal sultanate and then the Mughal subah based at Gaur and Dhaka, running from the 1530s to 1682 through some seventeen campaigns. The Talatal Ghar's subterranean garrison levels and escape tunnels, and the Rang Ghar's fortified capital around them, are what a state builds when it has spent a century and a half being invaded up one river valley and has learned that it will happen again.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
Open Talatal Ghar in the repository →