Silchar

Silchar is a city and the headquarters of the Cachar district of the state of Assam, India. It is second largest city of Assam after Guwahati in terms of population and GDP. It is also administrative capital of Barak Valley division. It is located 343 kilometres (213 mi; 185 nmi) south east of Guwahati. It was founded by Captain Thomas Fisher in 1832 when he shifted the headquarters of Cachar to Janiganj in Silchar. It earned the moniker "Island of Peace" from Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India. Silchar is the site of the world's first polo club and the first competitive polo match. In 1985, an Air India flight from Kolkata to Silchar became the world's first all-women crew flight. Silchar was a tea town and Cachar club was the meeting point for tea planters.

The city was founded in Janiganj-Sadarghat area of the town near the Barak bank which was used as a river port. It is theorised that the locals started calling the area 'Shiler Chor' meaning the rocky shore, which got shortened to 'Silchar', which was in turn adopted and popularised by the British.

Since Silchar was only founded after the introduction of the British in 1832, the pre-colonial history of Silchar can be approximated through the history of the region and nearby areas.

Cachar district, whose headquarters is in Silchar, was ruled by the Manikya dynasty in the 13th century. The initial capital of the kingdom was in Khalangsha in Cachar, which has been identified as Rajghat village in Sonai, 18 km from Silchar. The Tippera eventually moved eastwards to present day Tripura. By the 16th century, Cachar was a part of the Tripura kingdom.

The Tippera kings continued their rule in Barak Valley till mid-16th century, when commander Chilarai of the Koch dynasty defeated the king of Tripura in 1562 in Longai. Longai became the boundary between the Tripura and Koch kingdoms. Bir Chilarai, also known as Shukladhwaja, was the younger brother of the Koch king Nara Narayan. Gosai Kamal, also known as Kamal Narayan, was another brother of Naranarayan. He was made the governor of Barak Valley and ruled the area from Khaspur, 20 km away from Silchar.

Even after the collapse of the Koch kingdom elsewhere, the Koch continued ruling Cachar from Khaspur. The area was ruled by seven more Koch kings after Gosai Kamal: Udita Singha, Dhir Singha, Mehendra Singha, Ranjit Singha, Nara Singha and Bhim Singha. Bhim Singha, the last Koch Raja of Khaspur, only had a daughter called Kanchani who was married off to Prince Laksmichandra of the Kachari Dimasa kingdom of Maibang in 1745. Maibang is in present-day hill district of Dima Hasao, adjacent to Cachar. Laksmichandra was made the governor of a part of the kingdom which is still named after him - Lakhipur, situated 25 km away from Silchar. Laksmichandra became the Raja after Bhim Singha's death and eventually the two kingdoms were merged and present day Cachar came under Dimasa rule. Under the Dimasa kings, Cachar witnessed attacks from the Mughals, the Jaintias, the Manipuri kings, the Burmese, and the Ahoms.

While the hill areas of the Kachari kingdom i.e. Dima Hasao, had a Dimasa stronghold, the plain areas i.e. present day Cachar had Bengalis constituting the majority. While Bengalis had been inhabiting Cachar before the Koch rule, the Dimasa kings encouraged increased migration of Bengalis from nearby areas as priests, cultivators, and ministers at court. Eventually, the formal conversion of Dimasa kings into Hinduism was carried out under Bengali Brahmins when Raja Krishna Chandra and Raja Govinda Chandra performed the Hiranyagarbha ceremony in 1790.

The kings in turn were great patrons of Bengali literature; Bengali was the court language of the Kachari kings, translation of Sanskrit texts into Bengali was carried out, and the kings themselves composed prose and poetry in Bengali. In fact some of the only surviving written examples of the Bengali tradition in later 18th and early 19th century Cachar are the 27 letters written by Raja Krishna Chandra and Raja Gobinda Chandra to the East India Company.