Dimapur: Memories of a brick city

It was once the seat of a powerful kingdom whose legacy is often forgotten today

On the banks of the Dhansiri River sprawls a city that’s the cosmopolitan and commercial heart of Nagaland today. The ruins that dot its landscape, among them a set of mysterious mushroom-domed pillars, are testament to an equally distinguished past. Dimapur was once the seat of the Dimasa kingdom, also called Cachar, which was established by the Dimasa Kachari people and ruled parts of the Brahmaputra valley from at least the 13th century — the time of the earliest available written records, although Dimasa rule in Dimapur may go back as far as the 10th century, according to historian Uttam Bathari — to the 19th, when it was annexed to British India.

There are two accounts of the way in which Dimapur got its name. Most scholars are of the opinion that it is derived from the Dimasa Kachari words di (water) and ma (large) — referring to the Dhansiri — and Sanskrit pura (city). Others are of the view that Dimapur is a corruption of ‘Hidimbapur’, meaning the city of Hidimbi, a character in the Mahabharata who married the Pandava prince Bhima and gave birth to Ghatotkacha, believed to be the progenitor of the Kacharis. Meanwhile, other accounts often refer to the ‘brick city’. For instance, in the Ahom chronicles, Dimapur is referred to as the Che-din-chi-pen (town-earth-burn-make) meaning ‘brick town’.

The Kacharis have been described as “the original autochthones of Assam”. S.K. Bhuyan in Kachari Buranji writes that they built political and administrative units, vestiges of which have lingered till this day. Captain Thomas Fisher, the first superintendent of Cachar after the kingdom’s annexation by the British in 1832, said the Kacharis had gradually built an empire over Assam, Sylhet, Mymensing, and the valleys to the east of the Brahmaputra, their original seat being at Kamrup; and that their rule ultimately embraced everything from Kamrup down to the sea.