The Sivadol at Sivasagar is the great temple of the Ahom golden age. It is a towering Siva shrine, raised on the southern bank of the vast Borpukhuri tank in the heart of the old capital. Its tower stands about 104 feet high, some thirty-two metres, and is often said to be among the tallest Siva temples in India. The soaring curvilinear form and golden finial dominate the skyline of Sivasagar to this day. The Ahom monarchy built many religious monuments as it embraced the Hinduism of the plains. Of all of them, the Sivadol is the most magnificent. It is the single building in which the wealth, the piety and the architectural confidence of the eighteenth-century court are gathered into one form.
A queen’s temple, and the kingdom’s turn to the plains’ gods
The Sivadol was built in 1734, in the reign of Swargadeo Siva Singha. The work is credited to the patronage of his powerful chief queen, the Bar Raja Ambika. She raised it as the crowning shrine on the bank of the tank that the court had excavated a little before. Its construction marks one of the great hinges in the kingdom’s history. The Ahoms had come down from the hills in the thirteenth century with their own Tai gods and ancestor rites, and for centuries had governed a largely tribal polity. By Siva Singha’s reign the dynasty had become thoroughly a Hindu monarchy. It took initiation from Brahmin preceptors and endowed temples and Brahmin grants on a lavish scale. It made the Sakta and Saiva worship of the plains effectively the religion of the state. The Sivadol is that turn rendered permanent in brick and stone. Here was a king who placed his kingdom under the protection of the goddess and of Shiva. Beside his capital’s great reservoir, he built a temple meant to outlast his dynasty. The great reservoir on whose bank the temple stands was itself the queen's work, excavated by the court a little before the shrine was raised.
The Sivadol embodies a deeper turn: a king placing his whole kingdom under the protection of Shiva and the goddess, a devotion that shaped the closing years of his reign.
The three temples, the tank, and the masons’ craft
The Sivadol does not stand alone. It is the greatest of a group of three temples raised together on the tank bank. The Sivadol, to Shiva, is flanked by the companion Vishnudol, to Vishnu, and the Devidol, to the goddess. So the three principal devotions of the Hinduism the court had embraced were enshrined side by side above the water. The whole ensemble of temples and tank holds the great sheet of the Borpukhuri above the level of the surrounding town. It is one of the defining engineered landscapes of Ahom Assam, a single planned composition of water, masonry and worship in which piety and public works are inseparable. The temple itself rises as a tall, curvilinear dol, the regional temple form. Its tower sweeps up over a square sanctum to a height of about 104 feet. Above a tiered crest some eight feet high, it is crowned with a gold-plated kalashi finial. The whole rises to a height that is often said to make it among the tallest Siva temples in India. It is built of the thin, well-fired Ahom brick used across the capital, dressed in places with stone. It was carried up in the mature Ahom temple style, which married the pan-Indian temple idiom to local form and to the indigenous mortar and methods of the kingdom’s masons. This was the same craft that raised the secular monuments of the Rang Ghar and the palaces nearby. That a brick tower of such height has stood for nearly three centuries on a floodplain in an earthquake country is itself a measure of the builders’ skill.
The temple is richly worked. The walls of the dol and of its companion shrines carry carved panels and friezes, deities, floral and geometric ornament and figures drawn from the epics. The doorway of the sanctum is framed in dressed stone, and the summit is finished with the gleaming finial that catches the light above the tank. Inside, the sanctum holds the great linga of Shiva. In the manner of the regional shrines, it is set below the floor of the chamber rather than above it, so that the worshipper descends to the god. The whole composition was conceived as a single sacred prospect: the three towers ranged along the embankment, the broad flight of steps down to the water, and the open sky of the great tank beyond. It remains one of the most complete temple landscapes in Assam.
A living temple
The palaces and the Rang Ghar survive as conserved ruins. The Sivadol, by contrast, has never gone out of use. It is a living temple, in continuous daily worship. It is also the focus of a great gathering at Sivaratri, the late-winter festival of Shiva, when pilgrims throng the shrine and the tank through the night. The religious patronage that founded it thus continues, in a real and unbroken sense, to this day. The Sakta-Saiva devotion of the Ahom court is carried forward in active observance long after the court itself has gone. So the visitor stands not before a monument to a vanished faith, but inside a place of worship that the kings would still recognise. It remains the spiritual centre of Sivasagar, the building around which the life of the old capital still turns.
Visiting
The Sivadol stands in the heart of Sivasagar town in upper Assam, on the bank of the Borpukhuri tank. It is the natural first stop in any circuit of the Ahom capital. It is easily combined with the Rang Ghar, the Talatal Ghar and the palace of the Kareng Ghar at Garhgaon a short way off. As an active temple, it is open to visitors with the usual observances of a place of worship. The cooler, drier months from November to March are the most comfortable for the whole Sivasagar circuit. Sivaratri in late winter is the most spectacular, and the most crowded, time to see the temple at its living height.