Pratap Singha, whose Tai name was Susenghphaa, reigned over the Ahom kingdom from 1603 to 1641, and after Suhungmung he stands as the second great maker of the Ahom state. Where Suhungmung had given the kingdom its size, Pratap Singha gave it the administrative machine that would run it, almost unchanged, until its fall two centuries later. He came to the throne already an old man, by tradition in his late fifties and after long service as a Gohain, and for the length of his reign and the weight of his years he is remembered as the Burha Raja, the old king, and by the honorific Buddhi Swarganarayan, the wise king, for the political shrewdness that marked his rule.
The great offices of state
Pratap Singha came to power just as the Mughal empire settled its authority in neighbouring Bengal, and much of his reign was given to reorganising the frontier and the government to meet that new and formidable neighbour. His central reform was to raise the great councillors of the realm from three to five, and the two offices he added became the highest executive posts of the later kingdom. The first was the Borbarua, a chief judicial, fiscal and military officer seated at the capital, whose authority ran over the whole country east of Kaliabor that did not fall to the three older Gohains. The second was the Borphukan, a viceroy holding near-sovereign powers over the western marches that faced the Mughals, an office Pratap Singha founded though its seat was fixed at Guwahati only later in the century. Between them these two officers, one governing the east and one the west, framed the whole shape of Ahom government for the rest of its history.
To fill the first of them he raised a commoner, Momai-Tamuli Borbarua, a man who had begun in bonded service and rose to become the architect of the state's foundations. It was Momai-Tamuli who carried out, in the king's name, the great census and the thorough overhaul of the paik and khel system on which the whole kingdom would rest, the enrolment of every able-bodied commoner into the rotating militia service that turned a scattered population into a standing supply of soldiers and labour. That machinery, built under Pratap Singha and detailed in its own chapter, was the true engine of Ahom power, and it is the reason his quiet administrative reign counted for as much in the end as any campaign of conquest.
To secure the new order at home, the king also broke the independent power of the old landed chiefs, the Bhuyans of the long-settled tracts, who by tradition he moved from the north bank of the Brahmaputra to the south where the crown could keep them under its eye. In this too his instinct was the administrator's, to leave no rival centre of authority standing between the throne and the paik on his roll.
The first Mughal war
Pratap Singha's reign opened the long struggle with the Mughal empire that would dominate the whole of the seventeenth century, a struggle set off in part by the Ahom kingdom's sheltering of the fugitive Koch prince Balinarayan. The fighting over the Kamrup frontier went largely the Ahoms' way, from the river battle at Samdhara, where a Mughal commander was killed, through a string of engagements down to the decisive clash at Duimunisila, and it was closed by the treaty of 1639. That settlement fixed the boundary between the two powers along the Barnadi on the north bank and the Asurar Ali causeway near Guwahati on the south, a line that held until the war resumed under his successors, as traced in the chapter on the Ahom-Mughal wars. Fittingly, the treaty was concluded in the king's name by Momai-Tamuli Borbarua, the same officer who had built the administrative order standing behind the army.
An architecture that outlived him
The structure Pratap Singha set in place, the great offices, the militia rolls and the frontier viceroyalty, survived almost unchanged for nearly two centuries, and it is the framework Amalendu Guha analyses as the kingdom's whole political economy. He ruled long and from a position of settled strength, governing from the established capital at Garhgaon, and he had the rare fortune to see his own reforms take firm root within his lifetime.
His works reached beyond the machinery of office. He is credited with the roads, embankments, bridges and tanks that a settled kingdom needed, and with the founding of new towns in tracts that had lain thinly peopled. In matters of faith he is remembered for giving Durga worship its lasting form in upper Assam. By tradition he sent artisans to learn the making of earthen images and had the goddess worshipped in the new manner, a practice that took root and spread. In his own religion he held to the older Ahom rites even as Hindu observance grew around the throne. For the length and weight of a reign of nearly four decades he earned in memory the name Burha Raja, the old king, and the deeper verdict of history is a related one. If Sukaphaa founded the dynasty and Suhungmung made it an empire, Pratap Singha made it a state, and that quieter achievement is why so much of what later kings did was possible at all.