The Mughals took the Ahom capital and imposed a harsh treaty, but lost most of their army to the rains, disease and Ahom raids; Mir Jumla died on the way back.
01Up the river to Garhgaon
Mir Jumla, Aurangzeb’s ablest general and governor of Bengal, set out from Dhaka in late 1661, took Cooch Behar, and entered Assam with a large army and a fleet of war-boats carrying guns manned partly by Portuguese and Dutch gunners. He recovered Guwahati, stormed the Ahom forts at Simlagarh and Samdhara, and beat the Ahom fleet in a river fight near Kaliabor. On 17 March 1662 he entered Garhgaon. Swargadeo Jayadhwaj Singha had withdrawn with his court to the hills of Namrup, and the Mughals found great stores of grain, guns and treasure in the city.
02The rains and the treaty
Then the monsoon came. The rivers rose, the roads went under water, and the Mughal posts were cut off from each other and from the fleet. The Ahoms came down from the hills and attacked them night after night, and fever and hunger did the rest. Shihabuddin Talish, who marched with the army and wrote its history, describes the misery of those months. Mir Jumla himself fell ill. In January 1663 a treaty was made at Ghilajharighat: the Ahoms paid a heavy indemnity in gold, silver and elephants, gave up lands in the west, and sent the king’s daughter to the Mughal court. Mir Jumla died on the march back to Dhaka.
The humiliation of Ghilajharighat drove the Ahom revival under Chakradhwaj Singha and Lachit Borphukan, who took back Guwahati in 1667 and held it at Saraighat in 1671.