Regions
Assam
Also Known As Assamese
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Assam is a state of northeastern India, occupying the Brahmaputra river valley between the eastern Himalayan foothills and the Meghalaya plateau. It is one of the most religiously layered regions of South Asia: the Shakta pilgrimage site of Kamakhya near Guwahati, built around a stone held to be a fallen part of Sati's body, ranks among the most important tantric centers in the subcontinent, and the Vaishnava reform of the fifteenth century saint Sankardeva, the Ekasarana Dharma, spread through a network of satra monasteries that still anchor Assamese religious life. Islam arrived with medieval trade and conquest and remains the faith of a large minority. Alongside these stand the indigenous religions of Assam's many hill and plains peoples, among them Bathouism, the worship of Bathou Borai at a living sijou plant altar practiced by the Bodo, whose homeland lies in Assam's western districts.
Facts
Geography
LatitudeApproximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim. LongitudeApproximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim. Modern AreaAssam, a state of northeastern India in the Brahmaputra river valley. 2 Traditions
Principal Religious TraditionsShaktism and tantric Hinduism, centered on the Kamakhya temple near Guwahati; the Ekasarana Dharma of Sankardeva, a Vaishnava reform tradition organized around satra monasteries; Islam, established since the medieval period; and Bathouism, the indigenous religion of the Bodo, centered on the sijou plant altar. 2 Sacred and Liturgical LanguagesAssamese, the state's dominant language and the liturgical language of the satra tradition; Sanskrit, for Vedic and tantric ritual; and Bodo, in which Bathouism's oral tradition is carried. 2 Learn More
The Kamakhya Temple and the Rite That Needs No Image
Kamakhya, on Nilachal Hill above Guwahati, is counted among the Shakti Peethas, the network of sites tradition holds mark where a part of the goddess Sati fell as Shiva carried her body across the sky in grief, and Kamakhya is honored as marking the yoni, the embodiment of the goddess's generative power. The sanctum holds no image at all, only a natural rock fissure kept moist by an underground spring and worshipped directly as the goddess herself, a form of worship distinct from the anthropomorphic icons that dominate most Hindu temple ritual elsewhere in India.
The temple standing today was rebuilt in 1565 under the Koch king Naranarayana, replacing an earlier structure destroyed in Hussein Shah's 1498 invasion of the Kamata kingdom, and the reconstruction fixed Kamakhya's present architecture, a beehive shaped shikhara distinct to the Assamese temple style. Each June the temple closes for three days for the Ambubachi Mela, observing the goddess's menstruation as a season the earth itself is held to become fertile, and reopens to enormous crowds of pilgrims and tantric practitioners drawn by a festival built around a bodily reality most temple traditions treat as ritually impure rather than sacred, marking Kamakhya as one of South Asia's principal centers of tantric practice.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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