Tamreswari

Tamreswari, “the copper lady”, names both a goddess and her famous shrine: the copper-roofed temple that stood near Sadiya in the far east of Assam, on the bank of the Paya river. The deity worshipped there was the fierce goddess known locally as Kechai-khati, “eater of raw flesh”, and the temple was for centuries the most renowned religious site of the Sadiya region.

The shrine

The temple owed its name to a roof originally sheeted in copper — a celebrated feature that had already been stripped away by the mid-nineteenth century. A stone inscription of Saka 1364, corresponding to 1442, records the building of the temple's brick-and-stone enclosure wall by Mukta Dharmanarayan, a prince of the Chutia royal house. The goddess was served by Deori priests, the non-Brahmin priestly community of the Chutias, organised into distinct classes with separate ritual duties.

History

After the fall of the Chutia kingdom the Ahom kings maintained the temple, and the chief Deoris attended the Ahom court each year to receive royal sanction for the goddess's sacrifices — a mark of the shrine's standing in the state religion of the valley. The site was abandoned in the troubled last decades of the eighteenth century, during the reign of Gaurinath Singha, and the ruins were later overtaken by the shifting rivers of the region; by the mid-twentieth century floods had submerged what remained. The goddess herself survives in the living tradition of the Deoris.