Devalok
In stone and bronze · 1 telling · Northeast India

The queen's tower at Sivasagar

Who is in it

Places: Sivadol, Sivasagar

The story, beat by beat

  1. The Ahom queen Ambika, wife of Siva Singha, has the Borpukhuri tank dug between 1731 and 1738.
  2. On its bank she raises the Sivadol in 1734, 104 feet high with a golden finial.
  3. Beside it stand a Vishnu temple and a Devi temple.
  4. Together they show the Ahom court's turn to Shaiva and Shakta worship.
  5. A Shivaratri fair is held there each year.

royal patronage shaiva shakta tower

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Encyclopedia

Sivadol (temple record)

Northeast India · Sivasagar, Assam Shakta

The story of Sivasagar's Shiva temple is a queen's. Ambika, the Bar Raja or chief queen of the Ahom king Siva Singha, had a great tank dug in the 1730s and in 1734 built on its bank a temple whose tower rises a hundred and four feet, said to be the tallest of any Shiva temple in India, capped with a gold pot. She set a temple of Vishnu and a temple of the goddess beside it, and the three together mark the moment when the Ahom kings, once followers of their own Tai religion, took up the Shaiva and Shakta worship of the plains. The temple's great day is Shivaratri, when a fair fills the tank's banks. No legend of the linga itself has yet been found.

Sivadol — Wikipedia

Sources: Sivadol — Wikipedia

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