Labouring against the flood: paik labour and the making of the Ahom hydraulic landscape in Assam, India

The Ahom hydraulic landscape was not a one-time engineering feat against the Brahmaputra; it had to be continuously remade, season after season, through the labour of its inhabitants. Histories of the Ahom kingdom (1228–1826 CE) have documented its embankments and raised roads as instruments of royal engineering, flood control and agrarian expansion, but have paid less attention to those who built and maintained them. This article shifts attention from infrastructure to the labour that made it possible. It argues that cultivators organized through the paik and khel system supplied the compulsory, rotational labour for embankment construction and annual post-harvest repairs. Maintenance thus made hydraulic infrastructure not a completed achievement but a recurring demand on rural labour. Drawing on chronicles, contemporary accounts, colonial engineering records and institutional histories, the article reconstructs the labour regime behind Ahom flood control while distinguishing historical evidence from broader interpretations of its political implications. It proposes that flood protection and compulsory labour extraction were mutually reinforcing dimensions of Ahom state power. Comparing this case with other corvée-based hydraulic regimes, it reconsiders debates over the Ahom mode of production and places coerced labour at the centre of the environmental and political history of precolonial Assam.