Invited in by rival Assamese factions, Burmese armies invaded Assam three times between 1817 and 1821 and then occupied the Ahom kingdom until 1825, while separately devastating the Manipur valley from 1819. Assamese chronicles and early British reports describe systematic killing, mutilation, enslavement and the removal of captives to Burma, with the population fleeing into the hills, into Cachar and westwards into British territory; the period is remembered in Assam as the manor din, the time of the Burmese. Manipur's parallel experience, the Seven Years' Devastation, emptied much of the valley and drove a large refugee population into Cachar under Gambhir Singh. The refugee pressure and Burmese activity on the Bengal frontier were a proximate cause of the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26, after which the Treaty of Yandabo transferred Assam, Manipur, Arakan and Tenasserim to British control, ending the Ahom kingdom. No enumeration of the losses exists; the evidence is chronicle testimony and the observations of British officers who found abandoned settlements and jungle-covered fields.
Konbaung Burmese armies occupied the Ahom kingdom of Assam and the Manipur valley, causing mass killing, enslavement and flight
No count exists for the Ahom kingdom or Manipur before 1817. The first census of the region, taken in 1872 after fifty years of British rule and considerable in-migration, counted about 2.1 million in Assam and about 126,000 in Manipur, which cannot be projected back through a period of mass killing, enslavement and flight. Historians of the period record only that it is impossible to estimate how many were killed, deported to Burma or fled to Bengal, and describe a sharp fall in population.
No defensible range. Assamese and Manipuri accounts describe very heavy mortality from killing, famine and disease, and British officials described a depopulated valley, but no counts exist and colonial estimates were made after the fact by an interested party.
Assamese buranji chronicles and early British administrative reports record killings, mutilation, the burning of villages and the marching of captives into servitude in Burma.
India