Dimasa

Dimasa religion is the ancient animist and shamanic faith of the Dimasa, the Kachari people of the Dhansiri valley and the Assam hills. A typical village had neither idols nor temples; the earth, air and sky were thought to be filled with unseen spirits called Madai.

Six ancestral gods held authority over the whole country as area gods, and their unstructured shrines, called Daikho, were widely held to number twelve; the name means house of the god. Kechai-khaiti was the tutelary goddess of the Kacharis, with a shrine at Sadiya.

In 1520 King Khorapha struck at Dimapur the first Hindu-style coin of the Brahmaputra valley, naming the goddess Chandi. In the nineteenth century the Dimasa of the Cachar plains turned to Hinduism while the hill Dimasa kept the old faith.