In 1820 or 1821 Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji sent a contingent of soldiers under Chaitanya Singh to assist the Ahom kingdom of Assam against a Burmese invasion, at the request of the Ahom court.
The Burmese won. Most of the contingent was killed. The survivors, a few dozen, settled in Assam, married locally and stayed.
Their descendants live principally at Barkola and Chaparmukh in Nagaon district. They speak Assamese, wear Assamese dress, eat Assamese food and are Sikh: they keep the kesh, maintain a gurdwara and follow Sikh practice.
The community numbers a few thousand and has been there for two hundred years.
They are recognised in Assam as a distinct community and are almost unknown in Punjab.
A detachment sent from Lahore in 1820 to a war two thousand kilometres away produced a Sikh community that has kept the religion and lost the language, which is the reverse of the diaspora pattern everywhere else.
The community descends from soldiers of a Sikh contingent sent east with a British force in the 1820s who stayed after the campaign.
Their kirtan is sung in Assamese alongside Gurmukhi and their marriages follow Assamese custom around a Sikh ceremony. Delegations from Punjab have visited since the 1990s and the contact has stayed occasional.
They number a few thousand. It is the oldest Sikh settlement outside the north west and is almost never mentioned in accounts of the diaspora.