[Assam] Assam: India's little-known land - Trevor Fishlock, Telegraph, London

[Ram Sarangapani]

Here is an interesting travelogue of NE India. Of special interest are
descriptions of Majuli, Kaziranga, Digboi, Guwahati, Shillong, Cherrapunji
etc. Highlights are mine. There is also a mention of one Rev. Jones who is
considered the father of the Khasi language.

--Ram



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/india/2798965/Assam-Indias-little-known-land.html

 Assam: India's little-known land Trevor Fishlock explores the monsoonal tea
country of Assam, a region which was until recently off limits because of
ethnic tensions.


By Trevor Fishlock
Last Updated: 4:53PM BST 12 Sep 2008
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 [image: Indian rhino, Assam: India's unknown land] The great Indian
rhinoceros is the emblem and pride of Assam Photo: Getty
[image: Tea pickers, Assam: India's unknown land] Assam grows three fifths
of India's tea in vast plantations that carpet the land Photo: Getty

Hurry Hurry Spoils The Curry, said the jingle on the truck ahead. Dilip, our
ace driver, overtook anyway. And he was so swiftly past the next one I
barely glimpsed the aphorism on its mudflaps: Slow Drive, Long Life.

Beeping through the Assamese dawn, jinking around cattle and goats, we came
at last to the broad Brahmaputra River and ploughed the rough track to the
ferry point. *Here we found a team of ferry hands about to begin their
morning dental care. But, seeing us, they stuck their paste-loaded
toothbrushes into their mouths, like Popeye's pipe, and manhandled planks to
make a ramp on to the wooden ferry. *

With shouts and waves they urged Dilip aboard. He parked athwart the boat
with the front and back of the Jeep overhanging the hull. The ramp team
chocked the wheels with rocks. And as we chugged away from the riverbank
they waved us off with one hand and brushed their teeth with the other.

The steersman swung the tiller. No charts or instruments guided his
serpentine course as he felt his way through the shifting shoals and
shallows. Soon we were a speck absorbed into the immense grey watercolour of
the Brahmaputra. I sat entranced, watching pale sunlight and skinny
fishermen casting nets on the swirling pearly stream. Waterbirds crowded the
sandbank shores: ducks and dibbling herons, storks on sentry-go and fishing
eagles with Alan Sugar glares, ripping their prey.

With the boat to ourselves I was interested to see another ferry heading for
the mainland with a normal load: three cars, cattle penned in the bow,
passengers crammed on benches beneath a corrugated iron roof, and, on the
roof itself, serried motorbikes and more passengers.

We took two and a half hours to reach our destination, the sacred island of
Majuli, a gentle place of rice cultivation, pilgrimage, worship and
monasteries. According to the myth of the goddess Sati, who was cut into
many pieces, this is where her left breast fell to earth, giving life to the
island. *The monasteries date from the 16th century and there were once 65
of them. Maps proclaim Majuli as the world's largest river island, 36 miles
long, but the Brahmaputra's attrition has reduced its size and shrunk the
number of monasteries to 22.*

"Eventually we may need a place on the mainland," Babu Ram Saikia said, "and
that would be the sad end of a tradition." His parents placed him in a
monastery 14 years ago, when he was five, and he is one of the island's
1,200 bachelor monks. More than 1,000 other monks have families.

We lunched in a house that, like many in Majuli, was built on stilts to
survive monsoon floods. And then it was time to get the ferry. Two sounds I
carried with me from Majuli: the deafening clash of temple cymbals and the
tinkle and trill of the monks' mobile phones.

I savoured the long return across the Brahmaputra, one of India's
astonishing rivers. More than 1,800 miles long, it runs through Tibet as the
Tsangpo, makes a hairpin turn to flow as the great artery of life in Assam
and, with its name changed to Jumna, descends through Bangladesh into the
Bay of Bengal.

South of the Himalayas and Bhutan, north of Bangladesh, Assam is a monsoon
land with a strong sense of individuality. After years of being off limits
because of insurgency generated by ethnic tension it is opening its doors to
visitors. It's a part of India not at all well-known, so that travellers
here can enjoy a feeling of pioneering.

I flew from Calcutta to the tea town of Dibrugarh and stayed nearby at
*Mancotta,
a handsome tea estate house dating from the 1840s when the British were
annexing Assam in pursuit of a tea bonanza*. *The first Assamese tea, 12
chests of it, was shipped to London in 1838*. In the early years tea-growing
here had dark chapters of exploitation, but it evolved as an industry that
gave its workers better housing and medical care than most in India. Assam
grows three fifths of India's tea in vast plantations — tea gardens — that
carpet the land.

The estate houses are wonderful places to stay, Assam's equivalent of the
Rajasthan forts and mansions converted into small hotels. Mancotta is a
chang bungalow, meaning that it was built on stilts as a defence against
leopards in the dawn of the tea age. I slept in a spacious room with
hardwood floors and ate my breakfast omelette on the veranda with a view of
dark green tea bushes planted among elegant shading acacias.

With Uday, my guide, I drove out to the oil town of Digboi and, as we did
everywhere, saw hundreds of girls and boys, smart in their uniforms, walking
miles to school, underlining the hunger for education. Digboi, says the
local tale, takes its name from the cry of an early oil prospector: "Dig,
boy, dig!"

It was not far from the Japanese advance in the 1940s. In the neatly kept
war cemetery are the graves of 200 British and Indian troops. During the war
a 930-mile pipeline ran from Digboi to supply oil to China.

The museum tells the story of a century of oil and is also interesting for
its photographs of the Digboi sahibs relaxing at their cricket and amateur
dramatics. Relics of the British Raj include the golf club lawnmower,
gramophones, a lavatory chain "used by the Britishers in their bungalows",
and a large steel syringe for the treatment of piles.

We pulled into the shade of forest trees to eat our picnic lunch and watched
a group of gibbons enjoying theirs, nibbling the tasty red blossom of silk
cotton trees.

Heading down the Brahamputra valley we turned off to see the emblem and
pride of Assam. The forests and grasslands of Kaziranga national park are
home to 1,200 elephants and 1,400 wild buffalo, but the iconic beast is the
great Indian rhinoceros. About 2,400 of them live in Nepal, Bhutan and
Assam, and the bulk of them, 1,800, are in Kaziranga.

Bulk is the right word. The first creature I saw after passing through the
gates was a formidable two-tonne bull. The distinctive single horn — the
African rhino sports two — persuaded early travellers that they had found
the mythical unicorn. Today it is rated an endangered species and the park
is hiring more armed guards to deter poachers who kill for the horn. This
protuberance consists of matted hair, grows to a length of two feet and,
like bits and pieces of tigers, is made into supposedly aphrodisiac potions
for gullible men.

You would be lucky to see a tiger in Kaziranga. About 80 roam the forests
and I saw pictures of a couple of them which had tripped a camera shutter
beam at night and photographed themselves.

I stayed at Wild Grass lodge, where stag heads adorn the faux-baronial
dining room, and spent two happy days on the park's trails, seeing few
tourists and improving my bird spotting. I rose early to ride an elephant
and look for rhino.

Mahouts are used to sitting astride elephants. I am not. Dismounting at last
I found my legs to be like nutcrackers, rusted into the open position.

That afternoon, standing in a white Jeep, holding the handrail in Popemobile
pose, I counted 55 rhinos, three per cent of the park's population. In a
grand finale to the day a rhino crashed through the tall grass and stood,
thrillingly Jurassic, on the track a few yards ahead. A quick myopic stare
before lurching off like a blimpy old buffer.

Back on the road, heading for Gawuhati, Assam's capital, we stopped at a
railway crossing. In business-minded India such a place is a gift of gods.
Local people had planted palms nearby and they do an excellent trade selling
fresh coconuts to car drivers waiting for a train to go through.

We took the road south into Meghalaya, the state carved from Assam in 1972.
Its grand and rainy Khasi hills were reckoned by misty-eyed colonial Scots
to resemble the Highlands. I stayed near Shillong, the capital, at
Ri-Kynjai, a modern hotel of local stone, pine and bamboo, looking out over
a lake to the hills. Its remarkable roof is based on the traditional houses
of the Khasi people and looks like upturned boats — just what's needed in
the monsoon.

Thirty-five miles south of Shillong was a curiosity of a town I had long had
a hankering to see. Cherrapunji is reputedly the wettest place on earth. In
July and August the south-west monsoon hits these 5,000ft hills and drenches
them with rains measurable by the fathom.

The average is 428 inches. Freak rainfall of more than 950 inches, or 80
feet, has been recorded. A nearby village has measured 467 inches, but since
it is only six miles away it really comes under Cherrapunji's umbrella.

Local people refer to rain as slap, for the way it drums on roofs and trees.
And incessant slap was too much for a number of British soldiers posted here
in Victorian times. They shot themselves.

At the end of the road is a mighty cliff with a view into the sprawling
green plain of Bangladesh. Indeed, the landscape has many tremendous views –
of wild red and tawny gorges, of waterfalls plunging hundreds of feet into
the valleys. But I was in Cherrapunji during the dry season and the rocky
hillocks looked as parched as Mars. As everyone said: "You should see us in
the monsoon."

One of the features of this land is the large number of mysterious dark
sandstone monoliths. Thousands of stones, a dozen feet high and more, many
of them centuries old and all of them without inscriptions, stand in the
hills and forests as memorials to Khasi tribal leaders.

Scrambling up a hill overlooking a church in Cherrapunji I found Christian
monuments in a graveyard. Fading inscriptions evoked the struggles of early
missionaries who came from Wales to struggle in this remote land.

*The Rev Thomas Jones, who arrived in 1841, is honoured by the
million-strong Khasi tribe as the father of their language. It had no
written form when he arrived. He learnt it, rendered it into Roman script,
and began writing stories and a Khasi bible, which others completed. His
script lives on — and to this day Khasis sing their national song to the
tune of the Welsh national anthem. *

Poor Thomas Jones. His wife died and her monument is on that Cherrapunji
hill. He married an English girl of 14 or 15 and became involved in
commerce, transgressions for which his frowning Calvinistic Methodist
masters sacked him. He died in Calcutta in 1849.

I noticed, as I travelled, several Khasi men smoking large pipes and I
wondered if this were a legacy of those Welsh missionaries who, though
enemies of drink, encouraged pipe-smoking as an aid to holy meditation.

The varied tribal people of the Indian north-east, of Assam, Meghalaya,
Manipur, Tripura, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram, have an excellent
showcase of their histories, customs and costume at the Don Bosco museum in
Shillong. There's no messing about here: once you are in the one-hour tour
is compulsory. One thing you learn is that Khasis, and other tribes, form
matrilineal societies, with children taking their mother's name and family
wealth held in trust by the youngest daughter; one reason, it's said, why
Khasi women are confident.

Returning to Guwahati to catch the flight to Calcutta I had plenty of time,
while overtaking long lines of trucks, to catch up on mudflap philosophy: No
Bee, No Honey. No Worry, No Money. I thought about this at the airport where
I had plenty of time to add to my prodigious intake of Assam tea, which I
measured like the monsoon rain.

   - *Trevor Fishlock travelled to Assam with Cox & Kings (020 7873 5000, **
   www.coxandkings.co.uk* <http://www.coxandkings.co.uk/>*), which offers a
   13-night private tour, "Journey to Shillong", that takes in Dibrugarh,
   Jorhat, Kaziranga National Park, Guwahati and Shillong: from £2,895 per
   person, sharing, including flights with BA, accommodation, most meals and
   all transfers and excursions.*


   - Guidebook choice Northeast India (Lonely Planet, £13.99).