In the pouring rain, overlooked by dripping hills as you rattle over the great river’s earliest road bridge at Saraighat, you could almost fool yourself you were nearer home crossing the Clyde by Glasgow, but at this, the Brahmaputra’s deepest but narrowest point, its lazy power is breathtaking. Flying in to Guwahati airport, the gateway to India’s North East states, first sight of the river is from the right hand of the aeroplane, a vast lion’s mane of water eating into the land and flooding further each year as the millennial silt of deforested hills fills the depths of its natural channels. It remains a constant if unseen presence during summer travels in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh when water is everywhere. The insistent rain turns trickles to the rivulets that fuel major tributaries in a race from Tibet and the Himalayas towards the confluent rush to the sea.
Monsoon season is not the popular choice for travel in the North Eastern states of India. Cherrapunji in the state of Meghalaya, the ultimate goal for Alexander Frater in ‘Chasing the Monsoon’, wears the dubious garland of the wettest place on Earth. Weather aside, travel here at any time of year may not be for those India lovers who favour the palace hotels of the North or the comfortable resorts of the South. It is an adventure and one likely, with Lonely Planet returning this year to update and evaluate their scant information on the region, to become a tourist goal, if initially for the more spartan traveller. It is a promised land for the naturalist, the birder and the determined amateur anthropologist desperate to see the residue of traditional tribal existence before it is entirely lost to concrete and plastic, tee shirts and television. It is not an easily achieved destination; the years of insurgent activity in a sensitive border area have led to a strong Indian Army presence and extreme difficulties over travel permits for the various states. These complications have negated the need for a tourist and travel infrastructure beyond the most basic and the hope for the best.
Assam is most developed for travel and tourism with well-know wildlife camps, much patronized in the winter months; elephants; fishing; Indian rhinos, rare birds and famous tea stations. In spite of problems in the far North and extreme antipathy to a reverse river of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, all tarred with the Jihadi brush of those few demanding a North Eastern Muslim state, entry here presents few bureaucratic problems. Meghalaya and little Tripura, almost inside Bangladesh, are equally relatively uncomplicated; Arunachal Pradesh more difficult on paper than in reality. Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur require hard won permits issued by the Home Affairs Ministry in Delhi on the basis of varying restrictions including, theoretically at least, the necessity to travel as part of a married couple in a group of at least four people. Unless you enjoy camping in Lutyens ministry buildings, it is essential to have a good travel agent in the North East fighting your case. Even with those good offices we finally received notification of our permit less than twenty four hours before we were due to present ourselves at the Nagaland border.
We travel on straight if corrugated roads through miles of flooded jute fields; echoes of South East Asia in the stooping figures in shocking green paddy, triangular faces under wide woven hats; ploughing bullocks and endless fish and duck ponds. Ribby goats and cattle saunter down rusting railway lines; overwhelming pylons take giant strides across land and time to bring hydro power from Silliguri to West Bengal; tall brick kiln chimneys are, in contrast, like ancient tombs, smaller cousins of the Qutab Minar.
Assam has a problem with unemployed elephants due to recent logging bans and reductions in plywood production. Many elephants lived semi-wild in the dwindling forests, lured in to work with opium bribes by the families with whom they shared a traditional labouring relationship. Decreased elephant opportunities has put them in conflict with man over scarce resources, forcing the government to take action to catch them for training or re-training by equally reduced numbers of old-style trainers, for patrol duties in National Parks. Jobless elephants may still find a role in tea gardens or, like their displaced human colleagues, engage in illegal logging in the thousands of square miles of jungle too remote for officialdom to penetrate. Unemployed or untrained elephants, like other long-term jobless everywhere, can be seen in the vicinity of national parks standing on the side of the road, eyes half-closed, just watching the traffic.
The importance of a calm and experienced driver on these roads becomes increasingly obvious as we leave the paddy plains and pass laid back state border police into Arunachal Pradesh, a country of drenched jungled hillsides, voracious rivers, bamboo forests and clouded valleys. Roads disappear over cliffs and under landslides and we thank our stars for Sinha with a steady hand on the wheel. To our guide and, we quickly realize, our lifeline:
‘What would happen, Hemanta, if we had a crash?’
‘You have to hope it is your lucky day and an army truck comes along’.
‘Would anyone else help us?’
‘Not unless you were their people.’
Hemanta shares our foreign status in remote villages but after years in the business he has the friends and the influence we need to get through the door of official government guest or circuit houses; in several places the only habitable option. Hemanta’s hospitality choices, where there is a choice at all, are delightfully ruled by his stomach. He is a gourmet with a strong preference for the Italian food he ate on a one time trip to Europe and a craving for parmesan cheese. Parmesan cheese, had we thought of it, would prove increasingly welcome. An impression of plenty in crops and livestock is, once beyond the relatively cosmopolitan sophistication of Assam, disappointingly translated to food on the plate of unmitigated dreariness and lack of seasoning or savour. Traditional tribal food is another matter altogether and one to be approached with caution and a thought to the curiosity that killed the cat.
The Mithun or bos frontalis, are the semi-wild cattle traditionally prized as sacrifice or currency in bride price or fine; the celebratory feast meat of choice in tribal areas and, interchangeable with the cockerel, emblem of Nagaland. In variegated orange and black, with forbidding horns, they are if approached, keen to be sociable; their mistake in areas where nothing edible is left uneaten. In the Hong village at Ziro, said to be the largest tribal village in Asia, the Apa Tani inhabitants, volubly intoxicated on sweet and yeasty rice beer, were preparing for the arrival of the sacrificial mithun for a feast for 300. Anticipation of a magnificent beast was disappointed by the arrival of a skittish adolescent led by two small boys towards a sharp dao blade and an ignoble end in a pot of boiling water enlivened but nothing more than a handful of chillis.
Life is changing rapidly for the Apa Tani as for most tribes but missionary led Christianity has not removed all traces of the old social practices and the rituals of shamanism and animist religion. Clan banners and woven bamboo fetishes, embellished with egg shells, feathers and flowers stand in front of bamboo stilt houses, now generally roofed with corrugated iron. Traditional festivals in honour of the natural cycles of sun and moon, sowing and harvest, are observed by families with open hearths for cooking and a carefully covered television, the most prized possession.
Older women wear distinctive black bamboo noseplugs and facial tattoos, symbols of their married status that disfigure delicate, high-cheekboned faces; the young, tee shirts with traditional home-woven sarongs. Old men weaving baskets wear their hair in a skimpy knot on the forehead, clan chiefs a steel spike of office twisted through the topknot. Young men lounge in jeans, always with daos, the traditional heavy knives, used for everything from chopping wood to peeling fruit and carried in plastic and bamboo tied scabbards at their hip. With free primary education for all, the prosperous look forward to university places and urban careers. There is little gender discrimination and polygamy is seldom now practiced but the endlessly busy women inevitably get the thin end of the wedge in their daily work.
The Apa Tani are intensive agriculturalists, growers of rice, reapers of their pine forests and the bamboo so essential to their lives. Their tradition is to replant and replace leaving mature trees for successive generations and making the Ziro valley a fertile oasis. But as forest reduction from outside encroachment encourages men to look for more lucrative work, women are left with the lion’s share of domestic duties, paddy cultivation and weaving. On a Sunday they are in the neon green fields bending endlessly up and down in the rhythm of rice replanting; walking double under the weight of 25 kilo government rice rations carried in beautiful conical bamboo baskets, secured by forehead straps; chivvying chickens, dogs, pigs and children; everywhere in the wet and muddy streets. The villagers are no longer entirely self- sufficient and women queue for store supplies in cheerful gaggles under their constant umbrellas. Families leaving services at the local Baptist church, stroll back to the village to join the preparations for feasts honouring animist gods. Men loiter, drink, socialize, set fish traps in paddy streams, and wait for the main party to begin.
Beyond Ziro on the road to Daporizo and Along, pine gives way to exuberant deciduous jungle, trees and ferns incestuously intertwined, punctuated by the new shoots of banana palms poking up from the chaos of vegetation like enormous furled umbrellas. Hills are marked by the patched effects of slash and burn or 'jhum' agriculture as we pass through tribal areas; Nishi, Hill Miris and Tagin; shacks of migrant road workers from Bihar and West Bengal; busy, dirty, villages skirted by bamboo granaries. Everyone carries something; backloads of fire wood; vegetables; a baby; and always an umbrella, often with frills. On the road to Saddle, in a land of clouds, white poinsettias, orchids and flowering shrubs strive energetically to reach the light and water pours through bamboo pipes to disperse down precipitous hillsides to the endless rivers. The circuit house in Daporizo is full; every politician in the country is on the road ahead of the vote on the Indo/American nuclear pact. Likewise in Along, where, late in the evening, Holiday Cottages hotel is the unappealing option, complete with flooded passages and flying cockroaches, for tomorrow’s visits to prosperous Gadi Along villages with their own schools and football pitches. We buy electric orange and yellow sarongs from women weaving on loin looms, one praying for a sister for her three sons: ‘Boys are useless'.
In Passighat, a market town and centre of local industry and government, en route for the Brahmaputra ferry, we find nirvana, a new hotel with impossibly clean bathrooms, egg sandwiches from room service and a shop selling Cadburys chocolate and Colgate toothpaste. Back on the Assamese plains we drive at dawn on embanked roads over barrierless bridges towards the river, evidential in advance in the endlessly flooded farmland. Morning life is in full swing, people and animals busy on the fertile land, kingfishers and flocks of black drongos watching from perches on posts and wires. The car ferry is a country boat, in style the small fishing boat found for hire in Cornish villages for lobster potting or mackerel. Cars and passengers board via two carefully spaced planks. The reassuring and friendly mutual curiosity of tourist and village inhabitant in tribal areas is superseded here by our new disposition as mobile photographic curiosities, the newest show and tell, for other passengers and onlookers. The engines rev and, under a Scottish sky once more, we progress some ten miles or more on the grey pelagic sweep of fast flowing water towards an invisible bank.
An unexpected final hundred yards of shallow flood is accomplished on two canoes, three planks and an excess of authoritative local advice, and is an experience amusing only in the retrospective glow of a stupendous lunch in the comfort of the Chowkidinghee Heritage Bungalow in the tea gardens of Dibrugarh. We luxuriate in an expanse of teak floors and heavy furniture, a pile of dry towels in a spotless bathroom and the offer of fast laundry service. The sun shines on tea-pickers working under the feathery shade of acacia trees, their hands a blur as they pluck the bud and two leaves from the tops of acres of bushes. We are shown round the Dibrugarh Planters Club, en fete for the ‘Mid-rains Dance’, to which invitations are issued by a young but portly chairman puffed with the slight dignity attached to his status over a membership of 95. The neighbouring church has broken windows and the graves of British planters to whom Dibrugarh now would be unrecognizable; the old town claimed by the acquisitive river. Silk buying in a weaving co-operative, ‘Big Ones’ icecream and we have our permits for Nagaland at last. Then evening sun over the gardens, tea leaf pakoras and hot peanuts with onion, cold beer, television and a set of travel monopoly where Mayfair costs 200 rupees.
