Assam
One-Horned Mornings on the Brahmaputra
“Every other river in India is a goddess. The Brahmaputra is a god — the son of Brahma himself — and he behaves like one: generous, enormous, and entirely his own counsel.”
Photo: Kunal Dalui / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Crossing into the Other India
The train east from Bengal crosses into Assam through the narrow neck of land the maps call the Siliguri Corridor and everyone else calls the Chicken's Neck, at points barely twenty-odd kilometres of India wide, with four countries crowding the window, and on the far side of it lies a quarter of the country that most of the other three-quarters has never visited. Eight states hang from that corridor like fruit from a stem: the Northeast, home to more distinct peoples, languages and cuisines than the rest of India manages per capita anywhere, and the destination I had been saving, deliberately, for last. Assam is its great riverine heart and its front door. My first sight of the Brahmaputra, from the train bridge at dawn, the water running silver to both horizons, islands the size of towns adrift in mid-stream, recalibrated my entire vocabulary for rivers. I had followed the Ganga from glacier to delta and thought I understood scale. The Brahmaputra, born beyond the Himalaya in Tibet and arriving in Assam already vast, is not a river in a valley; it is a valley's entire argument, ten kilometres wide in flood, remaking its own geography annually. A tea-seller working the compartment supplied the local grammar as we crossed: 'Ganga is Ma. This one is not Ma. This one is Luit, the old one, the red one. You do not worship him so much as keep on his good side.'
You do not worship him so much as keep on his good side.From the chapter
The Goddess on the Hill, the Rhino in the Grass
Guwahati organises itself between the river and a hill, and the hill holds one of the most powerful shrines in the subcontinent. Kamakhya, atop Nilachal, is the foremost of the Shakti pithas, the seats of the Goddess, and its theology is unlike anything else in mainstream Hindu India: there is no idol; the sanctum, reached down worn stone steps into the hill's cool dark, holds a natural cleft in the rock, kept moist by a spring, venerated as the yoni of the Goddess herself. Once a year, during the Ambubachi Mela, the temple closes for three days in the belief that the Goddess is menstruating, and then reopens to vast rejoicing crowds, the occasion treated not with the squeamishness much of society still attaches to the subject but as the land's own fertility, honoured at its source. I queued two hours among pilgrims and red-robed sadhus, was blessed by a priest with water from the spring, and emerged into the daylight above the great river having had a conviction quietly rearranged: the traditions I had crossed all year kept surprising me with what they had decided, centuries ago, not to be embarrassed about.
Two hundred kilometres east, the grasslands took over the syllabus.
The chapter continues in the book…
- AnticipationCrossing into the Other India
- ArrivalThe Goddess on the Hill, the Rhino in the Grass
- ExplorationTea, and the Kingdom the Mughals Couldn't Take
- DiscoveryThe Island of Masks
- The TableSour, Smoked, and Serene
- FarewellKeeping on His Good Side
Assam, from the road
Read Chapter 30 in full
The complete Assam chapter — with when to go, getting around, what things cost, what to eat and how to travel responsibly — is in 28 Shades of India.