https://taj.magzter.com/index.html?pageno=1&name=vol54 (+pdf attached)
It has become deceptively easy to hop by air to Dibrugarh, the fast-growing “second capital of Assam” far up the Brahmaputra Valley, where several daily flights loop back and forth from other parts of the country. But what you see when you get out of the airport is an immediate reminder this is a different India altogether: New Delhi is over 2300 kilometers downriver and across the “chicken’s neck” that connects the North-East states to the mainland, but Myanmar is only 300km in the near distance. If you happened to drive another half a day further, you would cross to Yunnan in China. It is an extraordinary location, but that is just one of the remarkable facts of this unaccountably overlooked part of our world, with its amazingly beautiful – and often surreal – landscape of giant century-old trees interspersed with vintage oil wells, scattered amongst vast tea estates and herds of elephants, and cut through by the magnificent red river and its endless islands. Today, it is true Dibrugarh and its environs feel very far away, and you almost never see or hear this part of the country being mentioned in the mainstream media. Nonetheless, this has been an extremely vital and strategic location from the height of the British Raj into the making of modern India, and it still continues to play a vital – albeit almost invisible – role today. It was here at Digboi that oil was first discovered in the subcontinent, and the first wells began operating in 1890. Ten years later, the first refinery in Asia was established at the same spot, in what remains - over 120 years later - the world’s oldest operating oil fields. Over the decades since 1947, an impressive ecosystem of associated public sector heavy industry has grown around the petroleum reserves: Brahmaputra Cracker and Polymer Limited, Assam Petro-Chemicals, fertilizers, methanol, natural gas, and much more. Right alongside, tea production has spread and multiplied manifold, and become another major engine of the economy. During the horrors of World War II, while most of India remained mercifully untouched by warfare on its soil, these borderlands with Burma in the north-eastern corner of the country paid the most fearful price, as Imphal (around 450 km from Dibrugarh in the state of Manipur) and Kohima (just 335km away in Nagaland) experienced some of the worst carnage in human history, when the combined mass of tens of thousands of British and Indian troops faced down an unrelenting assault from equal numbers of Japanese, and finally delivered the largest and most significant defeat their opponent had experienced to that point. Military buffs like to rate this campaign – the turning point of the South-East Asian theatre of WWII – alongside Stalingrad and even Thermopylae, amongst the most crucial battles ever, but no one ever acknowledges how much the locals here have sacrificed for the grandiose delusions of faraway would-be empire-makers, and just how badly this part of the world has been constantly disrupted and drained to benefit others, and never in the interest of those who live here. In fact, more than almost anywhere else, modern Assam is the creation of colonialism, and only began to be joined to (British) India in 1826 after the Anglo-Burmese treaty of Yandabo, at the end of the longest, most costly and painful war in the history of the Raj. In rapid steps and at every opportunity, the British kept on seizing and annexing more and more of the Brahmaputra valley and the surrounding hill states into their Bengal Presidency administered from Calcutta, with increasingly purposeful intent after they learned tea was being produced by the Jingpo (one of the sub-groups of the Kachin peoples), and the first commercial tea estate was established at Chabua – very close to Dibrugarh – and quickly spread throughout the region. This cash crop earned – and continues to earn – reliably big bucks in the west, and from the beginning it became one of the highest imperial priorities (as the British had been bankrupting themselves buying tea from China) and because of that the entirety of Assam was remade in favour of its production and export. In her wonderful 2011 book Empire’s Garden: Assam and The Making of India, the Toronto-based Assamese historian Jayeeta Sharma vividly describes how “Nineteenth-century Assam’s countryside was dotted with immense forested tracts and a large number of water bodies, interspersed with hamlets and small urban clusters. In place of nucleated villages populated by specialized cultivating and artisanal groups, the river-valley plains alternated small riverside hamlets with wooded and cultivated tracts. The largest urban settlements, Guwahati, Jorhat, Sibsagar, and Shillong, each possessed a few thousand inhabitants and blended into surrounding rural hamlets. Decades of political strife when the Ahom kingdom of Assam faced multiple internal and external challenges left a virtual absence of wheel-ready roads and thinned out the population. Hill tracts that bordered the river plains had even sparser populations and dense forested terrain. Peasants moved between shifting and settled agricultural modes, punctuated with extensive use of arable, forest, and water commons.” But then, an end to Eden, as “the discovery of Assam tea held the prospect of refinement for what seemed a wild, jungle-laden frontier, and promised to enhance the economic prosperity of the British Empire. Assam acquired strategic and economic import just as Britain sought to turn its Indian possessions to best account. Tea cultivation rapidly expanded into a million-pound industry bringing large colonial revenues. The name Assam became synonymous with tea, an everyday staple for households worldwide. A range of interlocutors, from British bio-prospectors to American missionaries to Assamese gentry, extolled the Edenic transformation under way, of a jungle into a garden. They conjured up a future ordered landscape of export-producing tea plantations, a stark contrast to the partially cultivated and imperfectly commercialized state of Nature that they saw in the present.” And then they set about doing just that – razing the ancient forests, importing millions of virtually enslaved “indentured” labourers from other parts of India, and sending the profits straight back home in a pattern that persists into the 21st century. It is those tea estates – vast plantations growing right to the waters of the fast-flowing Brahmaputra river – that surround you in every direction from Dibrugarh to Tinsukia to Digboi, where the tiny and well-preserved little oil town abuts the stunning Dehing Patkai National Park, the largest stretch of tropical lowland rainforests in India that is sometimes called “the Amazon of the East” with densely forested riverine landscapes that are home to an exceptionally wide range of biodiversity. A couple of years ago, Rajib Rudra Tariang, the head of the Zoology department at Digboi College, told Mongabay “this forest boasts of perhaps the most diverse population of primates and wild cats in the country. Among primates, species like slow loris, Assamese macaque, stump tailed macaque, pig tailed macaque, rhesus macaque, capped langur and hoolock gibbons are found here. Also, animals like elephants, binturong, flying squirrel, the Gangetic river dolphin, yellow-throated marten, sambhar, barking deer, wild pig, Malayan giant squirrels, dholes, are all found in this forest.” I was lucky to visit Digboi College, which literally spills into the Dehing Patka forests, in the excellent company of three of its recent graduates: Niranjan Nayak, Ruhiteswar Moran and Jitendra Deka, also known as Art For Nature, an idealistic and talented young group of artists who say they “harness the evocative power of art to spread nature awareness and equip people with the skills to get involved with nature. Starting as a passionate group of self-taught artists, we transformed public spaces with vibrant murals. We believe these expressions through art may not only be a visual delight but a catalyst for social change.” This gregarious and thoughtful trio showed me some of their first marvellous artworks that had been painted on the walls of their alma mater, and also took me to the unexpectedly charming little Centenary Oil Museum, with its fascinating records of the world’s oldest operational oil well, and loads of well-preserved Victorian-era equipment that was custom-made for what was then a new industry. Oil began small in Assam, but its impact is outsized, and it is both surreal and sad to note how Dehing Patkai’s genuinely astounding biodiversity is segmented and scattered apart by an archipelago ofd rigs and pipelines. Here, I had one of the greatest sightings of my birding life over five decades - the ultra-rare white-winged wood duck – but it came while standing next to a steadily hissing and bubbling oil rig, in a clearing that had been cut into the jungle for the ease of industrial extraction. Notwithstanding these utterly incongruous condition,s, the four-layered rainforests all around are an absolute highlight reel: almost 400 species of birds, 100 species of orchids, 47 species of mammals and 50 species of snakes, more than 350 different kinds of butterflies, and on and on. In every direction, rising high above, are the greatest marvel of all, breath-taking Hollongs (dipterocarpus retusus), the state trees of Assam that soar to 100 feet above to spread their massive branches and create another world that is almost entirely invisible from the ground. It is there, high up in the canopies, that another of India’s greatest and most endangered wildlife treasures continues to survive: the Hoolock Gibbon, the sole ape species of the country (and one of only 20 ape species in the world). I had previously had the opportunity to observe them way up above me at Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary – an intact stretch of hollong trees from the now largely decimated and threadbare forests that once extended from Jorhat through Dehing Patkai – where around 125 individuals live out their entire lives at the top of the last old trees. But now, with the Art For Nature crew, I had a much more unsettling experience of seeing these brilliant black-and-white apes up close at Barekuri village, where the tree cover has been recently slashed anew by desperate landholders, in favour of tea and betel-nut plantations, and these usually highly reticent animals have been reduced to a kind of begging, compelled to come to the ground to accept food and fruit from the villagers and an increasing stream of visitors. What hope for wildlife, whether in Assam or elsewhere, in the unyielding advance of “development” in 2025? Those questions are very real and omnipresent in this marvellous sweep of the Brahmaputra valley towards Arunachal Pradesh, where the mighty red river tumbles down with great speed from Tibet. And in the notably slowed-down and serene atmosphere near and inside the unique Dibru-Saikhowa National Park, less than two hours from Dibrugarh, there are some positive answers that offer real solace. This one-of-a-kind island sanctuary and biosphere reserve extends across enormous swathes of grasslands – where one of the very few feral horse populations in the world has flourished since their ancestors escaped the armies in WWII – and encompassed the largest salix swamp forests in the region. There is oil here too, but it’s probably too difficult and expensive to extract, so the gorgeous riparian landscapes have not been disturbed very much, and they’re home to tigers and elephants and more of those super-endangered white-winged wood ducks, along with gigantic banyan trees that embrace acres. A veritable paradise, it is hard to get to, and very difficult to slog across – you have to take along an armed guard – but that is exactly how it should be, and long may it remain the same.
