Assam: India's little-known land

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.

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