Ask an Assamese where the valley begins, and the honest answer is a river. Assam is the land the Brahmaputra made. It is the silt the river laid down over ten thousand years, the flood it brings each summer, the soil it feeds, the boundary it draws and redraws at will. Every kingdom the valley ever held was a kingdom on its banks. Every people who came to live here came down its tributaries or across its water. The song the whole state knows by heart is a song sung to it. To tell the story of the Brahmaputra is to tell the story of Assam, because for most of that story the two cannot be pulled apart.
This is not one story but many, braided together the way the river itself is braided. It is a story of geology and of gods, of navies and of ferrymen, of a rhinoceros standing in floodwater and of a boy from Sadiya who grew up to give the river a voice the whole country would hear. It runs from a glacier behind the highest wall of mountains on earth to the drowned villages of a modern monsoon. Follow it down, from the source to the sea, and the valley assembles itself around you as you go.
The river with three names, and a hidden source
The Brahmaputra is one of the great rivers of the world, and for most of its length it does not bear that name. It is born in the far west of Tibet, on the northern slope of the Himalaya, from the meltwater of glaciers near the sacred country of Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. The exact glacier is still argued over, which is a fitting way for so large a thing to begin. There, on the roof of the world, it is the Yarlung Tsangpo. It runs east for well over a thousand kilometres, a high cold river on the Tibetan plateau, gathering the snowmelt of the mountains as it goes.
Then it does something no other major river does. Hemmed in by the peaks of Namcha Barwa and Gyala Peri, it turns hard to the north and east and then swings back on itself in a colossal loop, the Great Bend, and cuts down through the deepest gorge on earth. In the space of that turn it drops from the cold plateau toward the warm plains of India. It enters Arunachal Pradesh as a mountain torrent and takes a new name, the Siang, or in the plains the Dihang. It is still not yet the Brahmaputra.
That name it earns only at the head of the Assam valley, near the old country of Sadiya. There, in a low braided plain, three rivers come together. The Dihang from the north is joined by the Dibang and the Lohit, two great streams out of the eastern hills. Below their meeting the united water is, at last, the Brahmaputra, the son of Brahma. From there it runs the whole length of Assam, west and a little south, for some seven hundred kilometres, before it crosses into Bangladesh, changes its name once more to the Jamuna, and gives itself up to the Ganga and the sea. Along its full course it is one of the longest rivers in the world, and among the greatest of all by the sheer volume of water it carries. Something like a quarter of that water is snow and glacier melt off the mountains. The rest is the rain of the monsoon.
The name it takes in Assam sets it apart from almost every other river in the land. The great rivers of India are mothers, goddesses, women: Ganga, Yamuna, Kaveri, Narmada. The Brahmaputra is a rare male among them, the son of the creator-god. To the Assamese in their own tongue it is the Luit, and often the Burha Luit, the old Luit, the way one speaks of an elder. That single fact, a father-river in a country of mother-rivers, tells you something about how the valley feels its great water. It is not only nurtured by it. It is measured against it, argued with, and at times feared.
How a demon-god fathered a river
The valley has never been content to let its river be merely water. It gave the Brahmaputra a birth-story as strange and as violent as the river is large, and set it down in the old Sanskrit texts of the region, above all in the Kalika Purana that belongs to this country. By that account the river is the child of the sage Shantanu and of Amogha, and its true father is Brahma himself, who took Shantanu’s form. The child born of that union was not a boy but a body of water, so vast it filled a great basin among the eastern mountains. That basin, Brahmakunda, is by tradition identified with the sacred pool at the head of the Lohit, and the river that flowed from it carried the god’s name down into the world. To bathe where the water begins was held to wash away sin, and pilgrims came to the far eastern edge of the plain to do it. So the Brahmaputra entered scripture as a holy thing, a male river of divine descent, before it was ever measured or mapped.
The valley’s other founding legends all cluster on its banks in the same way. The first king of the land, in the tradition, was Naraka, and the story of how a demon-born king came to rule the country of eastern light belongs to the river-plain around the hill of the goddess. Above the river at Guwahati stands that hill, where in the older myth the body of the goddess Sati fell to earth and made the land a seat of her power. The temple of Kamakhya on it is the foremost shrine of the goddess in the east, and it looks down on the Brahmaputra as it narrows through the city. In the middle of the water below sits a small rock island with its own shrine, Umananda. The river here is not scenery behind the sacred places. It is part of the sacred geography itself, the moving thing around which the fixed holy places are arranged.
The rivers that feed the giant
A river this large is really a family of rivers, and to know the Brahmaputra you have to know the streams that pour into it. They come from two very different worlds, and the difference has shaped the whole valley. From the north bank come the snow-fed rivers off the Himalaya and the Arunachal ranges. The Subansiri, the gold-bearing river, is the largest of them, a powerful stream that drops out of the mountains and has long been eyed for the dams its fall could turn. West of it the Jia Bharali, which the hills call the Kameng, comes down past Tezpur in a broad bed of pale stones. Further west again the Manas, named for the serpent-goddess, runs out of Bhutan through the great forest that carries its name, the tiger and rhino country of western Assam. Last, near the Bengal border, the Sankosh marks the old western edge of the valley. These northern rivers are steep, cold and quick. They carry the debris of young mountains and pile it into the vast fans of gravel and sand that spread along the north bank.
From the south bank come the hill rivers, gentler and warmer, draining the older uplands of the Karbi plateau and the Naga and Barail hills. The Dhansiri winds down out of the Karbi and Naga country. The Kopili, the largest of the south-bank tributaries, gathers the water of the central hills. Above them, near the river’s beginning, the Buri Dihing and the Disang and the Dikhow drain the upper coal-and-oil country where the first Ahom kings made their home. The south-bank rivers built the fertile lower terraces where much of the valley’s rice is grown. Between these two sets of feeders the Brahmaputra runs down the middle of the trough they have filled, and the character of each bank, the coarse braided north and the softer south, is written by the rivers that drain into it. A traveller who reads the tributaries can read the valley.
The braided giant and the land it makes
Where a smaller river keeps to one channel, the Brahmaputra in Assam splits into many. It is the classic braided river, a shifting web of channels that divide around sandbars and rejoin and divide again, so wide in places that a person on one bank cannot see the other. In the monsoon it can spread to a breadth of some kilometres. In the dry winter it shrinks back into a maze of pale sand and shallow threads of water, and the sandbars stand exposed.
Those sandbars are not idle. They are the chars, the shifting silt islands that the river throws up and tears down from one year to the next. On them a whole society lives, a people of the water who plant on new land as it appears and move on when the river takes it back. A char that is a village this decade may be open water the next. To live on the chars is to live at the exact edge of the river’s generosity and its violence, and the char-dwellers of the Brahmaputra are among the most flood-exposed people in India.
The greatest of the river’s islands is not a shifting char but a place with a name and a history. Majuli, held between the main channel and a northern branch, is among the largest river islands in the world. It became, from the sixteenth century, the spiritual heart of Assam, the seat of the monasteries of the neo-Vaishnava faith, the sattras, where the songs and dances and manuscripts of the tradition are still kept. It is a holy island in the middle of a holy river.
And it is being eaten. The same river that made Majuli is steadily washing it away, so that a large part of the island that existed a century ago is gone under the water. The story of Majuli today is a race between the culture it carries and the current that undermines it. That is the Brahmaputra in one image: it gives a people its most sacred ground, and then, without malice, begins to take it back.
Step back far enough and the whole valley is the river’s doing. The Assam plain is a long trough between the Himalaya to the north and the old hills to the south, and the Brahmaputra and its tributaries have been filling it with silt for as long as the mountains have been rising. Every flood lays down a fresh sheet of alluvium. The river and its family carry one of the heaviest loads of suspended sediment of any river system on earth, the mud and sand ground off the youngest and fastest-rising mountains in the world. That silt is why Assam is fertile. The annual flood, for all the ruin it brings, is also the thing that renews the fields, the way the Nile once renewed Egypt. The rice that feeds the valley grows in soil the river refreshes every year. The tea that made the valley’s modern fortune grows on the well-drained higher ground above the flood. The wet grazing and the fisheries and the reed-beds all depend on the yearly rise and fall of the water. A valley this green is the gift of a river this violent. The Assamese have never had the luxury of loving the Brahmaputra simply, because the same water that feeds them drowns them, and both facts arrive together every year with the rain.
The river and the wild
Nowhere is the double nature of the river, destroyer and giver at once, clearer than in the wild country along its banks. The floodplain grasslands of the Brahmaputra are among the richest wildlife habitats in Asia, and they exist only because the river floods them.
On the south bank, in the middle valley, lies Kaziranga, the most famous of them. It is a belt of tall wet grassland and shallow water between the river and the Karbi hills, and it holds the largest population of the great one-horned rhinoceros left in the world, along with tigers, wild buffalo, swamp deer and elephants. Kaziranga is a creature of the flood. Each monsoon the Brahmaputra pushes over its banks and drowns much of the park, and the animals must swim or move to the higher ground of the hills to the south. The flood kills some of them every year, and the same flood is what keeps the grassland open and rich enough to feed so many. Take the flood away and Kaziranga would slowly cease to be Kaziranga. The park’s life runs on the river’s pulse.
The river itself is a habitat, not only a border to one. In its channels lives the Gangetic river dolphin, the blind, echo-hunting creature the Assamese call the xihu, which the state has taken as its aquatic emblem. Its numbers have fallen as the water has been fished and dammed and dirtied, and it has become a measure of the health of the river the way the rhino is a measure of the grassland. Above the water the Brahmaputra’s wetlands and sandbars are a highway for birds, the wintering ground of great flocks that come down from Central Asia, and the nesting country of rare storks. The naturalists who work these banks have their own quieter story to tell of the river.
The river and its peoples
The wild country of the river has a human twin, as old and as various. Every people that ever made the valley its home came to it by water, down a tributary out of the surrounding hills or up the main stream from the plains below, and the river laid them along its length the way it laid down its silt. To read who lives in Assam is to read the map of its rivers.
Near the head of the valley, where the eastern streams gather, are the peoples of the upper Brahmaputra: the Chutia and the Deori, the Moran and the Matak, the Sonowal-Kachari, and the Mising, who came down the Siang from the Arunachal hills to become a river people. Across the central and lower valley spread the great Bodo-Kachari family, among the oldest inhabitants of the land, and with them the Dimasa, the Tiwa and the Rabha; the Karbi held the plateau along the south bank; and in the west, on the lower river, were the Koch-Rajbongshi. Later peoples came too, carried up the same water by empire and by trade. Each arrived by the river, and the valley they share was assembled along its banks, community by community.
These were peoples with long pasts of their own, and long before any single power held the whole valley, each had raised its own country on the river. In the far east the Chutia kingdom ruled the upper plains from Sadiya until the Ahoms took it. Along the south the Kachari kingdom of the Dimasa held Dimapur, and when it was pushed off the plains it carried its court into the hills, to Maibang and at last to Khaspur. In the west, out of the fragments of classical Kamarupa, rose the Koch state, whose kings would become great patrons of the valley’s arts. Between them the Moran held the upper country, and in the centre a loose league of chiefs, the Bara-Bhuyans, held the land between the older kingdoms. For centuries the river ran through a plain of many crowns, carrying their trade and their quarrels alike.
For all their different tongues and gods and festivals, these peoples shared the one river, and most of their lives were lived not in its history but on its water: the boat, the net, the ferry and the flood, the daily business of living beside a giant. The Mising build their houses on stilts, the chang ghar, raised against the water, and read the river’s moods as farmers elsewhere read the sky. Their life, and the lives of the fisher communities and the char-dwellers, is set to the rhythm of the rise and the fall. In the dry months the river is a broad quiet road of country boats and ferries, of fishermen with their conical traps, of cattle grazing the exposed sand. In the monsoon it becomes something else.
For the flood is the other face of the giver. Every few years the Brahmaputra rises beyond its banks and takes the valley: fields, roads, villages, the season’s rice, sometimes the people and their animals. Whole char settlements are washed out and their families made refugees on the embankments. The erosion eats the banks and swallows the land of those who farm it. Assam’s floods are among the most destructive in India, and they return, not as a disaster that strikes once, but as a season that comes almost every year. To be Assamese is to have grown up knowing that the water gives the crop and the water takes the home, and that there is no separating the two. The people of the Brahmaputra do not sentimentalise their river; they live with it the way one lives with a powerful and unpredictable elder in the house.
The river and the turning points
On this plain of many peoples and many crowns, a handful of turnings changed the course of everything that followed, and each of them ran on the river. Every capital the valley ever raised stood on or near the Brahmaputra, for the river was the one road that ran the length of the land. Armies moved on it, and trade moved on it, and to hold the river was to hold Assam.
The first turning was the coming of the Ahoms. A Tai people from over the eastern mountains, they crossed into the upper valley in the thirteenth century, made their peace with the Moran and the others already settled there, and over six hundred years gathered the scattered kingdoms of the plain into a single state that ran the length of the river. They set their capitals in the upper valley, within reach of the water and its tributaries, and from them they came to hold the whole country. When the greatest threat in their history arrived, it came up the river, and it was on the river that it was broken.
In the seventeenth century the Mughal empire, master of almost all of India, pushed east up the Brahmaputra to take the valley. The Ahoms met them not only on land but on the water, with a river navy of war-boats, because whoever controlled the channel controlled the campaign. The contest came to its head in the spring of 1671 at Saraighat, where the river narrows between the hills at Guwahati. There the gravely ill Ahom general Lachit Borphukan rose from his sickbed, held his wavering fleet together, and broke the Mughal navy in the narrow water. The valley kept its freedom for another century and more, and it kept it on the river. Saraighat is the most celebrated day in Assamese memory, and it was a naval battle. The Brahmaputra was not the setting of that history. It was the field.
The Night of SaraighatA dying general, a wavering fleet, and the river that kept Assam free of the Mughals.Read the story →The second turning was not a war but a faith, and it came down the same water in the century before Saraighat. Among the Bara-Bhuyan chiefs of the central valley, at Bordowa on the river-plain, was born in the fifteenth century Sankardev, who gave Assam a devotion of its own: the Ek-Sharan Naam-Dharma, the path of single refuge in the Name, which asked neither costly ritual nor priestly caste but only that a person sing the name of God. Its plainness was its power. It reached past the boundaries that had always divided the valley’s people, drawing followers from every community along the river, from Brahmin and Kayastha to Koch and Kachari, and taking even a Garo hillman and a Muslim among its close disciples, gathering them into one congregation that shared a single prayer-hall.
Persecution drove Sankardev west, where the Koch kings Naranarayan and his brother and general Chilarai became the movement’s protectors, and under their patronage the faith flowered into a whole culture: the devotional songs called Borgeet, the dance-drama of the bhaona, the masks and manuscripts, and the great woven Vrindavani Vastra that carried the story of Krishna in silk. It found its lasting home in the middle of the river, on Majuli, where the sattras this story has already met made the great island their seat, and the songs and dances kept in them today descend in an unbroken line from what Sankardev and his foremost disciple Madhavdev set going five centuries ago. The river had carried the Naam the way it carried the war-boats, and long before the valley was ever one nation the faith that came down its banks had gathered its many peoples into something close to one congregation.
A state that drew the valley’s kingdoms into one, and a faith that drew its peoples into one worship: between them they laid the ground for the last of the great turnings, the modern awakening in which the valley would find, for the first time, a single voice.
The river in song
That voice, when it came, was a song. The Brahmaputra is not only the physical spine of Assam. It is the central image of what it means to be Assamese, the thing the valley reaches for when it wants to speak of itself, and it lives most fully in the valley’s songs. The Bihu songs of the spring, sung when the fields are prepared and the year turns, carry the river through them as the constant of the landscape. The love songs and the boatmen’s songs set their small human feeling against the vast indifferent water. When the modern Assamese identity was being made in the twentieth century, and the valley’s writers and singers were building a self-conscious culture, they reached again and again for the Luit as the emblem of the land and the people. The river was the one thing every Assamese, of whatever community or faith or tongue, shared; it ran past all of them.
That reaching filled the valley’s first modern art. Its central figure was Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, the Rupkonwar, poet and playwright and songwriter, who in 1935 shot the first Assamese film ever made and gave it the story of Joymoti, the Ahom princess tortured to death two and a half centuries earlier for refusing to betray her husband, a martyr of the upper valley brought to the screen at last in the valley’s own tongue. Beside him worked Bishnu Prasad Rabha, the Kalaguru, who gathered the songs and dances of the plains peoples into a shared modern art and carried the people’s cause into everything he sang. Between them they taught the valley to picture itself, and the Luit ran through all of it, the fixed emblem of a people finding a modern voice.
And no one understood this more deeply, or gave it more powerful voice, than the singer who grew up on the river’s bank and became its voice. He was born in 1926 at Sadiya, far up the valley near the very place where the three rivers meet to become the Brahmaputra. His name was Bhupen Hazarika, and no single person has done more to carry the river, and the valley on its banks, out into the wider world.
His deep, warm voice grew so bound up with the sense of being Assamese that for millions of people it simply was the sound of the place. But Hazarika was no provincial singer. His years of study in New York carried him into the world of Paul Robeson, the great African American singer whose songs bore the weight of a people demanding their dignity. That meeting marked him for the rest of his life, and out of it came his one indelible answer to the river.
Out of it came the song that is his monument, and it is a song sung to the Brahmaputra. He took Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River,” the song of the Mississippi rolling on indifferent to the suffering of the black men who labour on its banks, and he made it wholly Assamese. The song is Bistirno Parore, “on your broad banks.” In it the singer turns to the Luit itself and reproaches it. On your broad banks, he sings, thousands upon thousands of people cry out in want and pain, and yet you flow on, silently, without a sound, hearing everything and saying nothing. Burha Luit, old river, how can you roll on so calmly in the face of so much sorrow? It is the oldest cry in the valley, the child measuring itself against the vast uncaring parent, and Hazarika gave it a tune that the whole state, and then the whole country, took to heart. He sang it again in Bengali and in Hindi, and it carried his name far beyond Assam. In his music the Brahmaputra is not a landscape. It is a conscience, the witness that flows past all human striving and refuses to be moved, and against whose silence the singer measures the worth of a human life.
That was his deepest use of the river, but not his only one. Across a vast body of song Hazarika returned to the Luit again and again, as the image of endurance, of union, of the land itself. The river that in Bistirno Parore is reproached for its silence is, elsewhere in his work, the great mother-stream that gathers all the valley’s people to itself and carries them as one. That reconciliation has its own anthem. In Mahabahu Brahmaputra he made the Luit the mahamilonar tirtha, the shrine of the great confluence, the water on whose banks Aryan and non-Aryan, Koch and Kachari, Mising and Moran, every stream of people that ever came down a tributary or across the current, met and mingled into one Assamese people. The union that Sankardev had begun to build five centuries before, gathering the valley’s communities into a single congregation, Hazarika gathered again into a single song. He made the Brahmaputra sing, and in doing so he gave the modern valley the voice by which it now knows itself. When he died in 2011, the crowds that came to mourn him were beyond anything the state had seen, and it was fitting that they gathered on the banks of the river he had spent his life singing to. His full life is set out on his own page, Bhupen Hazarika.
The living river
The Brahmaputra of the present is not the unchanging thing the songs can make it seem. It is a river under pressure, and it has had at least one moment in living memory when it changed with terrifying speed.
On the fifteenth of August, 1950, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded on land struck the eastern Himalaya on the Assam and Tibet border, a shock of around magnitude 8.6. It shook the whole upper valley. In the mountains it loosed enormous landslides that fell into the tributaries of the Brahmaputra and dammed them. Some of those natural dams held for days and then burst, sending walls of water down the valleys and drowning villages. On the Subansiri, by the accounts of the time, such a burst killed hundreds. And the earthquake poured so much shattered rock and mud into the river system that, by many later accounts, the bed of the Brahmaputra itself was raised. The channel choked with new debris. In the years after the great quake the floods ran higher and spread wider than before. The river people had always lived with the flood. After 1950 the flood was worse, and the memory of the day the earth moved and the river changed its bed is still carried in the valley.
Since then the pressures have only grown. The population of the valley has risen, and more people farm and live on the flood-prone land than ever before. The embankments built to hold the river back have in places made the floods worse when they fail. Upstream, on the Tibetan reach and on the tributaries, dams are being built and planned, and Assam watches the water that comes to it with a new anxiety, aware that a river which begins in another country can be turned at its source. The erosion eats a little more of Majuli and of the char villages each year. The dolphin grows scarcer. The old questions the singer put to the river, about suffering and indifference and endurance, have not gone away. They have only taken new forms.
And yet the river goes on being the thing the valley is built around. The ferries still cross it. The Bihu songs still name it. The floods still come and the silt still feeds the fields. Children still grow up on its banks learning, without being taught, that the great water is both the giver of everything and the taker of everything, and that this is simply what it is to live in Assam. The Brahmaputra remains what it has always been: not a feature of the land, but the land’s reason for being, the old father-river rolling on, broad and silent, hearing everything, past a valley that cannot imagine itself without him.
Bistirno parore, on your broad banks, the people cry and the people sing, and the Luit flows on.
