These great prairies of tea, still referred to as ‘gardens’, produce 340,000-390,000 tons (350-400 million kg) a year, half of India’s total tea production.
The source of this bountiful fertility lies close to a snow-capped mountain in the arid desert of southwest Tibet. Mount Kailash is considered by Hindus, Buddhists and Jainists as one of the most sacred places on earth, the abode of their fiercest gods, the navel of the world from which life-giving rivers flow. The Indus and the Ganges both rise in its shadow, as does the Yarlung Tsangpo, which flows east through the length of Tibet, before entering the great bend of the Himalaya, plunging through a series of wild, barely accessible gorges and emerging in Assam, flowing due west and with a new name, Brahmaputra, ‘Son of Brahma, the Creator’.
It is by now an immense river, with 1000 miles (1600 km) of water behind it, and it endows Assam with a rich alluvial flood plain, 445 miles (712 km) long and an average of 60 miles (96 km) wide.
It sustains not only the tea industry but a rice bowl too, as well as wheat, sugar cane, banana, tobacco, mustard, jute, silk and just about anything you care to put in the ground.
My first sight of the mighty Brahmaputra is from the ferry boat station at Neamati ghat, a few miles from the crowded town of Jorhat.
There is an air of lassitude to the place. A bus is drawn up, waiting to collect disembarking passengers. Dogs chase each other sporadically before curling up on one of several coal heaps. Tarpaulin-covered shacks offer tea and samosas.
The river seems very still and very silent. It’s around 500 yards wide, I would guess, but it’s difficult to tell, as it fills more than one channel. The land is endlessly flat. Out there all the lines are horizontals, subtle pastel shades fading into distant perspectives. The Brahmaputra is like an inland sea, as magnificent and implacable in its own way as the plateau where it was born.
Somewhere downstream is Majuli, the world’s largest river island, and we’re here to try and get ourselves aboard one of the embattled ferry boats that are the only means of reaching it.
The bank on which we’re waiting will probably be submerged after the monsoon rains swell the river, which might account for the lack of any jetty. When the boat arrives, embarking passengers have to slither down the bank as best they can and cross two wooden beams that serve as a gangplank. The 100-foot-long flat-bottomed boats set no store by elegance. There is a basic cabin below, which is covered by a corrugated aluminium roof. Passengers pack in as best they can. From the anxious shouts and gesticulations you might think this was the first time a ferry had ever docked at Neamati but, as ever, remarkable order comes from the chaos, and by the time we cast off, every late-comer is aboard, as well as several bicycles, one or two motorbikes and a white Ambassador car. The women gather below and a mixture of men in Western and local dress sit, stand, squat and generally make themselves comfortable on the corrugated sheets above.
With a steady chug of diesel, we pull out into the wide brown stream, which, judging from the tree trunks, leaves and clumps of jungle scudding by, is not as lazy as it looked. We pick our way carefully among low sandbanks, some of which are cultivated. Ruddy shelducks sunbathe on the beaches. Cormorants perch on the fishing poles. Colours are soft and vaporous: muted greens, strips of golden sand and a huge haze-blue sky above.
My travelling companion is a well-informed young man called Maan Barua, whose father owns a resort hotel in nearby Kaziranga National Park. He’s 20 years old and knows an awful lot more than I ever will. From him I learn the sex of the Brahmaputra, one of only two male rivers in India, and that ruddy shelducks mate for life. He’s also promised to show me a river dolphin, if one passes.
After an hour and a half on the water the engine beat slows and the traditional man with a stick (in this case a bamboo pole) prods the shallow mud banks as we approach the island. As soon as the bank is within leaping distance, half the roof-class passengers fling themselves off and race up the hill to the bus. The bus driver, clearly enjoying his moment of power, sounds the horn again and again, prompting more and more people to death-defying leaps.
Majuli Island covers nearly 250 square miles (650 sq km), which, Maan tells me, is half as big as it was 50 years ago. It’s been continuously settled for 3000 years, but since the arrival of a saint, Shankara Deva, at the start of the 16th century it has become best known for its religious institutions, a form of monastery called satras. These differ from mainstream Hinduism by preaching devotion to only one god, Vishnu, and rejecting the use of icons or images.
The Uttar (meaning ‘North’) Kamalabari satra is in a peaceful rural setting among rice and mustard fields criss-crossed with well-trodden mud paths and dotted with small bonfires. We are required to remove our shoes and socks when we reach its arched gatehouse entrance, with the date of foundation, 1673, inscribed on it. Purity is a very important part of the tradition of the satras. The bhakat, the community of monks, has taken a vow of purity and if they prepare food or touch someone who is impure they must immediately wash.
In the centre of the monastery complex is an east-facing prayer hall called the Kirtanghar, some 200 feet long and surrounded by vegetable gardens and tropical fruit trees. The living accommodation is set round the perimeter of this intimate site in four residential terraces called haatis, which are themselves broken down into two storeys of rooms called bohas, lending the satra the air of an Oxbridge college marooned in the jungle.
The thing that strikes one most of all is the handsomeness of the monks. All look very healthy and lissom, with pale brown skin and hair worn either close-cropped or in long, lustrous black tresses, tied at the back.
Accompanied by an older monk called Dulal, dressed in a white robe and dhoti, we’re shown preparations for a play called Rasa Lila, which involves many of the most beautiful boys transforming themselves into beautiful girls. In this particular celibate sect, all the women’s parts are danced by men.
The whole play lasts five to six hours and they only perform it once a year, so they are doing an excerpt for us in which Krishna, a dashing romantic incarnation of the god Vishnu, appears to a group of milkmaids, who all fall in love with him.
Inside and outside the bohas the young men are rapt in concentration, applying make-up to each other, rubbing white base over leg hair, or in the case of the monk who is to play Krishna, covering himself with a mixture of calamine and indigo, blue being the traditional colour in which Krishna appears.
Dulal, who has spent 35 of his 41 years in the monastery, tells me that some of the young men are sent here by their parents because they can’t afford to keep them at home. Families who have experienced pain or disease might send one of their children to the satra in the hope of improving the family fortunes. A ten-year-old was being offered for sale in a market in Uttar Pradesh when one of the monks heard about it and brought him here.
By now, some of the young monks are pulling on skirts and blouses and another is, with great concentration, strapping on a pair of small artificial breasts, which he then covers with a bra. Krishna is having trouble coping with two wigs and a crown.
The dance is accompanied by a flute, harmonium, finger cymbals and three drummers, each with a kohl, a cylindrical drum only found in Assam, about 20 inches long, made from jackfruit tree stems with leather at either end and carried round the neck and across the chest.