UNKNOWN ASSAM

Evening Star, Issue 19804, 1 March 1928, Page 5

UNKNOWN ASSAM

STRANGE PEOPLE AND CUSTOMS [By E. G. Am.en, G.S.L, in ‘The Times.’] There is probably no part of the British Empire which contains so much of interest and of which so little is generally known as Assam. It is situated at'the north-east corner of India, and consists of the valleys of the Brahmaputra and the Surma with the intervening hills. Though the smallest of the Indian major provinces, it lias an area about equal to that of England and Wales. To the north and east its boundaries are not defined, but stretch as far as the frontier officers can make their writs run without recourse to force in the tumbled mass of mountains which lies between the Brahmaputra valley and Tibet and China.

In this part of the world there have been no advocates of a forward policy. The country could never pay the cost of administration, and for so long ns the hillmen leave the plains in peace they are left by Government to their own devices. When raids have to bo punished it is a difficult and expensive business. Coolies arc the only possible form of transport along the rough tracks that creep up the river gorges, and in the dense forest a bow and a poisoned arrow are almost as effective a weapon as a rifle. And so, though these mountains and livers are of the greatest beauty, and though they have been so little explored that they still possess the lure of the unknown, Government wisely prefers to leave them to their wild inhabitants. TREE DWELLERS. The range of mountains between the two valleys is the home of tribes which are of tho greatest interest to the ethnologist. In the west are the Garos, who live in tiny hamlets in junglecovered hills, where elephants and maneating tigers arc so numerous that men have taken to sleeping like birds in trees. They have huts on the ground which they occupy during the day, but at night they mount into -little houses of bamboo‘built in the branches of a tree stout enough to resist the attacks Of a wild elephant. In the centre come the Khasis, who still adhere to tho matriarchal system. A mere male has no independent economic existence. Before his marriage ho earns for his mother; after marriage ho earns for his wife, and if, as sometimes happens, she divorces him she keeps all tho property acquired during their union. Inheritance goes through the female, and, though men rule the little communities into which the tribe is divided, they are _ succeeded by their sisters’ sons. It is as their mother’s and not as their father’s representative that they have reached the headship of the State, and their own sons have no claim to succeed, since they are members of their mother’s family and are in no way affected by the position of their father. In one section of the tribe husbands and wives continue to live each in the old home, even after marriage; there is no common married life, and the husband is simply an instrument for tho transmission of life to the next generation. But, though their family customs are the exact opposite of those which prevail in other parts of the world, the women are not harsh viragos nor the men poor, weakly parasites. On the contrary, both men and women are a cheery, vigorous, independent lot, and the children are almost as attractive ns the children of Japan.

Shillong, the capital of the province, has been built on the rolling downs on which this tribe lives, and the Khasis have grown prosperous on the money which Government spends in the district and on the lime Quarries and orange groves which are found on the southern scarp of their hills. Their country boasts not only the provincial capital", one of the most delightful stations in India, but also Cherra Punji, which has the highest recorded rainfall in the world. The average annual fall is about 460 in: the “record” is over 900 in. HEAD HUNTERS. To the east are the mountains of the Nagas, a. collection of tribes, loved by all who live among them, whose .solo failing in an otherwise charming disposition is a strong desire to collect human heads. Frontier officers accept no such plea as an irresistible impulse, and within the British border the desire is hold in check. Beyond it every village is fortified against its neighbor and men have a hunted look. Ultimately Assam will probably join Burma, in swallowing the Naga hills, but we advance slowly, as administration is costly and the wild men have learnt to respect our frontier and onr subjects. \V r c should never have entered their hills had they been content lo leave us in peace. But when we did withdraw in 1851 there were such perpetual raids and fora vs that wo were forced to go back again and farther in. Even then it cost the lives ol three district officers before the 'Nagas learnt their lesson. On the north bank of the Brahmaputra we were able to maintain a policy of wait and sec. To the south a forward policy was forced upon us South of the Surma Valley live the Lusliais, a tribe which has taken wonderfully to Christianity and education, though it, too, had to bo bought lor a price. Between the Lusliais and the Nagas lies the interesting little State of Manipur, which found itself famous thirtv-live years ago as the result of the beheading of the Chief Commissioner of Assam with three members of his staff.

A combination of circumstances fins converted the province into a second Tower of Babel. Tlio tribes are derived from different racial stocks, and th© difficulties of communication in the hills and the unfriendly habits of the Nagas led to the growth and perpetuation of different languages. There are valleys in the hills whore the villagers on one side cannot undertsand the speech of villagers on th« other. And to the various tribal tongues are added the languages of the coolies, who come to the tea gardens Irom almost every part of India. As a result, 101 different languages are spoken among a population of a little over 8,000,000 persons, a fact that hardly makes for unity. And languages are here found in the making. 'Many of the laborers use what is known as coolie hat. which is compounded partly of debased Assamese and Hindustani and partly of their own tribal dialects, so that it cannot really be classified tinder any recognised family of speech. TEA GROWING.

But Assam is something more than a linguistic or ethnological museum. More than a century ago tea was discovered growing wild in its forests, and, when the Government was satisfied that the tree was the true tea of commerce, it sot up a factory lor the treatment of leaf plucked from tho wild trees, and planted seed obtained from China. In 1840 the estate was sold to the Assam Company, which had been founded the vear before with a capital of half a million. For_ the first ten years of its existence it did badly, and small wonder. It must have been at least a six weeks’ journey from this company’s gardens to Calcutta, and supplies, labor, markets, were all hard to get. But the tide soon turned, and the company has since enjoyed a long period of remarkable prosperity. It was the forerunner of many similar undertaking, and there are now in Assam 420,00(3 acres which yield over 240,000,0001 b of tea. The bungalows of the planters, dotted about the valley, with their tennis courts, their golf links, and their polo grounds, have converted much of Assam into something

more like a British colony than a part of the Indian Empire. And that, indeed, in spirit has never been. The Brahmaputra Valley haa been ruled in historic times by tho Koch Kings, the ancestors of that famous sportsman of the nineties, the Maharajah of Kuch Bihar, or by the Ahoms, a Shan tribe who entered it in the thirteenth century. Mohammedan generals made many attempts upon it, but initial successes never led to a permanent occupation of the country, and it was never part of the Mogul Empire. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Burmese ravaged the valley till the East India Company, tired of such uneasy neighbors, drove them back across the mountains and annexed the country. The kills had never called any man master, and it was only slowly and of necessity that tho British entered them. Even now there are independent villages within a few miles of such signs of civilisation as factories and railway lines. For many years Assam stood serenely outside the political turmoil of India, yet it responded in the most surpirsing way to the Gandhi agitation, as the presentment of Mahatma Gandhi not only as a god, but as a god who had little need for revenue, made an irresistible appeal to simple-minded peasants. Their hopes were not fulfilled, and the excitement soon died away. - Assam has her own problems to be solved, and, with the frontier, the assimilation of her large immigrant population, the development of her resources, and the raising of the economic standards of her people, she hu enough to occupy her without plunging into the stormy sea of Indian politics.