Abdus Salam reviews The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra, by Samrat Choudhury

Long before the ‘chicken’s neck’ became the sole point of access for India to its Northeast, there was Goalando. But as Samrat Choudhury puts it in perspective, maps and names are just human inventions as civilisations waxed and waned along riversides: “‘This is China,’ we say, ‘and this is India, and downriver from here is Bangladesh.’ The river doesn’t know, and it doesn’t care.” Ode to a neighbourhood The Braided River is the journalist-turned-author and Shillong native’s ode to his immediate neighbourhood. Not that the author doesn’t try capturing the flows in their myriad hues — “uprooted water hyacinth bobbing downriver at pace”, “glistening silver line”, “muscular ripples” — but one can only wax eloquent so much. Warning bells on environment Choudhury isn’t above the odd sweeping generalisation or two, such as announcing that popular culture in Pasighat seemed to revolve around television; and the temptation to exoticise — likening an old man in a flowing red robe carrying a wooden spear to a figure from Chinese kung fu films. The author, however, deploys his trained journalistic eye to give fuller treatment to reportage that has appeared across time and publications, such as on the boat clinic on the Brahmaputra that caters to people on the river islands, the river dolphins upstream from Tezpur, Makum, Assam’s very own Chinatown near Tinsukia town, river island Majuli, the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati, dargahs of Sufi saints Ajan Pir and Ghiyasuddin Auliya in Sivasagar and Hajo, and, of course, the Kaziranga sanctuary.