Assam, India — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Assam known for?

Assam grows much of India's black tea on estates that spread out from Dibrugarh and Jorhat, and its name is stamped on tea tins worldwide. The other draw is Kaziranga National Park, a UNESCO grassland on the Brahmaputra where two-thirds of the planet's greater one-horned rhinos live. Add Guwahati, the largest city and the doorway to the whole of northeast India, and Majuli, the vast river island in mid-Brahmaputra, and the shortlist is set.

Where is Assam?

Assam sits in the far northeast of India, south of the Eastern Himalayas and wrapped around the middle course of the Brahmaputra. The Brahmaputra shapes the whole state. Coming down off the Tibetan plateau, the Brahmaputra spreads into a braided channel that can run miles wide in the wet season, and around it lies the long flood plain that most of the state occupies.

That plain, the Brahmaputra Valley, stretches roughly a thousand kilometres from the eastern hills down toward the border with Bangladesh, rarely more than a hundred kilometres across. It is flat, green, and prone to flooding. A second, smaller valley lies to the south, cut off by hills.

The Barak rises in the ranges beyond the state, crosses the Cachar plains around Silchar, and flows on into Bangladesh. Between the two valleys run forested ridges, and beyond Assam's edges sit the other states of the northeast and the international line with Bangladesh. Assam nearly pinches shut in the middle, where the hill states press in from both sides and leave only a narrow waist of land linking it to the rest of India.

Guwahati stands on the south bank of the Brahmaputra, roughly where the western plain begins. The land is river country through and through.

What is Assam like?

Assamese is the thread that ties the valley together, an Indo-Aryan tongue counted the easternmost of its family and long the lingua franca of the northeast. It carried the court records of the old Ahom kings, and it carries the songs of Bihu. Bihu is the beat of the Assamese year.

The word names three harvest festivals, one at spring sowing in April, one in autumn, one at the January threshing, and the spring Rongali Bihu is the loudest of them, danced to drums and pipes across the whole state. Sattriya, a temple dance born in Majuli's Vaishnavite monasteries, is the more solemn counterpart. Everyday life bends toward the river and the leaf.

Rice and fish feed the plain, tea threads through it, and the monasteries of Majuli keep a devotional tradition that reaches back centuries. Guwahati holds the hilltop Kamakhya temple, one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the east. The mix of peoples is wide.

Tai settlers, hill communities, tea-garden labourers brought under the British, and the older valley population have all left their mark on how Assam eats, prays, and speaks.

What is the history of Assam?

The Ahom kingdom shaped Assam. Founded in 1228 by a Tai prince who crossed the eastern passes, it ruled the Brahmaputra Valley for close to six centuries, fending off repeated Mughal invasions from the west. Its defining moment came in 1671 at Saraighat, on the river by Guwahati, where the general Lachit Borphukan broke a Mughal fleet and kept the valley free.

Ahom rule ended in 1826, when the region passed to the British, who cleared the plains for the tea estates that still define upper Assam. The modern state took its present shape within the Republic of India in 1950.

What is the climate of Assam?

Assam runs on the monsoon. It has a warm, humid subtropical climate, and the rains that sweep up the Brahmaputra Valley from late June into September are among the heaviest in the country. Those months swell the river and flood the plain, so the dry, cooler stretch from November to spring is when most people travel here.

Summers before the rains are hot and sticky. Winter mornings on the valley floor turn misty and mild, cooled by air spilling off the Himalayan foothills to the north, and Kaziranga's grasslands are at their most walkable then.

How do you get to Assam?

Nearly everyone flies into Guwahati. Its airport, named for Gopinath Bordoloi at Borjhar west of the city, is the busiest in the northeast and the main air link into the whole region, connecting the valley with Delhi, Kolkata, and the other metros. Trains reach Assam too, running up the narrow land corridor that ties the northeast to the rest of India, though the journey is long.

Once in the valley, road and rail thread east and west along the Brahmaputra to Jorhat, Dibrugarh, and the Kaziranga grasslands, while ferries cross the river to Majuli.