Guwahati

I’ll start with sections on sightseeing and food, and then at the end will go into movies, music, and books of Assam, of which I don’t have enough to warrant a full post.

I was in Guwahati for about four days in December 2024, and I went out exploring for two of them and relaxed and worked the other two (in some quite nice cafes!). I wouldn’t rank it among my favorite places or anything, but I had a great time for a few days. Definitely worth a stopover on a Assam or Northeast India tour, or even a short standalone trip if you can get there at a reasonable cost/travel distance (though it’s relatively expensive to get to from Mumbai).

Since I didn’t do a ton of research and won’t be sharing a ton of historical info, I’ll put some recommended reading for Guwahati up front, for those interested. 

The article in Livemint Guwahati: A city shaped by time, and the Brahmaputra by Ibu Sanjeeb Garg gives a quick rundown of Guwahati’s history. Quite a good read, better than any other I found on the subject. I was curious about the writer, turns out he is an IRS officer.

The Unexplored Guwahati by Somen Sengupta is a good short writeup on things to do and see in the city, with historical background. Far better than the surprisingly thin sections in my Blue Guide and 2011 copy of Lonely Planet.

The best thing I read on Guwahati is about Kamakhya, linked below with more info. Also, most histories of Guwahati will mention that it’s the ancient/mythological city of Pragjyotisha, the home of the demon Narakasura. You can read the Amar Chitra Katha version of the story of Krishna and Narakasura on Internet Archives. 

As for what I have to say:

I had flown into Guwahati at the beginning of my northeast India trip in September, but decided against staying there as it was quite hot then, and I kept reading about bad flooding. We had a vague plan of returning when it cooled off and possibly even staying for a month or so there and using it as a base for long weekend trips to other parts of Assam (which I think would be a good idea, given the railway connectivity, though my “get out of the city” weekend plans usually fail because I’m lazy), but the timing didn’t work out. We ended up just making a quick stopover in December at the end of our trip before flying back to Mumbai. 

I wouldn’t have minded more time to get into it, but a few days was perfect for exploring the city. Guwahati has one major site (a temple) and a great museum, and beyond that it just has some cute old houses, a fun old market area, a charming village area to explore across the river, good food, and that’s pretty much it. It has a bit of a rustic, earthy, artistic vibe, I’d say, alongside the old fashioned colonial charm. I wouldn’t say it has a ton of character, but there’s a bit, with a mix of quaint old world small town and modern big city, in addition to the ancient and the spiritual.

It also has some natural beauty, in theory, but it was very hazy when I was there. Foggy could have been romantic, but this was more smoggy. I didn’t get a single nice view of anything. Green hills in the background were faded and dull. The Brahmaputra river ended up being a let down. Guwahati was probably quite pretty and charming once, a quaint town framed by a massive river and wild hills, but today it’s very dusty and polluted, and it’s full of unappealing modern construction and bad roads and traffic. 

I expected all of this but it was still a bummer. When I flew to Guwahati in September and drove up to Shillong, I was excited by the landscape I saw from the flight and the car, the red earth punctuated with plenty of greenery, and I had a gorgeous Dimapur-to-Guwahati train ride three months later, but nothing in and around the city was very appealing when I was there. The December weather was great (and flood free), but I imagine the city is much more attractive post monsoon. I feel I missed a part of the city's soul in the haze. I could walk around without sweating, though, and I don't recall mosquitos being an issue, so it's a tradeoff.

(My morning flight out of Guwahati was also delayed a few hours due to fog. Our 4am taxi ride to the airport was creepy because of the fog, and terrifying because of the driver. There were parts of the ride when we could hardly see ten feet in front of us, and he had to slam the breaks a few times because of a parked truck or barrier in the road that appeared out of nowhere. You’d think this was a good time to drive slowly, but he practiced the amount of caution and prudence that I’d have playing Grand Theft Auto.)

I liked Guwahati though. I don’t feel a burning desire to go back, but if I am to fly to Guwahati again to explore elsewhere in the region (which I must do, since I didn’t visit anywhere else in Assam) I could definitely spend more time here. It’s less “exotic” and more of a typical big Indian city than anywhere else in the northeast, but after spending three months in smaller cities in the northeast (Shillong, Imphal, Dimapur, Kohima, plus some rural areas) I was happy to return to this, even if it came as a shock at times. People are more aggressive/annoying, there’s more honking, etc. But also, Uber worked. I was so excited to use Uber after three months. And though I didn’t have time to go, there were fancy multiplexes! Rejoice!

In general I was also excited to be somewhere with more civilizational grandeur, the great architecture and artwork and classical music and rich history and everything, as opposed to the tribal cultures of the northeast with their more low key charms, where the main attractions are natural beauty and pretty villages. That was great too, but I was happy to get back to something more… epic, or mythical. The museums in the rest of the northeast consisted of a bunch of spears and wicker baskets. The museum in Guwahati is full of incredible sculptures of gods. It was invigorating. When I went to Guwahati’s biggest attraction, Kamakhya temple, having not visited anywhere so grand in around five months, I was like “Fuck yeah, India!” (My wife was not so pleased. “Why do we have to take our shoes off? It’s so dirty! Why is everyone pushing us? There’s goat poop everywhere!”)

That’s a good transition to get to Kamakhya Temple, the top place on most visitors’ itineraries, a short trip from the city (it took me around 40 minutes by car from where I was staying near Uzan Bazaar). Significant as the site where Sati’s yoni fell, host of the annual menstruation festival, and one of the four most important Shakti temples. It’s awesome! Cool architecture, some great sculpture work, and 10/10 atmosphere. Mostly pilgrims, I felt like I was the only tourist. If you want to go inside the inner sanctum (underground, it sounds amazing but I can’t find any pictures) you have to wait many many many hours, or you can get a VIP pass for 501 rupees in which case you only have to wait many many hours. No VVIP pass as far as I could tell. I’ll have to go back one day. Maybe someone will come with me, my wife doesn’t want to go.

I was recommended a tour of the temple and the surrounding area by a company called Kamakhya Walks. I ended up not doing it, as it cost 1500 inr per person and I’d spent way too much in the prior month, and also because I like to wander around places like this on my own the first time I go. I would definitely do the tour in the future, though. It sounded great from the reviews I read, taking you to some lesser visited places in the area and teaching you about the history and culture of the temple. That would have been helpful as I admittedly was pretty lost and confused and overwhelmed by everything (I like these feelings, though). I found no good online information about visiting the temple.

Whether or not you take the tour, I highly recommend reading about the temple, which for me greatly added to the experience of visiting it. A short, simple article in Conde Nast covers the basics of the history and mythology very well, while the historian Anirudh Kanisetti has an excellent longer article on the temple and how local traditions were able to become incorporated into Hinduism through the “legitimacy” offered up by claiming descent from the demon Naraka. I don’t want to regurgitate info you’ll find everywhere, I’ll just say it’s a fascinating place that I would love to revisit and learn more about. 

(There are so many wonderful stories about Kamakhya and it’s such an interesting temple to visit, someone really should make a movie about it. It’d be a great… period piece…) 

Visiting the temple is an intense experience. All busy Indian temples are for the usual reasons, but this has the more unusual reason of animal sacrifices being performed here. I find it very sad, but even if you don’t care about the fate of the animals (mostly goats and ducks, as far as I could see), they added an even extra layer of noise, odors, and filth to contend with (there were tons of monkeys too, though they were free and not on the chopping block). For me, it added to the experience, in a disturbing way. Visiting the temple felt like I was traveling back in time by many centuries. I’m not remotely religious or spiritual, but it was still a wholly transporting experience.

Though as I mentioned you can’t go into the inner sanctum without waiting in line, you can walk into part of the main temple, which is very cool. Besides that, there are many smaller temples to visit. I went to a handful of random ones. I wouldn’t say any were so special, but I enjoyed wandering around, and some temples had an eerie atmosphere which I liked. One was up on a hill which would have offered great views of the city and the river on a clear day, but there were no clear days when I was in Guwahati.

I also got prasad there. It was simple but good. Khichdi, a potato and bean sabzi, papad, and kheer. Always fun.

Another great place to visit was the Assam State Museum, which I loved. I’m usually a “see the city, skip the museum” person when there are time constraints, but honestly the museum is better than the city, for the most part. There’s an excellent sculpture gallery, a great section on village life with some amazing masks and other cultural artifacts, an awesome woodwork section, a long wooden ceremonial boat (in a separate building), etc. It gave me a great sense of the rich culture of Assam, which I look forward to exploring further one day. I also liked seeing some Japanese weapons, gear, and a missile from the battle of Kohima (more impressive than what I saw at Kohima’s WW2 museum). We probably spent around 90 minutes here.

By the way, a short walk from the museum is the Ambari archeological park. I saw it on the map while walking to the museum and stopped in, not knowing what it was. The ruins they’ve dug up aren’t really noteworthy, nor is the small museum section of sculptures they found there (I really enjoyed it, but it paled in comparison to what I saw in the main museum 10 minutes later), but I soon discovered that a large chunk of the sculpture work at the state museum actually came from here! The signboard here states that this may have been an artist’s guild. 

For me this added to the visit to the museum, and to my stay in general. Guwahati has a really rich ancient history, but it often felt too distant for me to appreciate. There are plenty of curious fun facts, like “This tank was built by King Whomsoever and was the site of the scene in the Mahabharata where…”, but then it’s just a not especially nice lake surrounded by dusty roads, or the historically significant temple is too modern and plain looking to be interesting, and I didn’t really care. But seeing these sculptures and the place where they were likely made and later discovered added meaning to it and gave me a more tangible connection to the past. In the state museum, I noticed some other sculptures were found at nearby places I knew as well (the Cotton University came up a few times). 

I also had a really nice visit at the Brahmaputra River Heritage Center, right on the river. It’s a small museum (won’t take more than half an hour) in the old Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow, and it’s quite well put together, evoking the colonial era charms with some nice artifacts and good information. I especially liked the masks. It's not as impressive of a collection as the state museum, but it's compact, well presented, and in a nice setting. The complex has a Starbucks and is a nice place to walk and relax. If we had more time we totally would have come to work at the tables overlooking the river. Next to the complex is what looked like a beautifully done riverside park. I would have come back for an evening stroll, but it was so gloomy outside each day that I didn’t feel a need.

Beyond the museums, the old parts of the city have their charms, though there’s nothing so extraordinary to see. Uzan Bazaar is what seemed to me to be the nicest part of town, fairly laid back with many cute old bungalows and nice cafes and restaurants. Worth a stroll. My favorite building was “The House of Baruas,” not on Google Maps as far as I can tell but you’ll find it if you care, I’m pretty sure it’s on Lamb Road, or somewhere around there. The house belongs to a prominent artistic family who has made important contributions particularly to Assamese film and music. I read this article about the house and family, not a riveting read as an outsider who has never heard these names before, but I liked getting the context. Here’s a trailer for a documentary on the subject.

There are several nice heritage buildings around here, but none that I felt a need to take a closer look at. Cotton College, High Court, various nice houses, etc, it’s all a cute backdrop, but nothing necessarily worth seeking out (maybe I’d feel more of a connection with them if I were engaged with the history). As was the case in Shillong, the city was devastated by the 1897 earthquake and a new quake-proof Assam style of architecture was developed as a result. 

I also walked through Fancy Bazaar, the old busy market area. Nothing that unusual for a British era Indian market neighborhood, but it was fun. Some cute old buildings (Maharana Athletic Club is a standout), but the fun is more for the shops and atmosphere. The area with clothes was packed in the evening. My favorite area had many bookshops, which included some local publishers (just type books into google maps and you’ll find it). 

I also went to the Shaikh Brothers bakery, where Nehru used to swear by their cheese twists, and where I enjoyed the salty and spiced cookies. I usually skip old bakeries but I was in the neighborhood and was compelled by an article about its history:

‘“The raw materials were then imported from Belgium, Australia and Peshawar for the products by steamers. John Henry Kerr, who was the British governor of Assam in 1922-27, issued a notification appointing Shaikh Brothers Bakery as official supplier of bread, butter and other products after they found the local bread of Shillong too sticky and hard. Ours were soft,” he added. He said the products were sent by horse cart to the Governor House in Shillong every day. Governor House sent the cart to the bakery every night.’

I think that’s all I got for you in the historic part of Guwahati. 

I also had a great time going across the river, though there’s not a ton to do. Village walk, peaceful atmosphere, temple, rock inscriptions, and that’s it. There’s more to do, I guess, there’s a whole signboard of things to do and taxis willing to drive you, but I just wanted to walk around and I didn’t find any good resources about the things to do so I was just winging it, just following random signs and things that sounded cool on google maps. For me it was a great way to spend a few hours, and getting there and back was part of the fun. I think this is an activity I’d rank higher if you aren’t exploring the rest of Assam, but if you are then it’s probably less exciting in comparison to other parts of rural Assam that you’ll see.

You can go by boat or by cable car (more expensive). I went by cable car and came back by boat, for the sole reason that I knew where the cable car was but didn’t know where to get the boat and figured that it’d be easy enough to get one going back (it was). I’m glad I got to use both modes of transport, they were fun. 

Once I got to the island I walked through a village, which felt a world away from the city, and walked to the Doul Govinda Temple. The temple didn’t seem all that special, but anyway I didn’t go in because there were what seemed like hundreds of monkeys! I mostly stood by the gate and kept trying to tiptoe in before getting scared and turning back. Some people went in with sticks to ward them off. It was an awesome and terrifying experience. 

After the temple I went to the Kanai Barashi Rock Inscription, which ended up being very cool, for people who like these small, random things as I do. There were three rock inscriptions (explained on faded, hard to read displays at the entrance, and I only found two out of the three), relating to historical events I had some vague understanding of, one about the Ahoms defeating the Mughals, one basically a repeat of that, and the other on something more ancient that I forgot. Even if that sounds boring, you might like this. It’s quiet, the rocks and small temples in the complex are kind of cool, and though I could complain about the lack of proper labeling, the hunt for the inscriptions makes you feel like an amateur archeologist. Fun. My favorite part was finding some hidden rock carved artwork.

The other thing people do is go to the Umananda Mandir which is on the island that the cable car passes over. Probably fun, though it didn’t seem that interesting, and I didn’t know where to get the boat. 

I looked into doing an evening Brahmaputra boat ride but the reviews said they had overly loud music and annoying people, which sounds right based on my experiences of such things in India. Anyway, my much cheaper ferry ride satisfied me. Also, the romance of the Brahmaputra was dimmed by the pollution. 

We had planned to spend our last day at Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary, said to be a good alternative for those who don’t have the time to visit Kaziranga, and apparently containing the world’s highest concentration of one-horned rhinoceroses, or as my wife calls them, “rhinosaurs.” (How many horns do most rhinos have? I never really thought about it. Happy to see them regardless of the horn quantity…) It is also next to a village called Mayong which is said to be the black magic capital of India, with a museum on the topic. Unfortunately we had to scrap these plans because my wife got a mysterious stomach bug (nothing serious, just the usual traveling in India side effect). Too bad. I was excited to see the rhinosaurs.

We ended up spending our final day just working from cafes and going to City Center mall, the fanciest in Northeast India, just for the hell of it, and to check out the more modern part of town. I guess if you want to see what the modern part of Guwahati is like, you can, but it’s not really different from any other modern part of India. The charming blend of fairly nice and dystopian. The roads around here are crazy, I’d rank myself as 7/10 at crossing roads in India but these defeated me. I watched one guy cross, it was like an expertly choreographed scene from a Jacques Tati movie. I wouldn’t dare.

I wanted to go to the Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra, a nice looking museum/cultural center, and the nearby Organic Market Complex, but they were too out of the way.

There are also a number of temples outside of the city that look worthwhile, less for the temples than for the environments, especially for those who aren’t exploring much else in Assam. Basistha Temple and Bhimasankar Dham Jyotirlinga Temple are two that I saved. 

Oh, and of course I checked out some old cinemas, though none that I saw were open. Unfortunately the Bijuli Cinema in Fancy Bazaar was all covered up and I couldn’t even get any photos of it. I did get a nice look at the nice Apsara Cinema near the train station, now used as a hall for marriages and other functions. Good idea! I didn’t get time to go to any movies, but I walked into the lobby at a PVR at the mall and it looked pretty nice.

I imagine most people coming to Guwahati are there as much for the food as anything else. Rightfully so. I love Assamese cuisine from what I’ve tried, though it’s been limited before this trip. Many years ago (I think in 2017) I ate a popup meal in Mumbai at the house of the homechefs O’Tenga and it was amazing and very exotic to me. Now, nothing I ate in Guwahati was so amazing or exotic. I’ve eaten too much and become too jaded, I guess.

Nonetheless I ate very well in the city, but that said as a vegetarian I felt there was a real lack of variety. I had a handful of Assamese thalis and they were so similar in the dishes offered, and pictures of thalis at other restaurants also looked the same, and there were few novel a la carte options. I felt I basically exhausted what the city had to offer in a very short time. Kind of sad. I really need to get out of the city or eat at someone’s house to delve any further, it seems. It’s odd to me that restaurants don’t bother with product diversification. 

I had reached out to a few homechefs and chefs who do popups and food experiences, but everyone was out of town or busy when I was there. I’m not totally sure what they offer and if they can host small groups but I’ll leave this here for those who are interested in paying up for a meal experience that goes beyond what the restaurants offer: Mamazaki (looks like global food with local seasonal ingredients), Kashmiri Barkakati Nath, and FSM Foodtrails (tribal food experiences).

But anyway, the food we ate was almost always good, usually very good, and it was pretty light, non-oily, and reasonably priced. A lot of it was the sort of food I’d happily eat every day, which I don’t always find when traveling in India. I just don’t want to eat the exact same thing every meal over and over. It was always rice, multiple dals (some meals had three different dals, I found that absurd, even two is silly), khar, a fried vegetable (usually eggplant), a mixed vegetable gravy with dried peas, a dry vegetable (usually greens and/or potato), and a pitika (mashed vegetables, almost always potato), plus some pickles and chutneys. Desserts are usually some kind of kheer (and usually less sweet than you’d get in other parts of India). For people who eat meat and especially fish there are more thali options and numerous a la carte dishes to order.

With the exception of Sunday night, every place I went to at lunch time was packed and every place I went to at dinner time was empty. I recommend all of the places I’m listing and think they’re all good options if you’re nearby, though I’m not sure any are necessary to go out of your way for. Go to whichever of these are nearby when you’re hungry.

The best meal I had was probably at a place called Tholgiri in Uzan Bazar. In both the food and the atmosphere it had a more rustic vibe than the other places, and the food had more interesting vegetable dishes. We got excellent mushrooms (the only time I had them in the city, I think oyster mushrooms), the pitika was a smokey eggplant (the only time it wasn’t potato), the fried vegetable was bitter gourd, there were a few different vegetable dishes (greens, pumpkin, cabbage), there were some unusual local fruit squashes, and there were a range of local sweets to try (I love the black sesame pitha). They also have a shop selling a range of local food products. I liked it so much that I planned to return when I was in the neighborhood, and it’s the sort of place I’d go to regularly if I lived nearby, but unfortunately as I was leaving I spotted a few cockroaches and decided not to go back… oh well. I still recommend it though. I think I’d go back on future trips. Hopefully they sort that out. I didn’t have the heart to tell them, maybe someone else can. They were packed at lunch.

Heritage Khorikaa is another good pick (as I understand it, the original Khorikaa still stands but the celebrity chef left and started Heritage Khorikaa). The thali was typical, as I described above, but this had the best selection of a la carte dishes for a vegetarian. We got banana flower, which isn’t that hard to find, as well as paneer cooked in black sesame sauce, a preparation you get widely with chicken but nowhere else with a vegetarian option. Quite delicious! I would go back as they had a few other unusual dishes to order. The restaurant was nicely set up but the service was lackluster and it was odd with nobody else there at dinner time.

Paradise (across the street from Heritage Khorikaa) was also very good, and it had the biggest range of dishes in the thali, with some lentil fritter dishes, a different dal, and banana flower. It was also the nicest of the restaurants. A la carte we ordered a paneer dish cooked in bamboo, nice to see as other restaurants offered bamboo cooked dishes but none were vegetarian. However it turned out to just be okay, I think something like mushroom or jackfruit would have been better. I was told it was best to come here for lunch, though I went for dinner. It was empty.

Michinga in Uzan Bazaar was quite good as well but I’d say it stood out the least of all of these. They get some kudos for the fried vegetable being pumpkin and the kheer being black rice, in both cases they are the only ones I had in the city. Packed at dinner (Sunday night).

Numerous places offer Assamese tribal food but as a vegetarian I was left out of that scene. I did go to the Mising Kitchen but the thali I got was all basic Assamese stuff. It was really good though, definitely recommended if you’re in that part of the city. Packed at lunch. I had planned to go to a place called Tribetown, which offered Bodo cuisine and had a number of unique vegetarian options, but it was too far out of the way. Otherwise none of the tribal places seemed to have anything veg beyond basic Assamese thalis.

If you get bored of basic Assamese thalis as I did, you can get a range of other foods from the northeast (this might be a good way to eat in Guwahati if you are on an Assam trip where you’re likely to get better Assamese food outside of the city anyway). I had just come from extended stays in Nagaland and Meghalaya so I didn’t feel a need to try any of those restaurants (though I did see a Garo restaurant, a cuisine I’ve not tried, but the veg dishes didn’t seem novel, meanwhile the Naga restaurants had better veg options than the restaurants in Nagaland!). Since I had only a very brief stay in Manipur, I decided to go to Sangai Manipuri Rice Hotel where I had a delicious thali. Empty at dinner.

When I flew into Guwahati in September I got a delicious thali at the airport from a place called Local Foods which offers food from across the northeast, but it wasn’t there at the airport when I flew out in December. They do have a branch at the City Center mall, though. Worth going to if you’re at the mall, I guess!

There are several really nice cafes in Guwahati. The most spacious, and thus best for working at, was Craftery. We also enjoyed the smaller Cut the Damn Cake and Bark Bark (I believe the only place in town that uses coffee beans from the northeast, they even had a single origin Assam). When my wife’s stomach was upset and she just wanted smoothies and smoothie bowls, we went to Hazael (where we also bought good sourdough) and Lush. 

We also went to the cafe at GTAC (Guwahati Tea Auction Centre), which is said to be among the biggest tea auction centers in the world, if not the biggest. I thought it’d be cool to see tea being auctioned but apparently it’s all online now and there’s nothing to see. I don’t really drink tea so I don’t have much to say, but it seems like a good place to shop for tea. I would think it doesn’t matter now and everything is online, but the stuff we bought surprisingly cannot be found online (we got premium CTC from Hookhmol, which broke some price records for CTC tea, and for a tea enthusiast friend I bought a Pu’er tea cake from Gauripur, another price record breaker, and my friend had high praise for it). 

You can also order tea to drink at the cafe, they have a good selection. I thought we should order a sampler of different types of single origin teas, that’s the point of such cafes, but my wife just wanted chai which I thought was a stupid thing to order at a cafe such as this since you get chai everywhere. But I didn’t really care since tea doesn’t interest me. It turned out to be possibly the best chai I ever had (I hardly ever get chai or any sugary drinks, and sugarfree chai is always kind of bad, but this was good even without sugar).

Assam grows cacao but for now none has made it into any bars yet. We’ll probably start seeing that in a few years.

While we’re at it, here’s a fun writeup on Guwahati’s food scene from Zac O’Yeah. From 2018, so the restaurant picks might not be totally relevant, but it contains some nice details on the cuisine and is pretty funny, plus it has some non-veg recommendations for you. I didn’t know about the distinction between Upper and Lower Assam food: “The main differences between Upper (or eastern) and Lower (western) Assamese cuisine appears to be that the Upper has a hint of Southeast Asian influences, while the Lower shares certain Bengali flavours.” I’m guessing I mostly ate the Lower food? I did feel it was similar to Bengali.

Also, I’m against alcohol and my wife was sick so we didn’t pursue this, but Assam has local rice wines that they’ve started bottling, and Terra Mayaa is the fancy cocktail bar that seems to make a good use of local ingredients. 

I love going to grocery stores when traveling. The best I found in Guwahati was ODC in Uzan Bazar. We bought some fun local products there, like the kombucha brand called Local (I loved the basil flavor) and an instant roasted red rice flour porridge box from a brand called Bor Hoi (quite good!). 

Now to some recommended reading on Assam (general Guwahati stuff is above). 

The first thing I read on Assam was Northeast India by Samrat Choudhury. Each chapter is on a different state, and the first two chapters are on Assam. Not the most exciting read but it’s a good introduction.

I read the first few chapters (available in the sample on Kindle) of The Assamese: A Portrait of a Community by Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty. From what I can tell, it is a very good, accessible anthropology book for general audiences. The intro and prologue are overly nostalgic and concerned with identity for my taste, but once you get into the actual book it is very informative. I wished it were more to the point at times, but the conversational tone makes it quite readable. I would definitely buy this for a future Assam trip, even if I’m unlikely to read the whole thing. Each chapter is on a specific topic, so one could skip around as they please and it should be good to have for reference. I look forward to the chapters on food and film.

While researching history books, Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India by Jayeeta Sharma came recommended from multiple trusted sources and looks good, but it’s very expensive in India. On a future trip I want to read more about the Ahoms, and I’ll probably read The Ahoms : A Reimagined History by Arup Kumar Dutta. Anirudh Kanisetti, who wrote a great piece about Kamakhya mentioned earlier, has another good article on various rulers of Assam.

There’s a good amount of fiction from Assam, both in Assamese and English. I spent a bit of time researching and not much of it jumped out at me, though hopefully I’ll get to some of it on a future trip. 

The author Rita Chowdhury sounded the most interesting to me (and, kinda fun, some of the publishers of her works that were listed on Wikipedia were publishers/stores that I recall walking by in Guwahati in the bazaar area mentioned above). She writes in Assamese but has two novels translated in English that I know of. Chinatown Days is a historical novel about the Chinese community in India, starting in the early 19th century when they worked as laborers in tea gardens, and leading to the discrimination they faced during the 1962 Sino-Indian war. The other book is The Divine Sword, an epic set in some ancient kingdoms of Assam (I’m not sure if it’s inspired by some real events and folklore or is totally made up). I picked up The Divine Sword but never got around to reading it.

I did make an effort to read a short story every day I was there (reading the first stories from a few collections, as available in the Kindle preview), though none were so good that I feel the need to share, nor do I feel a strong desire to buy any of the collections, though I’d be willing to check out more. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for short stories, or my excitement at visiting grand historical sites was not sufficiently matched by the petty middle class dramas of most of the stories. My favorite was probably The Decision by Syed Abdul Malik, the first story in the multi-author collection A Game of Chess: Classic Assamese Stories. It’s a nice, sweet old fashioned romance, though it didn’t have a ton of local color (I thought at one point that it could have been set in America with few changes). Probably a good collection, and I expect The Greatest Assamese Stories Ever Told is too, as those collections usually are. 

I listened to Assamese music for a week or so, before, during, and after my stay in Guwahati, having never heard any Assamese music before. I didn’t walk away with any new favorites but I really liked some of the folk music, mostly found by just clicking around on Youtube Music and googling things. 

The collection Assamese Bihu Songs was jamming (Spotify / Youtube). Chayanika Bihu Alekhya Aaru Bihu Geet Sankalan (Spotify / Youtube) is another awesome one.

Some of the big names in Assamese music are represented in those sets, including Bhupen Hazarika, who is probably Assam’s most famous music artist. I generally liked this lengthy playlist, and Naho Rana Klanta (Assamese Folk Songs) is great (Spotify / Youtube). His film music didn’t stand out to me, maybe I just didn’t listen enough or wasn’t in the right headspace. 

There’s also the husband and wife duo Khagen and Archana Mahanta, they have some good sets such as Nahor Kali Bihu Geet (Spotify / Youtube). (His music isn’t my thing but their son Papon is probably Assam’s most famous artist today. I also sampled Joi, another modern artist, not my thing. Both have had success as playback singers in Hindi films.)

Probably overkill at this point but here’s a Kamrupi Lokgeet album by Rameshwar and Dhanada Pathak (Youtube, didn’t see it on Spotify but there are others promising the same thing if you search).

I also looked for Tai Ahom music and came across Jutimala & The Tai Folks which does a modern take on their folk music. They have an album (I think a soundtrack for a made up series?) called The Golden Era (Spotify / Youtube) and I like what they’re going for though I found it to be too slick and modern for my taste. I realized, though, that they were included in Backpack Studio: Season 6, Vol. 1 (Spotify / Youtube), a great collection of folk songs, roughly half from Assam and half from Meghalaya. I’m too lazy to make a playlist of just the Assamese songs, anyway they announce where they’re from at the beginning of the songs and you can usually tell just by the names. Or at least some of you can. Here are two songs from Jutimala & the Tai Folks in there, these are more stripped down and I like these more.

While I was in Guwahati I also watched a dozen or so trailers for Assamese films, but nothing looked good to me. I didn’t get much of a chance to read about the industry.

I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen two Assamese films, both by Bhaskar Hazarika, both quite acclaimed, though unfortunately neither really worked for me. His debut Kothanodi is based on Assamese folk stories, something I wish we got more of, but it was just too cheap feeling and student film-ish for me. The thriller-ish drama Aamis was more watchable but I found it less convincing and compelling than everyone else. Check them out if they look good, I guess.

The most acclaimed Assamese filmmaker today is probably Rima Das, known for films such as Village Rockstars and Bulbul Can Sing. I haven’t seen them, and the low key village neorealist arthouse drama genre isn’t something that excites me, but I’ll give them a shot one day. I’m sure they’re very good.

The film Puberun played in competition at Berlin in 1960, which is the most prestigious festival appearance an Assamese film has had. I don’t know anything about this one.

I’ve heard a number of good things about Local Kung Fu but it doesn’t really appeal to me.

While researching Assamese films, one director whose name kept popping up was Jahnu Barua, which is funny because around the same time I kept seeing his name in the news for dumb statements he made as the head of the jury that selects a film to submit to the Oscars. Embarrassing statements aside, his older films might be good. The title of his that came up most was Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai (this and Village Rockstars are the two Assamese films that have won the National Film Award).

I also came across His Majesty The Ahoms, a Films Division documentary on the Ahoms and their traditions which have survived to this day. I skimmed a bit and look forward to watching it when it’s more relevant to my travels. 

There’s also this cartoon Ahom history lesson. Might be useful.