The Tezpur Pin- up

There once lived a young woman in possession of varied powers and an immense strength of character by the name Chitralekha. Her powers were paralleled only by her commitment for her friend Usha, daughter of the daitya king Bana. And as stories go Usha fell hopelessly in love with Aniruddha, grandson of Lord Krishna, who appeared to her in a dream. Chitralekha then undertook the long and arduous journey to the yadava kingdom, abducted Aniruddha and carried him in her arms all the way back to her friend. Then there was the inevitable war where the titans- Lord Siva, in aid of his devotee Bana and Lord Krishna, the Vishnu incarnate- clashed. Myth is that blood soaked into the battlefield and coloured its soil red and the town came to be known as Tezpur (City of Blood).
Tezpur today invokes nothing of the bloody myth in appearance. Green is the hue that colours its landscape. The deep green of lush vegetation is spangled with the yellow of bamboo thatched huts set upon brown and dull gray patches of earth. The Brahmaputra is embroidered on to its south like the broad border of a mekhla*. However, I reached Tezpur in a pitch dark. The nine hours delay of my train to Guwahati meant that I had barely enough time to get on to one of the last wingers to Tezpur. Wingers are 12- 16 seaters that trundle their way through the bumpy highway in surprising speed, heavy luggage bundled on its top and the 16 passengers swaying precariously on their seats.
The Central University of Tezpur, where Anju is a member of the faculty is about half an hour from town by auto through the unlit streets that cuts through fields and villages. The university campus appears as a display of lights in contrast to its settings lit only by pin pricks of fireflies. Anju was waiting for me at the Mission chariali, with Jeetender, whose auto- rikshaw would for the next few days be our main mode of transportation in and around Tezpur. It was Jeetender who took us both, and our friends, Nirmali and Vivek on the last day of my stay to Agnigarh- a hillock that commemorates the Usha- Aniruddha story and offers a panoramic view of the town and the river.In the recent years Agnigarh has been transformed into a park that narrates the myth through a series of statues. We reached there as the night was settling on to the river surface, enveloping the city in a pearly white glow. We lingered at the last, slightly gory and very unartistic tableau of the blood bath and wondered what the end of the myth would have been. Anju sincerely hoped that all the hypermasculine, chauvinist warriors had perished in the battle to leave Chitralekha and Usha to have lived happily ever after.
While nothing obvious remains of the bloody Shaiva- Vaishnava conflicts that the myth garbs, Tezpur hides its vicissitudes at a much a deeper level.On the flanks of the University are two villages- one where Bihari immigrants like Jeetender has settled and the other of Bangla speaking muslims like Fathima who works as a domestic help for the faculty. The villages are set out differently, the huts are structurally different and their life worlds rarely meet. The Muslim community constantly faces taunts for being Bangladeshi illegitimate claimants on the land. The town is a heterogenous matrix of tribes and of communities that have over a period of time come in primarily to work in its tea estates. Plaban, a left student activist and a friend of Anju says with anguish that at present the politics in the tea estates works primarily by invoking the ‘original’ identities. Tezpur is also a stronghold of the Indian Army. Anju feels that the relative absence of legitimate modes of protest and of obvious violence that mars other part of Assam have more to do with the pervasive military presence that is always more deeply violent in character.
Earlier that day we were at the Bamuni Hills, close to Agnigarh. The Bamuni Hills hold the stone ruins of the 10-`12th centuries CE Panchayatana temples. Huge granite blocks, animal busts statues and door jambs lay in piles and scatters over the mound. The central shrine as per the Archaeological Survey of India’s information board was dedicated to Vishnu. While the original alignment of the structure is only sparsely preserved, the ruins themselves offered a spectacular sight with the setting sun;foregrounding them in a deep orange back ground. So did the vast beach sands of the Brahmaputra on which children played volley ball over a make shift net stretched on bamboo poles, log boats plied the shallow muddy waters and skeletons of Chinese type fishing nets waited where the river sand met the village for the monsoons to flood and bring the river to them.
(cont...)
*The mekhla is the lower part of mekhla chador, a costume worn by women in Assam