Number of words: 551

Bedingfield’s fellow gunner was given a more challenging commission, which was to explore the ‘perfect blank’ that lay upriver from Rungpore. Making his way up the Brahmaputra in a Bengali country boat by a laborious combination of sailing, poling and towing from the bank, Philip Burlton eventually came to an area about ninety miles upriver where the Brahmaputra broke up into a complex of several tributaries (see inset, Map B). On the north bank of what appeared to be the main tributary there was a small settlement called Sadiya, with a population of about three thousand. Today the town no longer exists, having been swept away by the floods that followed the Assam earthquake of 1950, but its position had always been precarious, since it was sited on one of the banks of sand and debris known as chapris that came and went as the watercourses swung back and forth across the Assam valley. With every monsoon new barriers of vegetation and silt were piled up and new channels gouged out of the plain. In time these chapris became overgrown with tall elephant grass and dotted with simul trees, providing a natural home for tiger, water-buffalo, swamp deer, pig elephant and the stubby Indian rhino. Then came the fisher- men, with their coarse-thatch bashas, and finally more permanent settlements, sited usually where there was a convenient ghat. 

Its location made Sadiya the obvious base for the exploration of this furthest corner of Assam – and for its future administration, now that the Company had decided to maintain its hold on this newly-liberated land. Just as Peshawar was the lynchpin of the North-West Frontier in later years so, in its own more modest way, did Sadiya become the focal point of the North-East Frontier. It was where the Hindu culture of the plains gave way to the tribal and largely animist culture of the surrounding hills. In its crowded bazaar Burlton soon found himself face to face with representatives of a dozen or more ‘rude hill races’, people very different from any that he had hitherto come across in India.

The two largest groups in the area were the Mishmis and the Abors. The first inhabited the mountains and dense rain- forests north and east of Sadiya and were, according to Burlton’s fellow-explorer in later years, Richard Wilcox, “wild- looking but inoffensive, rather dirty people’ who rarely wore more than a G-string and whose most distinctive ornament was an earring ‘nearly an inch in diameter, made of thin silver plate, the lobes of the ears having been gradually stretched and enlarged from the age of childhood to receive this singular ornament.’ They were also great smokers from an early age, rarely being seen without a bamboo pipe in their mouths. 

West of the Mishmis was the tribe that the Assamese called Abors or ‘unknown savages’, a dozen or so quarrelsome clans tightly packed along both banks of a river known locally as the Dihong, and said to be ‘very averse to receiving strangers’. 

The men habitually wore arms or armour; cane helmet and breastplates short stabbing or throwing spears , Long swords known as daos and crossbows with arrows dipped in poison our concoction of aconite and deadly  

Excerpted from page 100 – 102 of ‘A Mountain Tibet ’ by Charles Allen