Soon the infant rabble was leading me noisily into the darkness of the riverside slum, through rough passageways of bamboo and rusting metal, stopping at a narrow doorway where a young woman in a pink headscarf beckoned me in for coffee. By now the horde had swelled to twenty, half of whom poured into the one-roomed hovel in a frenzy of anticipation. The smallest home I’ve ever been in, the hut consisted of four bamboo walls, a hard wooden bed, a single kerosene lamp and a wood fire sunk into the earthen floor. A few scraps of clothing hung from nails on the walls. It was a third of the size of my ten-pounds-a-night room at Dibrugarh’s generously titled Royal Palace hotel, yet somehow the young woman, her husband, one of the rabble and the baby she dandled on her slim hip existed here.
It was akin to a Dickensian scene: the woman – her gold earrings and nose-ring glinting in the darkness – squatting to boil a pan over the fire as eleven grubby, curious faces assessed me in the gloom. Perched on the bed, a crush of children on the floor at my feet, I communicated in smiles and sign language, hammily acting out riding a motorbike and being from England, ‘far far away’ – all the time more surprised faces appearing outside the door. When the pan had boiled we all sipped sugary powdered coffee from small china cups and I wished I had something to give them in return. They were Bangladeshi migrants who lived at the mercy of the river, their meagre dwellings frequently flooded and washed away. They had so little, but were so generous towards me, and so full of smiles.
Beyond Dibrugarh, Assam is chiselled to a point by the hills of Nagaland, Burma and Arunachal Pradesh. Here I rode slowly through a string of plastic-strewn towns where ragged old men sat on broken pavements and a grey pall hung over everything. Webs of electrical wires sagged disconsolately over the roadside; jerry-built shop fronts leant drunkenly on each other in wonky, rusting rows; women sat on their haunches selling hillocks of dusty vegetables; creaky old bicycles bulged with silver milk churns; cows chewed plastic bags; rickshaws clattered; men stared. Bored faces gazed out of tiny shops stuffed with packets of biscuits, strings of shampoo sachets, soap, cigarettes and cheap Chinese clothes. Behind hand-painted signs for ‘lodging and fooding’, figures hunched over plastic tables devouring plates of rice and dhal.
The faces that looked at me as I passed were a mixture of pale, dark, tribal and Oriental; a legacy of both Assam’s position at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia and the Raj’s brutal programme of imported labour. A vast workforce was needed to power the Empire’s new tea, coal and oil trades, but the locals quite wisely shunned the poorly paid, back-breaking work.
‘They are perfectly indifferent to providing for their future want,’ wrote J. M’Cosh of the Assamese in 1837. ‘They are idle and indolent . . . childish and timid . . . they have the greatest aversion to hire their services; and it becomes a necessity to catch workmen like wild animals, and keep a constant watch on them to prevent their running away.’
Instead the British passed the 1863 Transport of Native Labourers Act and imported hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers, known as ‘coolies’, from Bihar, Orissa and beyond. Rape, flogging and torture of these male, female and child labourers was shamefully common, and those who tolerated the wet, cruel, malarial conditions were branded ‘Class 1 junglies’ by their British overlords. It would be putting it mildly to say that Britain’s dealings in Assam are not a part of our history to be proud of.
Through all of these disorderly settlements ran the railway, built by the Assam Railways & Trading Company in the late nineteenth century to carry Upper Assam’s largesse west. Wild elephants took umbrage at the construction of these iron roads, regularly pulling down the telegraph poles that lined the tracks. But man won in the end. At Dibrugarh the bales of tea, barrels of oil and mountains of coal were loaded onto steamers and taken down the Brahmaputra, the Empire getting fat on the toil of bonded labour. Today this remote corner of India still produces a quarter of the world’s tea, thirty per cent of the country’s oil and huge quantities of coal, as well as holding forty per cent of the nation’s water. All this natural wealth, and the sight of it trundling west towards Delhi, has added fuel to the fires of discontent that have raged in Assam since Independence: one of the United Liberation Front of Assam’s main arguments being that an independent Assam would profit from its own resources, rather than seeing the wealth leak out to the rest of India.
In Chabua, where Assam’s first tea garden was opened in 1837, a convoy of army trucks carrying heavy artillery clogged the road outside the town’s air base, and Indian Air Force fighter jets roared over oil fields. One of the seven bases in Upper Assam hurriedly built by the Allies to airlift supplies to China in the Second World War, it was bombed in October 1942 by a hundred Japanese fighters. Today it is part of India’s bristling defence against the Chinese, its sentries snapping to salutes under a sign that reads: ‘Defending the Eastern Skies’. A later sign proudly welcomed me to ‘Digboi: the birthplace of Indian oil’. Here Italian engineers commissioned to build the railway from Dibrugarh to Margherita had noticed a sticky black substance on their elephants’ feet and, when the Englishman in charge had exhorted the men to ‘Dig boy! Dig!’ in search of more, the name stuck.
At Margherita the jungle-clad slopes of the Patkai range reared up to the south, their dark imprints in the mist a welcome respite after the plains. Originally called Ma-Kum, meaning ‘abode of the tribes’, before it was renamed after their Queen Consort by those same Italian engineers, the town lies just a few miles from the border with Arunachal’s Changlang district and less than twenty miles from Burma. Here I was met by thirty-year-old journalist Manash Gogoi, a self-confessed ‘fatty’ with an expanding waistline and a kindly face, his almond-shaped eyes typical of Assamese looks. As his mother served us steaming bowls of rice, dhal and fried fish in their cool, concrete kitchen, we discussed how, from colonial-era scraps over tea to the guerrilla fighting that still limped on in the surrounding hills, this far corner of Assam had long been an unlikely hub of political ambition; all the while the family’s overfed vegetarian spaniel howling pitifully every time one of those infernal buses screamed past. I knew how it felt.
Afterwards, one of Manash’s friends appeared, wielding the sort of TV camera that hasn’t been seen in England since Moira Stuart presented the Six O’Clock News. And before I knew it a large microphone had been shoved under my nose, the camera was flashing red and Manash was interviewing me for the local news.
‘I love Assam. Its people are very kind,’ I responded politely, before his mother ceremoniously placed a gamosa, a traditional Assamese white and red cloth, around my neck.
My visit there coincided with Saraswati Puja – a celebration of the goddess of knowledge, music, arts, wisdom and learning – and the streets were brimming with people in their finery. Women flitted through the traffic in fantastically coloured saris – jade, daffodil yellow, magenta, vermilion, turquoise – looking, amidst all the dust and rubbish, like misplaced birds of paradise. Young men loitered and played with their smartphones, swaggering in their tightest pairs of stonewashed jeans. Crowds milled around temporary roadside shrines.
In honour of Saraswati and the attainment of knowledge, the hottest ticket in town was the coal museum, a bizarre homage to the rich carbon seam that runs through here along the base of the Patkai. Manash insisted I pay a visit and we gawped around it, trailed by the darting cameraman and a twittering crowd. There were glass cabinets stacked with different varieties of bricks, a boat engine, a pile of old typewriters, random collections of coal-mining ephemera and, outside, a lurid green, fifty-foot plastic T. Rex. But by far the most photographed exhibit of the day was the lone Westerner.
‘Please, Madam, one click,’ they said, sidling over with banks of smartphones.
‘Your good country?’ asked young men, slipping their arms around my shoulders.
‘One selfie?’ ventured shy teenage girls, their pretty faces slathered in make-up.
I smiled sweetly as they clicked and p
osed and sidled, understanding, for a few hours, how awful fame must be. After more photo-mobbing outside, I bravely ran away to the nearest hotel and closed the door on India, lying on the hard bed drinking the last of the Tango-flavoured gin while watching a badly dubbed, theatrically breathless Hindi version of Bear Grylls on TV. It much improved him.
Stifled by Assam’s crowds, that night I dreamt of the entire subcontinent coming loose from its tectonic moorings and sinking into the Indian Ocean under the sheer weight of humanity and its waste.
Five miles beyond Margherita was Ledo, a small unnoteworthy town choked by the dust of its open-cast colliery. Heaps of coal lined the railway sidings and Terex earthmovers crawled over wrecked and blackened hillsides. Behind rose the wild hills of Changlang and Tirap, a slender finger of Arunachal Pradesh jabbing its way between Assam and Burma. Stopping in the main street to take in the usual melee of clattering rickshaws, ambling cows and crude shop fronts, it was hard to believe that this town was once the fulcrum of one of the most futile and forgotten campaigns of the Second World War.
By mid-1942, Singapore, Malaysia and Burma had fallen to Japan, and the Imperial Army was now advancing rapidly towards Northeast India, their sights fixed on Delhi. Fleeing through the jungles of northern Burma ahead of them was a desperate column of 600,000 refugees, dying in their tens of thousands from starvation, disease and the merciless strafing of Japanese fighter planes.
Japan had to be stopped and China – our only surviving ally in the East – kept in the war at all costs. Their surrender would not only free up a million Japanese troops to fight the Allies in the Pacific, but would put paid to Roosevelt’s vision of Chiang Kai-shek as the anchor of a post-war, non-communist Asia. At the helm of these efforts was Joseph Stilwell, the blunt, acerbic US commander of the China-Burma-India (CBI) theatre. Better known as ‘Vinegar Joe’, Stilwell’s sole task was to keep the duplicitous Chiang Kai-shek on side by supplying his floundering regime with enough fuel and weapons to fight the Japanese. It didn’t help that Stilwell loathed the ‘crazy little bastard’ he dubbed ‘Peanut’, recognizing him for the crooked, self-aggrandising despot that he was.
There were two ways to keep China supplied: by air or by land. Neither was easy. The air route involved flying over ‘the Hump’ of the eastern Himalayas, where abominable weather and poor equipment regularly flung the transport planes against the mountainsides like toys. The land option meant building a road through Japanese-occupied Burma.
Amidst disagreement and warring egos, Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for the latter. In December 1942, 15,000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of coolies began work on the Stilwell Road, a 465-mile supply route that would connect Assam with China. Beginning in the small settlement of Ledo, the proposed road would cut southeast over the Pangsau Pass – soon known as ‘Hell Pass’ – through the tiger-infested Burmese jungles and on to Kunming. Churchill damned the project from the outset, predicting it would be ‘an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished until the need for it has passed’, and he was quickly proved right: the road was a gross failure, a Sisyphean endeavour costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
Conditions were hellish. The men worked sixteen-hour days in humidity so intense it rotted the fatigues off their bodies, and they built much of the road by hand or with outdated, unreliable equipment. Leeches left them covered in oozing sores. Bamboo lice infested hair, beards and groins. Scrub typhus meant a brief but agonizing death. Ninety-eight per cent of the soldiers contracted malaria and many suffered more than a dozen bouts during their tour. Dysentery was de rigueur. Cobras slithered through the muddy jungle camps. Tigers attacked at will. Enemy snipers lurked in the sylvan gloom. Monsoon rains destroyed bridges, buried men in mudslides and swept them away in flash floods. And their reward at the end of each ghastly day was another can of Spam and gibbons screeching from dusk till dawn, depriving the exhausted troops of proper sleep.
As one popular ditty said:
Long may you live
And when you die
You’ll find hell
Cooler than the CBI.
Unsurprisingly troops and coolies died in their thousands. Of those who survived, many took solace in ‘gunga’ and opium (the British often substituting the latter for the coolies’ wages). Others simply went mad. No wonder the mocking soldiers renamed CBI ‘Confusion Beyond Imagination’.
Seventy per cent of the US conscripts toiling in this jungle hell were African American. The highest concentration of black troops in the entire war, they were deemed by the US Army to be too stupid, idle and cowardly to do any more than crush rocks, load trucks and wash their white officers’ underpants. An official US Army document of 1939 titled ‘Command of Negro Troops’ stated: ‘These men are so limited in their ability that there is no use trying to make good soldiers out of them.’ The same document warned white troops to ‘stay completely away from them’ during training.
Another US colonel wrote: ‘The average Negro is naturally cowardly’ and ‘lacks the courage and intelligence’ for conflict.
The only positive – and entirely absurd – beliefs about black soldiers were that they had better night vision than Caucasians and were more resistant to malaria, thus making them ideal for jungle warfare. German and Japanese prisoners of war were treated, fed and housed better than America’s black conscripts. It’s no surprise many black soldiers came to despise their white superiors.
One of these wretched GIs was 21-year-old Herman Perry, a handsome fellow from Atlanta who arrived in Margherita on 7 September 1943. Six months later, an exhausted, diseased, embittered Perry shot dead a hated white officer and fled into the wilderness of Burma’s eastern Patkais. Idolized by his fellow black conscripts for his phenomenal ability to dodge bullets, tigers and the military police, Perry ended up settling in a Naga village, marrying the chief’s fourteen-year-old daughter and fathering a child. Months later, after one of the biggest manhunts of the Second World War, the ‘Jungle King’ was finally captured and, after a sham of a trial, hanged by the US Army at Ledo. All in the name of supplying a dictator far more interested in filling his own coffers and fighting Mao Zedong’s communists than in aiding the Allied cause.
The Stilwell Road officially opened on 20 May 1945, twelve days after Germany’s surrender. As a United Press story wrote in 1946: ‘There can be no better example of the terrific waste of war.’
Manash Gogoi and his friends had known little about the road and nothing of Perry. And the crowd of men who encircled the Hero in Ledo were far more interested in ‘one click’, my ‘good country’, and how much the bike had cost than anything to do with Stilwell’s Ozymandias.
Riding on slowly, eyes stinging from the coal dust, I scanned the turbid outline of the hills and thought of Perry and the months he had spent evading capture there. Now these border jungles harboured a very different sort of fugitive: groups of disillusioned young men with AK-56s and desperate dreams of a sovereign Naga state. Despite a peace deal being signed in August 2015 between Modi and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, the struggle wasn’t over for some. And while the army sought to flush the militants out of this southernmost corner of Arunachal Pradesh, the area was sadly off-limits to outsiders.
The troubles weren’t solely confined to Tirap and Changlang. Two days later the Indian Army and Assam Police launched a joint combat operation in a village near Margherita, killing three Naga militants and one ULFA rebel and recovering a stash of rifles, IEDs and ammunition.
Riding east out of Ledo on the old Stilwell Road, I soon came to the military post of Lekhapani, where a large, modern sign at the roadside read: ‘Stilwell Road: Rejuvenate our lifeline, Revitalize our relationship, Reach out beyond our borders’, above a map of the original route. Here soldiers from the Assam Rifles walked along the tarmac in full battle dress and pickups loaded with troops roared past, mounted machine guns at the ready.
Wanting to follow the infamous road for a little longer, a
t Jagan I forked right towards Burma’s Pangsau Pass, and instantly found myself transported to another land. I was still in Assam, just, but the traffic and crowds had vanished and instead I was twisting along a deserted, winding road through a tunnel of jade foliage. Real jungle at last! That familiar matted weave of soaring trunks, bamboo thickets, giant ferns and elephant grass.
A lone man padded barefoot along the cracked tarmac, square-ended dao – the machete-type knives ubiquitous in tribal Northeast India – and lengths of freshly cut bamboo slung over a slender shoulder. Through the trees nearby I glimpsed the thatched roofs of a tribal village. Giddy from the thrill of this new world I rode straight through a military checkpoint, the soldiers barely looking up as I buzzed under an arch saying ‘Welcome to Arunachal Pradesh’. With my Assam plates and visor down they must have mistaken me for a local. The same happened at a second checkpoint and I continued, slightly warily, repeating my Irish granny’s mantra of, ‘Do nothing, say nothing till the police arrive.’ For all the armed presence and permit rules, it was perplexing no one had stopped me.
Halfway to the Burmese border I parked outside the locked and rusting metal gates of Jairampur’s Second World War cemetery, clambering over a low, spiked fence into a pathetically neglected graveyard. Its disrepair synonymous with the forgotten status of the CBI theatre, a peeling sign was the only clue as to who lay beneath the cracked and mossy stones. It read:
These graves bear silent testimony to those soldiers, unlisted men and labourers who ventured to virgin jungle and blistering heat and laid down their lives in the line of duty during the Second World War, whilst part of the all forces against the Imperial Japanese Army.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 5
