Ranjit Barthakur and I sat on a large log watching otters fish in the Diphloo River. We paused a while to take in the throb of life that is Kaziranga on the way back from Debeswari, where we had seen two Bengal Floricans rise and then float down like balloons, in a dance ritual designed to impress females hidden in the tall grass. We also saw where a tiger, elephant and turtle had left tell-tale foot prints when they crossed a dry sandy riverbed, no doubt at different times of the day.
Across the river from where we now sat in silence, two rhinos made a quick appearance and then vanished into their veiled grassland world. They were followed by a small herd of elephants, whose trumpeting we heard long before they revealed themselves to us. A decidedly fishy smell and silvery scales strewn about the log suggested we were not far from the underground otters’ holt.
Ranjit was born in Assam, and it was on his invitation that I first visited Kaziranga over two decades ago. Visiting and defending wild places has virtually become the purpose of my life, and I already knew pretty much all that had been written about Kaziranga before I reached, but nothing could possibly have prepared me for the aura of the grassland home of the Indian one-horned rhino. From the earliest days of my involvement with wildlife in the 1970s, I had heard stories of the magnificent northeast from the likes of the late Dr. Sàlim Ali and Humayun Abdulali. I had also read E.P. Gee’s ‘Wildlife of India’ from cover to cover.
For centuries, this hidden part of India, extending all the way to Myanmar, was saved from the plough and axe because of its sheer inaccessibility. “When most of India’s wildlife has vanished, somewhere in the northeast a wood duck will still be whistling,” said Dr. Sàlim Ali to me once, commenting on a proposed manuscript for Sanctuary Asia. He was not to know that in the decade after he passed away in 1987, this protective isolation would be shattered by a progressive series of roads, mines, dams and other human ‘development’ infrastructure that brought humans closer to the secret nooks and havens from where wild creatures were driven away to who knows where.
Speaking easily from knowledge born of years spent in the northeast, Ranjit told me about the ‘Seven Sisters’ – the political states of India into which the northeast has been divided – Assam, Arunachal, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. He spoke of their incredible biodiversity, their unique human cultures and their crucial bio-geographic location on the cusp of the Indo-Malayan realm. “This river flowing gently by will turn into a raging torrent when the waters from the hills of Karbi Anglong come hurtling down just a month from now,” he said. Adding that the mighty Brahmaputra, on whose banks we sat earlier that morning, sipping a cup of black tea offered to us by a forest guard, would turn into an even more wild and untamed surge. Kaziranga is a child of the Brahmaputra river valley, which is in turn locked between the eastern Himalaya to the north and the ranges of Garo, Khasi, Jayantia, and Mikkir, Cachar and Barail hills to the south. This climatic and geographic variation results in a special mix of plants and animals found almost nowhere else on Earth.
Here within a 430 sq. km. grass and forest asylum that is protected like a fortress, alongside the rhino, a whole host of animals have found refuge. No one can be unimpressed with the sight of rhinos, wild buffaloes, elephants, swamp deer and gibbons. Like a moth to a benign flame, I have returned time and again to Kaziranga over the years only to discover a new facet, a new personality, with each successive trip.
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Bittu Sahgal
The writer is the editor, Sanctuary magazine[/column]