River Traveller tells the story of a great river, as powerful as it is mysterious. The Brahmaputra rises in Tibet, travels through three countries and, after travelling over 2,900 kilometres, flows into the Bay of Bengal. It has fascinated cartographers, lured adventurers, attracted kings and dynasts, and has supported life and ways of living by its banks. It is one of the world’s longest and widest rivers—sustaining entire civilizations and agrarian systems. Alongside, its unmatched fury has destroyed human overreach for centuries. In River Traveller, veteran journalist and writer Sanjoy Hazarika makes epic journeys down the mighty river and describes all of this—and more.
In his travels spanning over two decades, Hazarika gets to know the river intimately, and brings both a journalist’s eye for reportage and a writer’s fine sensibility to his descriptions of places, people and events, and his accounts of the river’s historical burden.
He describes a Tibet that is trying to hold on to its cultural legacy in the face of Chinese rule and the land’s exploitation for its resources. He recounts stories of explorers, spymasters and map-makers who discovered the route of the river. Travelling with the river in Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Bangladesh, he notes the changing face of the expansive waterbody. Making historical connections with conquerors and colonialists, studying natural disasters, and minutely observing the contemporary lives of people, he creates a narrative as majestic as his subject.
From extremism to environmental responsibility, politics to ethnography, River Traveller touches on a multitude of subjects, and is an enduring study of human life and natural history. It is a rich and memorable portrait of one of the mightiest rivers on our planet.