Guwahati

Guwahati is one of the oldest continuously settled places in eastern India. Sanskrit texts know it as Pragjyotishpura, the capital of the legendary king Naraka and later the seat of the Kamarupa kingdom, whose rulers from the seventh century onwards were described by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang and recorded in copper-plate grants. The Kamakhya temple on Nilachal Hill, the Navagraha on Chitrachal and the scattered stone carvings around the city are the physical remains of that long period, when the city's reputation for astronomy, tantra and learning spread across the subcontinent.

After Kamarupa broke up, the Brahmaputra valley became contested ground. The Koch king Nara Narayan rebuilt the Kamakhya temple in the 1560s after an earlier structure was destroyed, and from the 17th century Guwahati stood on the frontier between the Mughal empire and the Ahom kingdom, changing hands repeatedly. The decisive moment came in 1671 at Saraighat, just west of the city, where the Ahom general Lachit Borphukan defeated a much larger Mughal fleet in a battle on the river that remains central to Assamese identity.

The British annexed Assam in 1826 after the Treaty of Yandabo and made Guwahati the seat of their administration until 1874, when the headquarters moved to Shillong; the town meanwhile grew as a river port and railway centre. It became the state's main city after independence, and in 1972, when Meghalaya was separated from Assam, the state capital moved from Shillong to Dispur, inside Guwahati. Growth since then has been rapid and sometimes turbulent: the Assam Movement of 1979 to 1985 against migration from Bangladesh had its centre here, and the city has spread over hills and wetlands that once bounded it.

Guwahati is the meeting point of Assamese valley culture and the many hill cultures of the northeast. Its Assamese identity is rooted in the Vaishnavite reform of Srimanta Sankardev, whose namghars — prayer halls without images — stand in neighbourhoods across the city, and whose Sattriya dance, once performed only in monasteries, is now taught and staged here as a classical form. Bihu is the great common celebration: Rongali Bihu in April brings dance, dhol drums and the buffalo-horn pepa pipe out into fields and streets, and Magh Bihu in January is about feasting and bonfires.

The city is also the region's media and education centre, with Assamese newspapers, television, a lively music scene and university campuses drawing students from Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. That mix shows in restaurants serving Naga and Mizo food, in churches beside temples and mosques, and in a young cultural scene that has produced rock bands and film-makers with followings across the northeast.

Kamakhya sets the city's religious tone. It is one of the most important centres of Shakta worship in India, associated with tantric practice, and the Ambubachi Mela in June brings hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, including crowds of sadhus. Animal sacrifice is part of ritual at the temple, and visitors are asked to be respectful about it. Everyday courtesies include removing shoes indoors, using the right hand for food, and the offering of a gamosa to guests and honoured visitors.

About a million people live in Guwahati, and the wider urban area is larger still, making it by far the largest city in northeastern India. It functions as the northeast's hub: wholesale trade for eight states, the region's main airport and railway junction, its largest hospitals, and the Assam government offices at Dispur. Oil and gas from upper Assam, tea, plywood, cement and a growing information technology and services sector feed the economy, alongside a very large informal workforce of traders, drivers and day labourers.

Residential life ranges from the old bungalow streets of Uzan Bazar and the railway colonies of Maligaon to new apartment blocks climbing the hillsides in the south and east. Rents and land prices have risen fast, and settlements on hill slopes and around Deepor Beel are vulnerable to landslides and waterlogging. Students from across the region fill hostels and rented rooms around the universities.

Days start early, because India's single time zone puts sunrise before five in summer, and offices, schools and markets open and close correspondingly early. The shared problems are familiar: traffic on a road network squeezed between river and hills, urban flooding when hill streams and drains overflow after heavy rain, air quality in winter, and the annual Brahmaputra floods that affect the districts around the city more than the city itself.

Assamese cooking is light, sour and lightly spiced, with little use of the heavy masalas found further west. A home meal is built on rice, with khar — a dish of vegetables, pulses or fish cooked with an alkaline filtrate traditionally made from burnt banana peel — served early in the sequence, and masor tenga, a sour fish curry soured with tomato, elephant apple or lemon, at the centre. Pitika, boiled potato, aubergine or fish mashed with mustard oil, onion and chilli, accompanies almost everything, along with a bowl of dal and seasonal greens.

Fish from the Brahmaputra is the everyday protein, and duck cooked with ash gourd or sesame, pigeon, pork with bamboo shoot and mutton appear at feasts and festivals. Bamboo shoot, fermented or fresh, and the sour fruit of the elephant apple are distinctive local ingredients, as is the use of mustard seed and ghost chilli in small quantities. Restaurants in the city also serve the food of the surrounding hill states — Naga smoked pork with axone, Manipuri eromba, Tibetan momos and thukpa — which makes Guwahati the easiest place to eat across the whole region.

Sweets and snacks follow the Bihu calendar: pitha, rice-flour cakes filled with sesame or coconut and jaggery, are steamed, fried or roasted for the festivals; laru are sweet balls of rice, coconut or sesame; and doi with gur, curd and palm jaggery, ends many meals. Tea is drunk all day, grown a few hours upriver in the plantations that made Assam's name, and the bazaars sell it loose alongside the pickles, dried fish and bamboo shoot that fill household stores.