Kohora

Kohora existed long before the park did, as a farming settlement on the strip of firm ground between the Brahmaputra's floodplain and the wooded slopes of Karbi Anglong, in a district that grew rice, mustard and, from the 19th century, tea. The Ahom kingdom ruled this stretch of the valley for some six hundred years until Burmese invasions and then the British East India Company took Assam in 1826; tea planting spread across Golaghat district in the decades that followed, and the road that became National Highway 715 carried the crop westward.

The village owes its present shape to conservation. Kaziranga was declared a reserve forest in 1905 after concern over the collapse of the rhino population, became a game sanctuary, was renamed a wildlife sanctuary in 1950 and was later made a national park; UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site. The park's central administration and its busiest entrance sit at Kohora, and the range that begins here carries the village's name.

From the late 20th century tourism reshaped the place. Lodges, resorts and souvenir stalls filled the highway frontage, jeep owners and guides organised into associations, and families who had farmed or worked in the tea gardens took jobs in hospitality. The other constant in Kohora's history is water: the Brahmaputra floods the park most years, drowning animals and washing out roads, and the highway itself becomes the escape route for wildlife heading uphill.

Kohora is an Assamese village with a mixed population drawn from the valley's communities and from the Karbi hills above, along with families whose ancestors were brought from central India to work the tea gardens in the 19th century and are known collectively as the tea tribes. Assamese is the common language, with Karbi, Hindi and Bengali heard along the highway.

The religious life of the valley revolves around the Vaishnavite tradition of the 15th- and 16th-century saint Srimanta Sankardev, whose namghars — village prayer houses without images, where singing and recitation take place — stand in most settlements. Bihu shapes the year: Rongali Bihu in April brings drums, buffalo-horn pepa pipes and dancing in the fields, Magh Bihu in January brings feasting and bonfires, and Kongali Bihu in autumn is a quieter observance in a lean month. Muga and eri silk, woven in the valley, are worn for festivals, and the gamosa, a white cotton cloth with red borders, is given as a mark of respect.

Conservation itself has become part of local identity. The rhino appears on shop signs and school walls, families count forest guards and guides among their members, and the annual poaching figures are followed closely. Relations between the park and the villages around it are not always easy, because elephants raid crops and land near the boundary has been contested, but the park is also the district's largest source of work.

Kohora itself holds only a few thousand people; the wider Bokakhat area and Golaghat district around it are rural, with Golaghat district counting a little over a million residents at the 2011 census. Life runs to two clocks. Tourist Kohora wakes before dawn between November and April, when jeeps line up for the morning safari, and quietens by mid-morning; village Kohora follows the agricultural day, with rice fields, kitchen gardens, cattle and the tea gardens that surround the highway.

Work comes from three sources: the park and the lodges, tea estates and smallholdings, and the road, which brings dhabas, workshops and transport jobs. Many households combine them, and the monsoon closure of the park means a long off-season in which guides and drivers return to farming or travel for work. Mobile phones and UPI payments have reached even small shops, although coverage thins away from the highway.

The recurring problems are floods, which submerge fields, roads and much of the park most years and drive animals across the highway; human-wildlife conflict, with elephants in the crops and the risk of collisions on the road; and the seasonal nature of tourist income. Education and health services cluster in Bokakhat and Golaghat rather than the village, and younger people often leave for Guwahati or further afield.

Eating in Kohora is Assamese home cooking, light on oil and spice and built around rice. A meal usually begins with khar, a mildly alkaline preparation of vegetables or papaya cooked with water filtered through the ash of banana peel, and ends with a sour dish — masor tenga, a light fish curry soured with tomato, elephant apple or lemon, is the classic. In between come dal, a green such as lai xaak, a potato or pumpkin dish, and often duck or pigeon cooked with ash gourd on a festive day. Pork with bamboo shoot appears in Karbi and tribal kitchens up the hill.

Fish from the Brahmaputra and its channels is central, smoked, fried or dried, and bamboo shoot, fermented as khorisa, gives many dishes their sour edge. Pitha, rice cakes filled with sesame or coconut and jaggery, and laru, sweet balls of coconut or rice, are made for Bihu, along with rice beer in communities that brew it. Betel leaf with areca nut, tamul-paan, follows a meal almost everywhere.

The everyday drink is Assam tea, grown in the gardens on all sides and drunk strong with milk and sugar from glasses at the roadside stalls; the estates also sell whole-leaf grades that never reach a village cup. Lodges catering to visitors add north Indian and Chinese-style dishes to their menus, and the highway dhabas serve rice and curry, parathas and eggs all day to drivers.