Most of us look at personal experience and the history contained in books as separate things. It is only with time and effort that one sees how the threads of individual lives go on to weave a larger picture. In November 1962, with the Indian army in retreat from the Kameng sector of what is now Arunachal Pradesh (then North East Frontier Agency, or NEFA), panic spread through the small town of Tezpur in Assam – the nearest sizeable settlement, on the north bank of the Brahmaputra. We take so much of our past for granted, and it was only recently while talking to an aunt about the evacuation of people from Tezpur across the Brahmaputra that the full scale of the event became clear to me. A few details I had picked up over the years, after I had returned to the North East in 2011. Earlier, I just knew that something called the “Chinese aggression” had happened.
It was hard to imagine the chaos that would have descended upon that small town, the thousands of people in bullock carts and vehicles crowding the steamer ghat to flee to the other side of the river. The tea planters, several British among them, and the senior administrative figures like the DC and the SP had flown out from the small airport at Salonibari on the outskirts of Tezpur, and no one was left in charge.
When The ‘Lamas’ Came
My aunt, who is now 77, and one of five surviving sisters from a total of six sisters and a brother, as usual started her story with a diversion, with an incident from 1959: “It was after my first child was born that the Tibetans had come down to Missamari. The DC asked our uncle to make temporary shelters from bamboo and straw for them. So we went from Tezpur with our uncle in his jeep to see them, me and our elder sister who was back home from medical college in Dibrugarh. People had started calling the place Lama Camp by then, because of all the Tibetans who had fled with the Dalai Lama from Tibet. I remember they would pour atta and water into a bamboo sunga or tube and churn that to have as food. That and their prayer beads; it was all the women did. We had seen the Dalai Lama in Tezpur. He still looks the same I think.”
An episode from almost 60 years ago: Missamari was an army camp with an old runway to the north-west of Tezpur; during the Second World War it was one of the air bases in Bengal and Assam from where American-built Douglas DC-3s and C-47s had flown to Kunming in China’s Yunnan province to supply Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist troops. Lama Camp was since absorbed into the growing army base. Above Missamari had been thick forests, and above them rose the forested Eastern Himalayas of the Kameng region.
Not far from Missamari at the foothills was a road camp known as Foothills (where later khachars or mules were trained for carrying supplies and equipment up in the mountains). The Dalai Lama had carried on to Tezpur, from where he addressed the press. Then he went by train to Dehradun and onwards to Mussoorie, which was where Jawaharlal Nehru met him.The occupants of Lama Camp followed him in stages to Himachal Pradesh.
“After my second child’s anno proxon (the ceremony where the child is fed solid rice for the first time) in my mother’s place in Ketekibari on 17 or 18 November in 1962,” my aunt continued, “we had gone to Sootea near Tezpur. Coming back the next evening, we saw army officers and tea garden managers leaving in cars and trucks.
“That night none of the men in the village including Baba (my aunt’s father, and my grandfather) slept at night. We could hear the explosions all the way from Missamari, where the army’s ammunition stocks were being blown up.
“The next day people were going here and there. Word had spread that the Chinese were coming. My sisters (including my mother) came back early from school, saying that everyone had left. Our mother was complaining no one had cooked. We put up some rice and dal on the kitchen fire. One of our brothers-in-law who was a ‘nazir’ in the DC office then turned up in a jeep with his parents, telling us to come along to the steamer ghat. In the confusion our mother left her money behind, but I was carrying my husband’s money with me. My younger sisters put some rice and dal in a milk jug to carry with us. We went to the steamer ghat. Just as we reached the jeep’s tyre got punctured.
An episode from almost 60 years ago: Missamari was an army camp with an old runway to the north-west of Tezpur; during the Second World War it was one of the air bases in Bengal and Assam from where American-built Douglas DC-3s and C-47s had flown to Kunming in China’s Yunnan province to supply Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist troops
“It was chaos at the ghat. One army man, a Nepali, was with his child who was crying. The mother was in hospital the man said. A British woman wearing brown trousers had a child who had fever and was crying; she brought water from the river and gave it to him. There were hundreds of people all around. A lady went into labour and gave birth there on the sand. We managed to cross over to the other side of the Brahmaputra, and then went to Samaguri in a bus arranged by our brother-in-law. I remember my son’s milk bottle fell and broke when we reached the place, a house belonging to someone we knew that had been emptied for us. My brother, and my husband who was in Dhekiajuli, arrived, and then left after a day or two. Baba stayed behind in Tezpur. Later he told us how they had provided drinking water to the jawans who were retreating on foot. We bought things from a nearby market, cooked, ate, slept on beds made on the floor in the empty house. There were our brother-in-law’s parents, our mother, my two sisters, and my eldest sister’s daughter, who was worried about the kitten she had left behind in Ketekibari. After a few days we went back to Tezpur.” (This would have happened after the ceasefire).
What Was Left Behind
My mother was in class 7 then; they had just started wearing the mekhela sador that the older girls in the government school were allowed to wear, and she says that she folded up her school uniform and took it along just in case. My father, who was roughly the same age as my mother, was then in Dhubri in lower Assam where my grandfather, who was in the police, was posted. My grandfather’s elder brother’s family came down from Tezpur then to stay with them. He himself was busy on duty, part of the effort to stop vehicles and buses from crossing over the interstate border into Bengal; then the roads were sealed.
