Articles > Arunachal Pradesh

Tucked away in the far north-east, wedged between the borders of Bhutan, Burma and Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh is India's newest and least-known state. Before the region was elevated to statehood in 1986, Arunachal Pradesh was known as the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA). Aside from a few forays by administrators and anthropologists, the area was ignored by India's British rulers, and its isolation was legally safeguarded by India's own government - before laws permitting limited tourism were passed in 1995, even Indian citizens were not allowed to visit.

Had it not been for the fact that the NEFA’s strategically valuable location made it the ideal base for the allied airmen flying the treacherous Himalayan route over "The Hump" into China during World War II, this lush, lonely area might have been entirely ignored by the outside world. Even now, the frontiers of Arunachal Pradesh are blocked by military checkpoints. Entry to the state is only possible with a Special Areas Permit which costs US$150 per person per night you stay in Arunachal Pradesh, and all visitors must travel in groups of at least four - the Indian authorities seem determined that this unspoilt mountain realm will not be turned into another Goa.

The most convenient gateway to Arunachal Pradesh is Tezpur, in the neighbouring state of Assam. Though civilian flights here from Calcutta are fairly frequent, Tezpur airport is primarily an Air Force base - this region of India is heavily militarised, thanks to smouldering separatist squabbles in Assam, Sikkim and Nagaland, and soldiers are a frequent sight along the roads. The border checkpoint on the road to Itanagar - Arunachal Pradesh's capital city - is also staffed by soldiers, who have a large wooden chart in their office recording crimes committed in the region. Offences are listed year-on-year according to type, including murder (not many), cattle theft (occasional), explosive theft (one in 1993) and, more intriguingly, cheating (one each in 1995 and 1996). I wonder if it was the same bloke.

Itanagar is about a seven-hour drive from Tezpur, and is a dusty, run-down sort of place, though you don't come to Arunachal Pradesh for the city life. Eighty percent of the state is classified as mountainous. The easternmost edges of the Himalayas reach into Arunachal Pradesh - if you sit on the left-hand side of the plane on the flight from Calcutta to Tezpur you can see the summit of Everest, poking like a white dorsal fin through the grey cloud.

For the first proper sense of Arunachal Pradesh's remove from the rest of India, and the rest of the world, it is necessary to travel another seven hours by road from Itanagar to the hill station of Ziro. As you progress through the villages and settlements along the road, the people start looking less Indian and more and more South-East Asian. The drive itself is an adventure, inching steadily upwards along palm-sweatingly dicey roads cut out of the sides of richly forested hills. Along the route, gaily painted tombstones with names inked on them mark the spots where previous drivers along the route have misjudged the curves, although at least one could have blamed other factors, had he lived - the memorial in question commemorates not just the passengers in the bus, but the bull elephant they collided with.

Ziro was the base from which the famous Flying Tigers of World War II flew "The Hump", as well as providing air support for the battle of Kohina and the retaking of Burma from Japan in 1944. The airfield that launched these missions is still in occasional use. Ziro today is a genial, tumbledown city with few sealed roads and even fewer concessions to visitors, for the simple reason that almost nobody visits. The only worthwhile souvenirs are the beautiful hand-woven rugs made by local villagers, and their approach to selling them certainly emphasises that they haven't yet got to grips with the idea of tourism. I buy one - red and black, embroidered with stripes of multi-coloured wool - from a stall opposite the airfield. The shopkeeper quotes a price of 550 rupees - about seven quid. Though this is abundantly reasonable for something that is so clearly the result of hours of time and years of expertise, I'm running low on change, so I offer him, somewhat apologetically, 500 rupees. "Okay," he says, grinning triumphantly. "400 rupees." He refuses to take any more.

While Ziro, though remote, is recognisably a 20th century city, nearby Hong looks like a theme park vision of what mediaeval Asia might have been like - except, of course, that as far as the Apa Tani tribespeople who live here are concerned, it's real life. Hong is a collection of a few dozen grey houses, built from bamboo and roofed by palm leaves. Some of the houses have one or more constructions lashed to their porches that resemble giant wooden television aerials - they are, in fact, animist totems denoting the birth of a male child to the household. Hong's two squares are each dominated by much bigger versions of the same thing - at a great village festival, held every three to five years, the tradition among the young men is to steel themselves with rice wine and swing from them.

The only traffic in Hong consists of pigs, chickens, dogs and people. The children look as filthy and happy as children anywhere, and dress like children anywhere - India's national education system extends even this far. As is the case anywhere, it is the older people who cleave hardest to the local traditions. The men carry short swords in blunt-tipped scabbards slung around their necks, wear their hair in topknots and sport complicated, swirling facial tattoos. The women also have the permanent face-paint, but also distend their noses and ears with really quite alarmingly large wooden plugs. One such apparition invites us into her house - a large, dark single room with a fireplace in the middle of it and pigs, chickens and dogs waiting noisily for leftovers beneath the bamboo floor. She ladles us servings of cloudy rice wine into steel cups and regards us smilingly. The wine tastes okay, but doesn't inspire any great urge to go and hang from one of the teetering wooden crosses in the square outside.

Were you to remove the more modern utensils and clothes from the people of Hong, the village could exist any time in the last thousand years. Incredibly, Arunachal Pradesh secretes dozens - even hundreds - more villages even more detached from the world at large. The tributaries that wind down from the Himalayas into the mighty Brahmaputra river are a life source for any number of isolated settlements. As you drive along the bank of the Siang river, navigable by the dirt mountain road from Pasighat, you can catch glimpses through the jungle of the roofs of villages that no foreign person - indeed, almost no non-Arunachali Indian - has ever been to.

Pongging, Sissen, Panggi, Karu and Komsing are now all off the list of unvisited villages - these were the ones the expedition I travelled with camped at - but all five will be able to stand a few more tourists before they turn into Disneyland. The people who dwell in these villages belong largely to the Adi Minyong tribal group and lead a life as close to idyllic self-sufficiency as exists outside the memoirs of the HMS Bounty mutineers. The jungles that surround them are a bottomless reservoir of game, and the lush, moist ground supports acres of rice and millet.

The jungle can be a mixed blessing, of course - the Siang trails should not be attempted by anyone with a major aversion to being eaten alive by a singularly ravenous population of leeches, and the area is also home to substantial numbers of big cats. Several of my party were roared at by an unseen leopard, and a couple of weeks before we'd arrived in Pongging, a villager had shot a tiger who'd come a bit close to the village for comfort. This may have been necessary, and was certainly fancy shooting with an ancient, muzzle-loading rifle, but the hunter was punished nonetheless according to tribal law, which strictly forbids the killing of tigers: he was not allowed meat for some weeks, and made to sleep apart from his wife for two months.

In all five villages, we were treated as honoured guests, although our appearance and equipment caused equal parts consternation and amusement. The people up here are not entirely unacquainted with the outside world, however. On top of the hill in the middle of Karu sit two indicators of the village's spiritual priorities: an animist totem pole, and cricket stumps.

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