The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra

Written by Samrat Choudhury

Narrated by Ranjit Madgavkar

The Brahmaputra is by some margin the largest river in India. After its confluence with the Ganga in Bangladesh, it becomes the largest in Asia. In The Braided River, journalist Samrat Choudhury sets out to follow its braided course from the edge of Tibet where it enters India down to where it meets the Ganga at a spot marked by the biggest red light district in Bangladesh. Along the way, he meets suspicious Indian spies, gets packed off on the back of a cement truck by soldiers, visit a shelter home for baby rhino and elephant orphans in Kaziranga, and hops from river island to riverside town meeting the locals. The tales of these encounters spice up a story that weaves in the history of the emergence of the border between India and China in Arunachal Pradesh, the formation of the Assamese identity -- a matter of great contemporary relevance owing to the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act -- and the ecological challenges posed by proposed dams.

This is a genre-bending book that touches upon several hot-button issues -- environmental, military and political -- as it blends travel, memoir and history with the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Dec 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9789354893148

Samrat Choudhury

Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist from Shillong, and a former editor of broadsheet newspapers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. He currently divides his time between India and the Philippines and writes op-eds, analyses and occasional reportage for a number of national and international publications.  Samrat's previous book was The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra, 2021. He has earlier authored a novel, The Urban Jungle, which was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize. He also co-edited an anthology titled Insider/Outsider, on this issue with relation to Northeast India. His other projects include Partition Studies Quarterly, an online journal focused on the forgotten causes and experiences of the Partition of India in its Northeast, of which he is one of the three founders.  Samrat was the Asian Leadership Fellow from India at the International House of Japan in Tokyo in 2018 and a Chevening Scholar at the University of Westminster, London, in 2019.