– Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
In the beginning of the 17th century, the Kingdom of the Cocho had its headquarters in Hajo. Although it was visible on the northern side of Brahmaputra, that city was not the destination of the two Portuguese priests, but Pandu, the nerve center of a region recently conquered by the Moguls to the kingdom of Assam, whose territory stretched its borders eastward. As Cacela writes, “Pandó is not a very large but it is crowded; it does not extend far into the interior, but lying on the shore of the beautiful Rio do Cocho; and is the cause of the continual war with the assanes who confine with Pandó, the last land of the Kingdom in that part.”
In fact, Pandu was situated in the south border of the Brahmaputra, the so-called “river of the Cocho,” ten and a half kilometers from Hajo. In Pandu the Jesuits obtained the first information about the mythical Cathay by the voice of a Uyghur of the kingdom of Kashgar, as Cacela tells us: “We did not find there anyone who had heard of that Kingdom more than a Moor, a serious person who told us that Cathay lies beyond a city called Coscar.”
Also the local Raja, named Satargit, “a native of Busna,” commander-general of the Mughal army in front of Assam, received them very well, and even made a point of accompanying them on the obligatory courtesy visit to his new Mughal lord, Bir Narayan – the “Liquinarane” of Cacela’s Relação – who lived in a palace in Hajo, also dependent on the indisputable and unstoppable authority of Akbar, the syncretic emperor of the Mughals, protector and friend of the Jesuits who at the monarch court in Fatehpur Sikri, a few hundred miles north of Agra, secured them residence and chapel.
In reality, modern Guwahati is nothing more than a territorial extension of the old Pandu, nowadays a mere peripheral district bathed by Brahmaputra. Its south bank is the first and only place to visit, shortly after we rented a car and the driver who will transport us the next day to Cooch Behar. I was looking forward to find out vestiges of the importance of the old quarters of Pandu. In vain. I am confronted only with a pile of shacks interspersed by one or another cement building along the shores of the sacred Brahmaputra, the object of continued offerings and ceremonies to the deities of the Hindu pantheon. Sitting on the sandy ground a devotee prays, hands together in front of a bowl of coconut water and a small branch of laurel and does what the brahmin, squatting, recommends him. At the end of the prayer, the ritual bath imposes itself and the leftovers must be delivered to the birds, who are slow to arrive. In fact, one does not see a single bird, a rare fact next to a river of this size. Fluttering in the water surface enormous skeins of natural foam. Stranded, rotting away, an old ferrie and, in the water, another one that looks more like housing than means of transport. A barge arrives and it is in it that two people, a bicycle and a goat make the crossing to the island ahead, that Estevão Cacela reported in his text. I confess that I was surprised by the rare presence of boats in the mellow waters of the Brahmaputra.
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