– Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
During the short trip to the riverside we came across two black wooden boats with high deck and a flat bottom stranded on the sand. On the whole, they did not seem to have a single nail, but pegs of wood. It would have been in a boat of the sort that Cacela and Cabral returned to the Brahmaputra, this time to retrace the path in reverse. A few miles only, for Hajo was right there nearby. We are told by Cacela that “we have set up in very fine boats in which we came to Azó, and the next day we went with the raja to visit the King.” The Jesuit does not forget to point out the popularity enjoyed by the little Raja of Pandu. Apparently he was very generous with the population. We read in the “Relation” that “the streets cheer him up as if he was the king himself, due to the liberality with which he distributed the wealth produced in the region”.
Hajo, today a discrete suburb of Guwahti, was, at the time of the Jesuit visit, the seat of power where the Rajah had his court. Trying to identify the place where they were received is a task that we have set ourselves. It will not be easy! The palatial buildings of the time were, as a rule, made of wood and, as such, perishable.
Crossing the 19th-century iron bridge over the Brahmaputra, our driver shows some difficulties in finding the way. After the third or fourth inquiry, all in vain, we encountered a rusty plaque indicative of the temple. The Hayagriva Madhaba, place of veneration of Narasimh, one of Vishnu’s avatars, mirrors itself in the greenish waters of a huge tank at the foot of Monikut Hill, where the temple is located. There the Hindus make their ritual oblations, whether the water is clean or not. The Ganges and other sacred water courses or reservoirs are a motif of worship, even if in it float carcasses of animals, or even remains of corpses not yet totally burned, because the money is not always enough for the necessary fuel and only the richest are destined for aquila and calamba, the fragrant timber once so sought after on the coasts of Conchinchina and Tokin (present day Vietnam).
A middle-aged individual dressed in yellow (probably a Brahmin) answers affirmatively when I ask him if it was there that the king of Cocho lived. A panel and the opinion of an stranger who, in the meanwhile shows up, corroborate the statement and I believe I have unraveled the mystery. “It was here that the Portuguese priests were received.” On hearing such a hasty conclusion, the man soon contradicted himself, replying in a broken but blunt English: “No. It’s wrong. The king of Cocho never came to this place. If he did so he would go blind. This is the house of Lord Vishnu and only he can reside in it. If the king met the priests it could only have been in Cooch Bihar.”
Our interlocutor, a native of Assam, and as such a staunch defender of his region, was incapable of conceiving that his homeland had ever been controlled by the people of Cocho, even when they were under the Mughals. However, in order not to leave us totally adrift, in a friendly pro-diplomatic move, and also not to lose face, he adds: “There are still his descendants. They live in Calcutta.”
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