Annapurna Mellor
June 6, 2018
For photographer Annapurna Mellor, five weeks navigating India’s northeast, from Assam to Kolkata, provided ample time to produce a photographic ode to this stunning, rarely-visited region.
I’m staring at the giant map of India which hangs above my desk. I’ve been three times before, and I want to go again. But where? I know very little about the northeast, aside from tea—Darjeeling and Assam are staples in every British cupboard. I make a mark on my map. And with that, the fate of my fourth trip is sealed.
It takes me four flights to get to Gauhati, the capital of Assam and the gateway to the region. I’m on assignment with the Indian tourism board for my first week. They pile me and a group of camera-clad journalists into a couple of jeeps and we leave Assam’s dusty capital to head north, into the wild state of Arunachal Pradesh. Our destination is Tawang, a mountain town claimed by both India and China, on the border between Tibet and Bhutan.
Roadside Assam rolls past my window, and I see the sights I’m familiar with from my travels in the rest of India. Hindu temples, grazing cows, women in colorful saris, fluorescent barber shops and freshly-fried pakoras steaming from streetside shacks.
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There’s no official border crossing to Arunachal Pradesh, but I know we’ve reached the state when we start to climb. From Gauhati to Tawang, it’s a long, two-day drive up some of the world’s highest roads. From the warm plains of Assam, we enter the Tawang Valley through the 13,680-foot (4170-meter) Sela Pass, where snow covers the ground and we gasp to breathe whatever oxygen we can find.
