This is a brief photo essay of the trip that Margot and I made to India in October/November 2025.
Flying in to Kolkata at night and travelling by bus in to the centre of the old part of town was of course a sensory overload. Bright, noisy and crowded, it was at the end of a festival of light and the residents seemed to be embracing this wholeheartedly. But thinking back, it seemed that wherever we were in India there was always a festival going on.
In the older part of Kolkata the English colonial buildings amazed me with their number, size, former grandeur and current decrepitude. They seemed to have found an existence in which India had subsumed them with a casual yet relentless inevitability.
As someone whose own country was a series of British colonies that federated as a nation less than 50 years before India gained its own independence, I found the whole colonial thing fascinating, and wondered what today's Indians thought of it all. Certainly there did not seem to be evidence of bolshie revisionism and protest, but I have observed that in general colonised people do not always feel the glow of warmth and gratitude to their colonisers that those colonisers might think is appropriate. The Queen Victoria Monument (above) seemed to have firm financial pragmatism in evidence, but I felt I would need to read what Indian scholars thought of the whole thing, and with much volatility still about I felt the dust may yet be a long way from settling, if it ever does. In the gardens of the Victoria Monument I became aware that we were quite a novelty, and many families wanted to take photos of us posing with them or their children. I liked this because it made me feel a bit less voyeuristic and my own photos seem more of a fair swap.
"Gangtok 40KM" promises the sign. We flew from Kolkata to Bagdogra, whence we set off in a convoy of white Toyota taxis, feeling very much like the cast of Succession, threading along a crowded single lane road (more crowded because of another festival of course) up and up, seven hours into the dusk and then the night. On the way we stopped for passport control in the town of Rangpo and headed into the state of Sikkim. This is a tiny spit of land between Bhutan and Nepal, bordering with China. Sovereign to India since 1975 it is indicative of the geopolitical complexities that I felt only began to make sense when actually being there and experiencing it.
The long climb in to Gangtok rewarded us with this view from our hotel window the next morning.
Darjeeling was established by the East India Company after the British mediated control of the area to the Raja of Sikkim, creating a buffer in contested lands near Nepal. It functioned as the summer capital of the Bengal Presidency during the British era, and its population grew rapidly as it was developed as a tea growing area from the late 1830s. It rained solidly for the two days we were there, so we did not get to see the sun rise over the Himalayan mountain of Kanchendzonga, but we did ride on a section of a narrow-guage railway completed in 1881 that joined New Jalpaiguri to Darjeeling.
Out of Darjeeling we flew Guwahati and then the next day drove to Silghat where we picked up the boat we'd be on for seven days. We were now in the state of Assam in India's north-east, which like Darjeeling produces tea; only lots more of it. I did not know that tea production only began with British colonisation. The state is also famous for silk production, which has a much longer history.
We learned about tea production, which is highly labour-intensive and very difficult to automate because of the care with which the leaves must be picked so that they have just two leaves with a bud between them to make premium tea. The pickers above were outside the factory we visited and in which we saw the various stages of wilting, rolling, oxidation and drying of the leaves, along with the more modern Cut Tear Curl method that produces smaller particles of leaf suitable for tea-bags and the like.
The woman in the blue dress was also a member of a traditional dance troupe who had come aboard the boat the previous evening and performed for our group, so she was much greeted and photographed when we saw her in the factory the next day.
The Kaziranga National Park - a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is on the Brahmaputra and is a big deal. We went on a safari (if sitting in the back of a Suzuki 4WD and driving around is a safari, and I guess it is) and saw lots of rhinos, elephants, water buffalo and birds. We were lucky and by stopping and waiting we saw a family of about ten elephants crossing the road. We were out at the end of the day (because India has only one time zone the sun was setting at around 4.30 in the east) and lots of the Suzukis were out and about and also got to see them.
The Indian one-horned rhino was hunted near to extinction for its horn, and these days the national park provides a safe haven, but there are lots and lots of rangers on the lookout for poachers.
Fisherman in the park can't go out at night, because anyone out after dark is likely to be shot lest they be poachers, so the fishers in the area come out with the dawn.
Speaking of dawns, it was fun being on the boat and seeing the land drift past. We could only move in daylight because the boat's pilot needed to find the channel in the river which often moved as the silt shifted, and I made a point of watching all the sunrises and sunsets, and had an idea for perhaps making a series of work out of that, but we'll see how it goes.
We visited an island called Majuli, that is the largest river island in the world. To my surprise we had arrived during a festival and the kids were very cheery because there was no school so they could follow us round and have their photos taken.
We visited a village where these bowls were made very skilfully by hand, and wood-fired in kilns.
But of course it wasn't really that simple, as demand for the hand-made bowls was not as strong as it had been before plastics, and as people moved further from the riverbanks as they eroded, the clay became harder to source, wood for fuel was not as plentiful as it had been etc.
The boat trip really was lovely, then it was back in a bus to Jorhat airport and a flight to Kolkata where we had one night before flying home.
Kolkata seemed a bit more familiar and quieter than on our first visit, but also it was a Sunday this time, and that might have had something to do with it. We both took illnesses with us on the plane that lingered back at home, but these did not diminish what was a wonderful and memorable first trip to India.
Credits:
Images David Hume