A boy ferries a boat across flood waters in Majuli. File picture

Guwahati, Sept. 13: Majuli is going back to the Stone Age!

Several bridges to be built on the island under the Prime Minister’s relief package would be cut out from single blocks of stone, a technique used by the Ahom kings. One such bridge still exists at Rongpur, the capital of the Ahoms, currently in Sivasagar district.

The stone bridges will provide an ethnic touch to the island and are part of the Centre’s effort to get the prestigious World Heritage Site tag for the island.

The secretary of the state cultural department, Swapnanil Barua, told The Telegraph that the “single-stone bridges will not have a modern look. These would have some kind of heritage touch, like the one built by the Ahom kings centuries ago”.

Barua said apart from these unique bridges, Majuli would also have an ethnic village, which would depict the life of the people on the island. The work on the Rs 20 crore project would start as soon as floodwaters recede.

South Asia’s largest river island, Majuli, is a major tourist destination in the Northeast. Even today, when the island is almost submerged in floodwaters, more than 50 foreign tourists are camping at Majuli, enjoying every bit of the unique lifestyle of the people. Barua said the construction firm, which got the contract, has been strictly instructed to keep the “heritage touch” to the bridges to come up on the island.

“The basic aim is to the keep the rich heritage tag of the island,” the official said.

The process for Majuli’s nomination in the World Heritage list of the Unesco under “cultural category” has been initiated by the Centre, which was a follow-up to the Prime Minister’s interaction with the satradhikars of the island in August last year.

The Centre has appointed a consultant to prepare a dossier, which would inter-alia, bring out the island’s outstanding universal value.

The International Council of Monuments and Sites, an advisory body of Unesco for World Heritage inscriptions, will also be invited to the site to evaluate and ascertain the outstanding universal value of Majuli as soon as the bridges are ready.

Barua said the ethnic village would depict a typical Mising village. “Since the Mising tribe is the dominant population on the island, this ethnic village would depict a typical Mising village with chang ghars (houses built on a raised platform),” he said.

Majuli with a population of about 150,000 people once covered a prosperous 1,500 square km that was dotted with satras (Vaishnavite monasteries). This was sometime before 1947.

Today, its very existence is in danger as the island has been reduced to half its original size and is prone to extensive flooding and erosion by the Brahmaputra.

The threat to Majuli’s existence began in 1950 after a severe earthquake shifted the riverbed and caused massive silting that in turn led to heavy erosion, particularly during the rainy season. Several satras have also shifted to the mainland to escape the fury of the river.