Jatinga Awaits its Visitors

By Samudra Gupta Kashyap

Jatinga has never had too many visitors; only some suicidal birds. For a few months every year, this village that’s about eight km south of Haflong town in Assam, exotic species of birds, like the ashy-headed green pigeon and green-breasted pitta, fly into Jatinga, bang against walls and trees and drop dead, an event that has come to be known as the Jatinga phenomenon among ornithologists.

Till a little over a year ago, the entire North Cachar Hill district (now called Dima Hasao), of which Jatinga is part, was in the grip of militancy and violence. Though Jatinga was not directly affected, it suffered enough collateral damage. Now, the village wants to fight back by opening its doors to outsiders.

“We do not want to perish in this cycle of meaningless violence. Our village, like every other village in this hill district, is a little paradise. People here have realised that tourism is the only road to development,” says Sylvia Suchiang, a school teacher who is part of the Jatinga Mothers’ Association.

Jatinga, a village of 3,000 people, is picture-postcard perfect. Perched on a spur of the Haflong ridge, an offshoot of the Barail mountains, Jatinga is located at a tri-junction of roads leading to Haflong, Lumding and Silchar. It is also connected by a metre-gauge railway track that winds its way through tunnels and over gorges, leisurely or lahe-lahe, as they say in Assamese.

“Jatinga is a 100 per cent literate village,” claims Evelyntice Sajem, who retired as principal of the Haflong Girls’ Higher Secondary School. “Also, women here contribute immensely towards the family income.”

Every morning, women walk down to their fields on the main Barail range, trekking 10 to 12 km each way, carrying home ginger, turmeric, oranges, pineapples, bay-leaf and potatoes. “Lakhonbang Suchaing, the founder of our village, had in 1920 also built a guest house for visitors. Probably he had tourism in his mind,” says Sajem.

“More than anything else, the bird suicide mystery has the potential to attract tourists and ornithologists from all over the world to Jatinga,” says External Siangshai, a youth from this village who is associated with an NGO called Community Resource Management Services.

And that exactly is what the Dima Hasao Autonomous Council—the local-self government in the tribal districts of Assam—is trying to cash in on. The first-ever Jatinga International Festival took off last week and despite teething troubles, tour operators from Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata came to the village.

Way back in 1957, when legendary amateur naturalist Edward Pritchard Gee—originally an Anglo-Indian tea planter in Assam—wrote about birds committing suicide in Jatinga in his book Wildlife of India, not many believed him. But when the celebrated bird-man, Salim Ali, agreed that it was indeed a mysterious phenomenon, the Zoological Survey of India sent Sudhir Sengupta to unravel this mystery. Sengupta linked the suicide tendency of the birds to “changing weather conditions” that disturbed the “physiological rhythm” of the birds. Several studies that followed Sengupta’s have tried to solve the Jatinga phenomenon but there has been no conclusive evidence so far.

While people in Jatinga realise that the bird suicide mystery is their unique selling point, they know it can’t be at the cost of the birds.

“There was a time when every household here put up lights to attract the birds during those particular weeks. We can’t stop the birds from banging against walls but with increasing awareness, we have started taking care of the birds and provide them first-aid,” says Manba Sajem, president of the Jatinga Youth Cultural Organisation. Sajem and his friends organise regular awareness programmes for the villagers, telling them that if the birds stop coming to Jatinga, the tourists too won’t come.

The forest department has set up a watch tower where visitors can watch the rush of birds on specific nights, with as many as 44 species of birds recorded over the years.

The list of avian visitors to Jatinga include the yellow bittern, ashy-headed green pigeon, green-breasted pitta, blossom-headed parakeet, greater rocket-tailed drongo, pheasant-tailed jacana, button quail, paradise fly-catcher, slaty-legged banded crake, white-winged wood duck and many more.