Since July 19, an artificial flood has wreaked havoc in four Upper Assam districts. So catastrophic has this flood been that nearly 800 villages and an area of around 1,19,000 hectares of cropland have been submerged, sheets of mud have been deposited in fields and inside people’s homes and large areas in the countryside have been turned into lakes.

More than 100 people have died and roughly seven lakh have been affected. Countless cattle have died.

The worst part of this disaster is that these are places not on the map of Assam’s annual flooding. But now, they seem to be doomed, as if a malignant wound has been created that will only spread and not heal.

For a land that is shaped and reshaped by the Brahmaputra river system and its unique fluvial dynamics, floods are not new in Assam – nor unwanted. Every monsoon, floodwaters bring alive all that was parched and dormant, replenishing the wetlands and the paddy fields, and reassuring fecundity in all living beings.

Assamese society has been traditionally a flood-dependent society, not a flood-fearing or flood-resisting one.

To make sense of the current catastrophe in Upper Assam, a historical understanding of how a natural phenomenon has become disastrous in the Brahmaputra Valley is necessary.

Flood toll goes past 100 as two more people die in Assam. More than 70% of the deaths reported in two districts--Sivasagar & Charaideo.Read how the infrastructure accentuates and amplifies the disaster manifold in Upper Assam.https://t.co/RS0bpUnUGk— Rokibuz Zaman (@ZamanRokibuz_) August 9, 2026

Flood toll goes past 100 as two more people die in Assam. More than 70% of the deaths reported in two districts--Sivasagar & Charaideo.Read how the infrastructure accentuates and amplifies the disaster manifold in Upper Assam.https://t.co/RS0bpUnUGk

I grew up in Majuli – an island often associated with flood and riverbank erosion. One of my earliest memories of floods was waking up one morning to find that water was barely a few inches below my bed, with small fish and tadpoles all around me. We spent several days on a raised platform, next to our cattle, cooking and eating there.

That was in the 1980s, but in Majuli, flooding of this kind remained an annual ritual until a few decades........

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