Cane, Bamboo & Grass: The Green Crafts of the Northeast

A Mising Longhouse, 1954

Verrier Elwin is sitting on the veranda of a Mising longhouse in 1954. The Brahmaputra runs brown and heavy forty feet below the stilts. Inside the longhouse, an old bamboo weaver is splitting a green muli stalk with his thumbnail, peeling it into strips thinner than a blade of grass. The strips pile up beside his knee like pale honey ribbons. He is making a japi, the conical sun hat that every Assamese farmer wears in Bihu season.

Elwin has a notebook open on his knee and a cigarette between his fingers. He has been sent by Jawaharlal Nehru to document the arts of the North-East Frontier before, in Nehru's phrase, the modern world crushes them. Elwin is the Anthropological Adviser to the Government of India for the frontier. He has already spent twenty years with the Baiga and Gond of central India and thinks he knows what tribal craft looks like. He is about to be surprised.

Over the next five years, Elwin will travel through every Northeast state. He will sleep in Apatani bamboo houses in Ziro valley, cross Khasi root bridges in the Cherrapunji rainforest, watch Naga elders weave ceremonial hats from palm leaf and cane. He will eventually publish The Art of the North-East Frontier of India in 1959. Its central thesis is quiet and radical. The bamboo, cane and grass crafts of the Northeast are not primitive. They are one of the most sophisticated living-materials traditions anywhere on earth, and they may be the only ones that still build with plants as partners instead of with plants as raw material.

The Sixteen-Month Plant

Bamboo is, technically, not a tree. It is a grass. The tallest grass on earth, and also the fastest-growing plant of any kind. Some species gain a full metre of height in a single day under ideal conditions. In the Northeast, the dominant species are Melocanna baccifera, known locally as muli, and Bambusa tulda. Both mature in three to five years. Both can be harvested every sixteen months without damaging the clump. Both sequester carbon at rates comparable to mature hardwood forests, while producing usable building material twenty times faster.