Professor Arupjyoti Saikia, Professor in History and Suryya Kumar Bhuyan Endowment Chair on Assam History, IIT Guwahati

Arupjyoti Saikia is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Guwahati, India

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"Arupjyoti Saikia is already known to be the leading historian of Assam. With this magnificent biography of the Brahmaputra, he has also established himself as India's pre-eminent environmental historian. This book beautifully and seamlessly transcends conventional binaries of hill and plain, land and water, economy and culture, social science and natural science. Using a dazzling array of primary sources, Saikia constructs a compelling narrative of the river's journey from geological time to the present, evoking the Brahmaputra's many moods, the forms of human livelihood it enables and constrains, the forms of non-human life it sustains and enhances. This is a total history in the best, and fullest, sense of the term." - -Ramachandra Guha

"'Lucky Brahmaputra, lucky Assam! If a river could get to choose, for its biographer, the most learned, comprehensive, scrupulous and yet sensitive scholar available, the Brahmaputra could not possibly have done better. Saikia's superb study is a model of interdisciplinary learning, hydrological knowledge and historical depth. The Yangzi and Indus must be green with envy.'" - -James C. Scott

"'What kind of history can be told of a region by a river which is its lifeblood and lifeline? Crashing down from the Himalayas, moody and impervious to human efforts to engineer and tame it, the Brahmaputra has sustained the ecology of life and society of Assam, on its terms so far. Saikia's opus is magisterial, but not without passion, as he describes the human-river interactions from its geological bases to contemporary hydrological conceits.'" - -Prasenjit Duara