Glimpses of Gandhiji's Assam Visit

 

Mahatma Gandhi visited Assam four times in his life. His first visit to this

state was in the year 1921. His subsequent visits to Assam were in 1926, 1934 and 1946. Till that Assam was in its regional cocoon. Gandhiji's visit helped it to pull itself out of the cocoon and its bonding with the national movement got strengthened. Gandhiji's second visit to Assam in the year 1926 bears a great significance. That year Congress session was scheduled at Pandu in Guwahati on the bank of river Brahmaputra. The entire pandal erected was to be covered by only khadi cloths. For this reason 10000 yards of Khadi cloth were necessary. Families of  four neighbouring districts of Assam were assigned the job of producing the special quality of Khadi Cloth required for the pandal and that was achieved in time. This was the first time in the history of Congress that the main pandal was covered by Khadi cloths. This motivated the Congress workers to set a trend to construct pandals of all future Congress sessions out of Khadi.During his last visit to Assam in 1946 Gandhiji inaugurated the Assam branch of Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust and a Gram Sevikas Vidyalaya. This is the only branch in India that was inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi himself.

While in Guwahati, Gandhiji was overwhelmed by the beauty of Brahmaputra. He compared  Brahmaputra to Thames of London in superiority and said that he had seen the glittering scenes of Thames in London but he could not recall any scene like the one sitting on the bank of which he was writng the notes.
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