I FIRST HEARD OF DHUDOR ALI, the Lazy Man’s Road, while living in Guwahati, and reading a history of Assam by Dr Swarna Lata Baruah.
I read about the Ahom period, which began in 1228 when Sukapha, a chieftain from Mong Mao (somewhere around the present-day boundaries of Assam, Myanmar, China’s Yunnan region, and Arunachal Pradesh) crossed the Patkai mountains with several thousand soldiers and settled in upper Assam. He and his successors would rule Assam for six hundred years, influencing and being influenced by the tribes who already lived in the fertile Brahmaputra valley. One of the later Ahom kings, Gadadhar Singha, decided to take a group of his subjects in hand; these were the dhuds, or lazy men. (They were probably also opium smokers.) The king decided that the dhuds would build a road from Golaghat to Joypur in upper Assam. The road was built, but very slowly.
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