A small and quiet town still nurtured in the nourishing lap of the West Dehing Reserve Forest — this is Digboi, the flagship of Asia’s oil industry with the flair for innocuous majesty and simplicity, infinitely vibrant yet infinitely gentle, an inexhaustible saga of human ingenuity and natural profundities. A mystical aura surrounds the history of Digboi dating from the establishment of the Tipam kingdom by the early descendents of the Ahom rulers, and may even take us to much earlier times. A rich medley of men and women from varied corners of the world have made up the heritage of Digboi layer by layer and built up its stronghold of cosmopolitanism together with a number of its unique and ageless institutions, organizations and facilities and whoever comes here even for a short visit is bewitched by their incantatory charms.

The most irresistible charm of them all, however, happens to flow from its wonder creation of the golf facility away from all the vagaries, all the din and bustle of the officialdom and the drudgery of the work-a-day life. Uncouth and virgin, still and sleepy, the entire landscape of the Digboi Golf Link or Course, as you would like to address it, is ready to receive you with its murmuring silence at all hours of the day! Sekhar Suman, the popular star of the small and big screen from Mumbai, years ago in 1996, lost himself so completely one January late afternoon that I had to wake him up from his bewitched captivity with a virtual call and I still remember clearly the ring of his words after he recovered himself to the world of senses, “Oh, how could a piece of earth be so magnificent! Surely, heaven could not be as enchanting!” Anthony Choat, a golfer from Adelaide, Australia, says, “The majesty of the course is simply stunning!”

Yes, even the gloom over the Digboi Golf Course is verdurous and it fills our inner being always with the fresh fragrance of fallow and virgin land, the kind of fragrance that fills our nostrils after a heavy shower at midday in a grassy meadow in mid-April only.

Sprawling luxuriantly across an undulating landscape along the running slope of the hilly stretch of Digboi forest reserve, the golf course is an idyllic site where one can see nature in all her plenty — myriad forms of flora and varieties of fauna. Yes, one can see even today in the early hours of the morning or in the late hours of the afternoon a deer grazing languidly or hear a wild tusker trumpeting or can observe all the varieties of hornbills and so many other avian varieties, including some of the critically endangered species, the reptiles crawling away noiselessly, the indescribably beautiful varieties of butterflies and moths, and may be even some carnivores fleeting silently across the balls of the careless eyes! Unbelievably fabulous and too deep to unravel is the grandiose wealth of it! Yet, the southern boundary wall is only 300 metres away from the Golai No. 2 & 3 stretch of the National Highway No. 38 and the railway line runs parallely in between.

It is here where voices die and silence wakes up and moves along as a trusted companion. The untrammelled sea of green silence drowns one into the realization of the superior reality of an inner unity of consciousness far too great to forget or ignore. The small Club House is the island of tranquillity in the green sea where “peace comes dropping slow” from a green-blue sky not for too above your head! Had Yeats been here he would have chosen to be in this cottage instead of in the makeshift cabin in the Lake Island of Innisfree and would have written one more volume of poems on the wild swans of the water-bodies nearby! Or even Eliot would have found the answer to the question as to the identity of the ‘other’ that progresses unfailingly together with man in the eternal journey of life!

One may play golf or not, but the course is equally bountiful, equally reassuring. ‘Come hither!’ beckons the blissful mother to her erring children. And the call has continued to be responded to in large numbers from very many parts of the world and quite many are reported to have made it a compulsory stop in the yearly run of their life. Many golfers still reminisce in the heart of their hearts in far off corners of the earth the glory and the excitement that they had experienced long years back in the warm lap of this amazing course.

The present course was carved out in early 1943 and prior to that it had been made up in 1930 covering the Assam Oil’s present residential areas of Shantipara and CMH Areas from the Jubilee Field up to the Paragdhar Chaliha Auditorium at Muliabari. The 18-hole golf course at Digboi is the first of its kind in Assam and one among the few best courses in the world. The course length is 6,309 yards. The longest hole is 513 yards and the shortest is 127 yards. The course rating is 71 and Par is 72. The course is mostly a natural one; only a tiny part of it is artificially built up. The wavy surface of the course calls for special ingenuity among the players to keep control upon the ball in its movement between the tee and green. The profusion of natural ditches and rugged mounds here and there make the Digboi Golf Course a real challenge even to the veterans.

This golf course bears testimony to the past history of Digboi; the fifth fairway lies across the airstrip built up in course of the World War II, the Hole No. 3 is called ‘Firing Line-Pillbox’ to commemorate a war-time shelter, the Hole No. 11 near Well No. 992 is called ‘Captain’s Well 992’ because it was opened by the then golf captain of Digboi Golf Course and the Hole No. 17 is ‘Hornbill’s Haunt’ just because it had been frequented by the hornbills from the adjacent forest. In spite of their colour and racial discrimination, the then European community living at Digboi and its neighbourhood had exemplified their regard for the history of the place and they had built a small cottage almost at the midpoint of the now extinct first golf course of Digboi for after-play rest and named it ‘Tipam House’ which exists today with lot of expansions as a reminder of the long lost first golf course.

Till around 1947 golf was an exclusive sport for the Europeans and Indians had no access to it. The first captain of Digboi Golf Club founded in 1930 was JA Butlin and the line of European captains continued without any abetment till 1971 and the last in the lineage was HE Waller. Then came the turn for the illustrious Indian golfers to don the captainship of the Club. Jagadish Phukan became the first Indian to lead the historic Digboi Golf Club as its captain. This year’s incumbent is PC Sonowal, DGM(HR) of IOCL (AOD). A few among the captains in between were Dr PK Barua, PN Das, BN Dutta, RC Mahajan, HB Singh, BK Nath, PK Choudhury, T Saikia, TK Dutta, IP Baruah, AC Gohain, HL Das, AN Das, BK Sarma and PL Barua. The first captain of the ladies wing was Mrs M Williamson in 1968-69.

Since 1999 Digboi Golf Course has been the venue of the national level annual Masters Golf Tournament with limited international participation. It has been the breeding ground of many international class golfers who have added further glories to it. Currently, this year’s IndianOil XtraPremium Masters’ Golf Tournament has been under way since October 22 and the gilded event with modest prize money of Rs 20 lakh will end up in the afternoon of October 25. But why is this tournament here?

Elaborating on the objectives of the tournament, IOCL (AOD) executive director Subrato Ghosh said that apart from popularizing the Indian Oil brand of XtraPremium oil, the motivational back-up consisted of the urges to put forth once again to the world outside the gold-studded and vibrant heritage of the oldest 18-hole golf course of the region and further to create a healthy exposure of this sports event among the local youthful talents. “The breathtaking scenic beauty of the course together with the outlying forest areas should be marked boldly for attention to the whole world,” added Ghosh. He also said that a plan to turn Digboi into a golf-tourism spot was presently being dipped into. While inaugurating the tournament on the morning of October 21, BM Bansal, planning and business development director of IOCL underlined the motive of health-building among the younger generation for a confident India behind their encouragement to this golf tournament and to a number of other sports.

Subrato Ghosh has certainly formulated a positive attitude towards this precious slice of the heritage of Assam and it will be more commendable if he lets his spirit trickle down to the lowest rung of this organization and takes the people into confidence in order to build up an effective mechanism to protect and preserve the pristine glory of the entire landscape of Digboi.

Hitendra Nath Sarma