A leopard in the courtyard. A private aircraft. Assam's first RCC home. Through one family and one house in Uzan Bazar, an extraordinary chapter of Guwahati's history quietly lives on.
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There are houses that are simply old. And then there are houses that quietly become witnesses to a city's history.
Hidden among the trees of Uzan Bazar, overlooking the Brahmaputra, stands what is believed to be Guwahati's first double-storeyed RCC residential house. Built in 1957, the home has survived changing skylines, expanding neighbourhoods, devastating floods and generations of a city constantly reinventing itself.
Today, as the Goswami family carefully renovates the building without disturbing its original character, they are not merely restoring an old house. They are preserving a small piece of Guwahati's memory. But the story of this house is far bigger than its bricks and walls.
Spend an evening with Dr Naba Goswami, grandson of literary stalwart Hem Chandra Goswami, and the house almost begins to narrate its own history. Every room seems to hold a story. Every corridor opens another chapter.
One moment, you are talking about Assamese literature. The next, you are listening to stories of private aircraft, tea estates, elephants hauling timber, a pet leopard that later became the first animal donated to the Assam State Zoo, and a former President of India enjoying a traditional Assamese lunch under this very roof.
It almost feels unbelievable. Yet every anecdote belongs to this one family.
The foundations of the family's legacy were laid by Hem Chandra Goswami, one of the pioneers of modern Assamese literature. But it was his son, Prafulla Chandra Goswami, who gave the family its entrepreneurial identity. At a time when Guwahati was still a quiet river town, he ventured into businesses that ranged from timber and tea to the export of gharial skins. As those enterprises expanded, the family even purchased a small aircraft to travel between Guwahati and their tea estate in Golaghat, a remarkable luxury for that era.
Dr Goswami still remembers flying in it as a child. His childhood, however, is remembered for something even more unusual. One evening, when he was barely six years old, his father returned home carrying what he described simply as "a surprise." The surprise was a leopard cub and the family named him Spotty.
Raised almost like a pet, Spotty would wake young Naba each morning by gently licking his arm before school. On one Saraswati Puja, the family's elder son even took the now-grown leopard for a walk near Handique Girls' College, sending students running in every direction. Years later, Spotty would become the first animal donated to the Assam State Zoo.
Stories like these sound almost mythical today. Yet they belong to a Guwahati that was slower, smaller and far less crowded than the city we know.
The house itself welcomed personalities who shaped India's history. Former President Giani Zail Singh once shared lunch here, enjoying a traditional serving of bilahi masor tenga alongside then Chief Minister Mahendra Mohan Choudhury. Rani Gaidinliu and Lal Krishna Advani were among several prominent visitors who also walked through its doors.
The family's legacy extended beyond business and literature. Long before women's empowerment became part of everyday conversation, Hem Chandra Goswami's wife donated a bag full of gold jewellery to fund initiatives for women, a decision that even attracted the attention of the British administration. Decades later, that spirit of public service continues through Dr Goswami's own charitable work, including facilitating thousands of cleft surgeries for underprivileged patients and supporting skill-development programmes for women near Guwahati.
Yet perhaps the most fascinating part of this story is not the famous names or extraordinary anecdotes. It is the house itself.
When it was built, Guwahati looked very different. Much of what is now a bustling city barely existed. The family's land once stretched across large parts of Uzan Bazar before changing times, business setbacks and the devastating 1950 earthquake gradually altered both their fortunes and the city's landscape. The house, however, remained.
Today, as workers carefully restore ageing walls, polish old woodwork and prepare the building for a new chapter, the intention is refreshingly simple, not to modernise it beyond recognition, but to allow it to continue telling its stories.
Because sometimes, the most interesting stories about Guwahati aren't hidden inside museums or history books. Sometimes, they are quietly waiting behind the doors of an old house that has been watching the city grow for nearly seventy years.
