From Shillong to Dispur: The Story of How Assam Got a New Capital

Ask a child in Assam to name the state’s capital and the answer will be Dispur. Ask their grandparents, and some will remember a time when the answer was Shillong, a cool hill town of pines and winding streets.

For nearly a century, Assam’s capital city was Shillong. But in the early 1970s, the map of the North-East was reorganised, and the state found that its capital was no longer in Assam. It had to move to a small village near Guwahati.

How did it happen?

A hill station becomes a capital

The story starts with the British, and with the rain.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British ran the Khasi and Jaintia Hills from Sohra, better known as Cherrapunji. Sohra is famous for its rainfall, and British officials didn’t enjoy living there. The climate was hard and the town had few facilities. In 1864, they moved their station about 50 kilometres away to Shillong, a cooler plateau sitting at roughly 1,500 metres.

Ten years later, in 1874, Assam was separated from Bengal and made a Chief Commissioner’s Province. The British chose Shillong as its headquarters. On a map, the choice made sense. Shillong sat between the province’s two main valleys, the Brahmaputra to the north and the Surma, or Barak, to the south. It was also pleasantly cool, which mattered a great deal to officials who had come from Britain.

The town was nearly lost in the great earthquake of 12 June 1897, which destroyed much of it. Shillong was rebuilt, and it stayed the capital.

When the Assam Legislative Assembly met for the very first time, on 7 April 1937, it gathered in the Assembly Chamber at Shillong, according to the Assembly’s own history. After Independence in 1947, nothing changed. Shillong remained the capital of Assam, which at that time covered much of what we now call the North-East.

The North-East is redrawn

Independent Assam was a very large state. Alongside the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, it included the hill districts that would later become Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram. What is now Arunachal Pradesh was administered separately as a frontier area.

The hill communities spoke different languages and practised different customs and ways of managing land. Their desire for self-government led to the creation of a number of new states.

Nagaland was the first, becoming a state in 1963. On 21 January 1972, the Khasi, Jaintia and Garo Hills became a separate state named Meghalaya, “the abode of clouds”. Under the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971, Manipur and Tripura also became states on the same day.

This left Assam in an awkward position. Its capital, Shillong, was in the Khasi Hills, which were now part of Meghalaya. The Government of Assam was running the state from another state’s capital.

For a short time, according to the Assam Legislative Assembly, Shillong served as the joint capital of both states.

Why Dispur?

In 1972, the Assam government made its decision. The capital would move to Dispur, on the south-eastern edge of Guwahati.

Guwahati was the obvious place to look. It was already Assam’s largest city and its main centre of trade. It had a railway station, an airport, roads running across the state and a river port on the Brahmaputra. It also sat in the Brahmaputra valley, where most of Assam’s people now lived.

Dispur itself was little more than a village, and that was part of its appeal. There was open land, and a government that needed space for offices, homes and an assembly could build there without pulling down half a city.

The move was announced as temporary. Assam needed a working capital in a hurry, and Dispur was the practical answer.

A capital in a tea warehouse

Things moved quickly. On 16 March 1973, the Assam Legislative Assembly held the first sitting of its Budget Session at Dispur, which the Assembly itself describes as the “temporary capital” at the time.

There was nothing grand about it. The Assembly met in a converted tea warehouse. Offices were set up wherever there was room, in whatever buildings could be found or put up in a hurry. It was a long way from the stone buildings and pine trees of Shillong.

Over time, the state secretariat at Dispur, now known as Janata Bhawan, became the centre of Assam’s administration.

How a village became part of the city

When Dispur became the capital, it was a quiet rural area. Fifty years later, you’d struggle to find any sign of the village it once was.

Government offices, ministers’ bungalows, MLA hostels and department headquarters grew up around Janata Bhawan. People came from every part of Assam to work there, and homes, shops and schools followed them. As Guwahati spread outwards, Dispur was swallowed up by the city. Today it falls within the Guwahati Municipal Corporation, in Kamrup Metropolitan district.

Dispur now houses the Assam Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly, MLA hostels and the State Emergency Operations Centre. Most people in Guwahati simply think of it as one of the city’s neighbourhoods, a busy one with a lot of government cars.

Fifty years in a temporary home

The temporary capital kept its temporary Assembly for a remarkably long time. For half a century, Assam’s lawmakers continued to meet in the converted tea warehouse.

That finally changed on 30 July 2023, when Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla inaugurated a new Assam Legislative Assembly building at Dispur. The complex covers about 10 acres. Its design blends traditional Assamese elements with modern technology, and the House has room for over 180 members, comfortably more than the 126 MLAs who sit there now. It was also built for a paperless, digital assembly.

It didn’t come cheap. Delays and later additions pushed the cost from an initial estimate of about ₹234 crore to around ₹351 crore. But fifty years after Dispur was called a stop-gap, it finally had a permanent home for its legislature.

And Shillong?

Shillong became the capital of Meghalaya, and it still is. The buildings that once housed Assam’s government, including the old Secretariat and the Raj Bhavan, now serve Meghalaya. The town still has its colonial-era houses, its pine forests and its cool air, and it remains one of the most popular places to visit in the North-East.

The story in dates

Year	What happened
1864	The British move their station from Sohra (Cherrapunji) to Shillong
1874	Assam becomes a Chief Commissioner’s Province, with Shillong as its capital
1897	The great earthquake of 12 June destroys much of Shillong; the town is rebuilt
1937	The Assam Legislative Assembly holds its first sitting in Shillong (7 April)
1947	Shillong continues as Assam’s capital after Independence
1963	Nagaland becomes a state
1970	Meghalaya becomes an autonomous state within Assam
1972	Meghalaya becomes a full state (21 January); Assam decides to move its capital to Dispur
1973	The Assembly holds its first sitting at Dispur, the “temporary capital” (16 March)
2023	A new, permanent Assembly building opens at Dispur (30 July)

Looking back

Assam didn’t choose to leave Shillong. The map changed around it. When Meghalaya became a state in 1972, Shillong went with it, and Assam needed a new seat of government within its own borders. Dispur offered space, good connections and a place at the heart of the Brahmaputra valley.

What began in 1973 as a stop-gap, with an Assembly sitting in a tea warehouse, slowly became a capital in its own right. It took fifty years for the temporary arrangement to get a permanent Assembly building. In that time, Dispur grew from a village into a busy part of Guwahati, and it’s now hard to imagine Assam being governed from anywhere else.