The discovery of oil in India comes with a quirky story but one that is too slick to be true. According to the tale, now a legend in corporate history circles, India’s oldest oil field – Digboi in Assam – got its name from the goading of a British engineer, who exhorted his team to ‘dig boy, dig!’ as they scoured the earth for liquid black gold.

While the oil field, also one of the world’s oldest, owes its name to clever wordplay, the truth is it probably got its name from a corruption of ‘Diboi Nallah’ (note the absence of the ‘g’), the local name for a rivulet that passes through the region.

What we do know for sure is that the discovery of crude in Assam was somewhat of an accident. It goes back to the 1820s, when an invading army from Burma displaced the 800-year-old rule of the Ahoms, leading to the first Anglo-Burmese War of 1824. During the war, a number of British officers went deep into Assam on reconnaissance missions. In 1825, a British officer, Lt R Wilcox of the 46th Regiment Native Infantry, who was at Supkhong (40 km west of Digboi), mentioned in his report that he had observed ‘great bubbles of gas and petroleum’ rising to the surface and that ‘the jungles are full of an odour of petroleum’.