Barak Valley · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
The valley's only large town and its transport, education and publishing centre, on the Barak's south bank. Assam University, the medical college, the Bengali-language press and the region's political life are all here, and the railway station carries the memorial to the events of 1961.
Best time: November–March.
The memorial at Silchar railway station to the eleven people killed in the police firing of 19 May 1961. It is the focus of the valley's annual Bhasha Shahid Divas observance, when the station forecourt fills before dawn.
The plains capital the Dimasa Kachari kings moved to from Maibang in the hills. What survives is brickwork — the Singhadwar or lion gate, the Suryadwar or sun gate, a temple and fragments of a hall — standing in cultivated land about twenty kilometres from Silchar with no reconstruction around it. A hill dynasty's attempt to become a plains court, and the reason the valley's older place names are Dimasa.
Best time: October–March.
A Shiva shrine on a forested ridge south-east of Silchar, reached on foot up the hill. The Shivaratri mela draws pilgrims from across the valley and from Tripura and Bangladesh, and the climb, done overnight and in procession, is the point as much as the shrine is.
Best time: February–March, at Shivaratri. Getting there: Road to the trailhead from Silchar, then a walk of several hours.
The largest wetland in Assam and one of the strangest — it is a lake through the monsoon, with boats crossing it and fishing communities working it, and by January it has drained enough to be ploughed and sown with rice. The same ground yields a fish harvest and a grain harvest in one year. Migratory waterfowl use it in winter.
Best time: December–February for the rice-and-birds phase, July–September for the lake.
A river town on the Kushiyara, historically the valley's trade outlet downstream and still its customs and land-port centre. The Barak divides above the town into the Surma and the Kushiyara, and the plain on both banks is continuous.
The smallest district town, at the centre of a tea belt that runs up to the hill foot. The Katakhal drains the basin north into the Barak and floods it reliably.
A wide seasonal depression south-west of Silchar that becomes a shallow lake each monsoon and paddy land each winter, with fisheries worked communally in the wet months. The clearest place to see how the valley's agricultural year is organised around standing water.
Best time: November–February.
Estates opened from the 1850s across the low undulating ground between the flood basins. The valley is Assam's second tea district and its liquor is generally lighter than the Brahmaputra belt's; the estates are also the reason a large Sadri-speaking population lives here.
Best time: April–October for plucking, November–March for comfort.
The valley's rail junction, where the line from the Brahmaputra side turns for Silchar and for the border towns, with the remains of an old riverside fort above the Barak. The point at which everything entering the valley by rail has to pass.
The town's river frontage, where the ferry crossings, the winter fairs and the immersion processions happen. The Barak here is wide, slow and brown, and is used rather than looked at.
Settlements around Silchar and Lakhipur established by Manipuri families displaced during the Burmese occupation of the Manipur valley in the 1820s. Two centuries on they still weave phanek on household looms, perform Raas at Kartik Purnima, and keep a language and a cuisine unrelated to the plain around them.
Places worth visiting in Barak Valley — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (12)