Tripura Hills & Plains · Northeast Hill Massif
The small things
- Four new years in one fortnightBuisu for the Tripuri, Bizu for the Chakma, Sangrai for the Mog and Poila Boishakh for the Bengali plain all fall within days of each other in mid-April. Across the ranges in the Chittagong Hill Tracts the first three are observed together under a single blended name. It is the same solar turn observed four ways in a territory a day's drive wide.
- A dance performed standing on a potIn Hojagiri, Reang women stand on an earthen pitcher with a bottle and a lit lamp balanced on the head and lamps in the hands, and dance for half an hour using only the lower body. The upper body cannot move, because the load on the head does not permit it — the entire aesthetic of the dance is a consequence of a physical constraint the dancers accepted.
- A geographical indication that belongs to a templeMatabari Pera Prasad was registered as a GI in 2024. Most food GIs attach to a district or a variety; this one attaches to what is offered at one shrine at Udaipur and made in the lane outside it, which is an unusually narrow definition to get through a registry.
- A fish nobody eats as fishBerma is not a dish. It is small dried fish fermented into a cake, added a pinch at a time to vegetables, pork, chutney and broth, and it supplies salt, savour and smell simultaneously. Remove it and a Tripuri kitchen becomes unrecognisable; it is doing the work that fat, stock and spice mix do in other Indian cuisines, all at once and from one ingredient.
- A dance invented to frighten insectsLebang Boomani begins as pest control. After sowing, brightly coloured lebang insects arrive on the jhum plot; men beat bamboo clappers to drive them off and women chase them across the slope. The rhythm and the chase became a set piece performed on stage, but the original function is still legible in the choreography.
- A palace you can only reach by boatNeermahal stands in the water of Rudrasagar, begun in 1921 and finished around 1930 — twenty-four rooms with no land approach at all. Its builder also laid out the plan of Agartala and put in the airfield, which makes him responsible both for the region's most practical infrastructure and for its least practical building.
- Sculpture that could not be carried awayUnakoti's images are cut into the living hillside — a thirty-foot Shiva head and a twenty-two-foot Ganesha among them, from around the eighth and ninth centuries. Nothing there is portable, which is why an unguarded forest site with monumental sculpture still has its monumental sculpture. India put it on the UNESCO tentative list in 2022.
- A hill dynasty that kept its records in BengaliThe Rajmala, the chronicle of the Manikya line, was composed in Bengali verse from the fifteenth century and extended reign by reign. A dynasty whose subjects largely spoke Kokborok chose the language of the plain for its own memory — and four centuries later Tagore turned that chronicle into a novel and a play.
- The bamboo behind the incenseBamboo is the region's leading forest crop, and a large share of the plain round sticks that the Indian incense industry burns is cut and sized here. The decorative cane lamps in the emporium and the agarbatti stick in a temple two thousand kilometres away come off the same clump.
- A language in the wrong familyKokborok is a Bodo-Garo language, related to Bodo and Dimasa in Assam and to Garo in Meghalaya — not to the Kuki-Chin languages of the hills immediately to its east, which are much closer geographically. The region's linguistic affinities run north-west across the Barail, while its terrain runs north-south, and the two do not agree.
- The cloth that marks an age, not an occasionAt the Risa Sormani a girl is given her first risa to wear at adolescence. Most ceremonial textiles in India mark a wedding or a festival; this one marks the passage of a person from one stage of life to another, and the cloth stays with her afterwards as ordinary wear.
- Oranges because of one cold ridgeMandarin orchards work on the Jampui crest at up to 939 m and nowhere else in the region, because nowhere else gets cold enough in winter. A single ridge's altitude produces a fruit economy, a November festival and the region's only hill-station tourism.
Small local details of Tripura Hills & Plains — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)