Community Living and the Tribes of Tripura: A...

Community Living and the Tribes of Tripura: A Case Study of 20th Century

Author Name : Dr. Nirmal Bhadra

In the course of human history community living was the pioneer method of the commencement of human society. This paper studies the nature end marginalization of community living among the tribal communities of Tripura during the second half of the 20^th century. It also attempts to a microcosm study on the processes of evolution and mishap of the Joint families among the tribal communities of Tripura.              

Tripura, the land of tradition, culture and heritage, is a small state among the North East states of India. Once an imperial or monarchical state, Tripura has undergone and witnessed many significant historical events, passing through these events it has boldly faced many blows and had to accept the reality of destruction and reconstruction. The ethnic distribution of Tripura is very peculiar. A large population of the state is constituted of Hindu Bengalese, where as the tribes are the indigenous people of the state. They inhabited Tripura since the primitive age¹.

 Prof. S. Bhattacharjee has analyzed various aspects of these inhabitants and has shown that the hilly tribes of Tripura belonged to the Mongoloid race and their original house land was south east China. From there only they separated out as a linguistic group of Tibeto-Burman family. They entered Assam via Burma and finally came to Tripura via Garo hills. Their journey started in 1000 B.C. They started staying here approximately 1500 years ago².