Fraternity to Communality - Moving Round the ...

Fraternity to Communality - Moving Round the Socio-Political Scenario of Tripura

Author Name : Dr. Nirmal Bhadra

The ethnic distribution of Tripura, - a small state of North East India is very peculiar. A large population of the state is constituted of Hindu Bengalis, where as the tribes are the indigenous people of the state. They inhabited Tripura since the primitive age.  Meanwhile for fostering education, trade and commerce in the state the Royal family of the then Tripura invited administrative personals of various sort and expert farmers from Bengal. On the other hand incidents like partition of the country, communal disturbances and the Indo-Pak war of 1971 forced thousands of non tribe people from the neighbouring districts of the then East Pakistan and today’s Bangladesh to migrate and settle in Tripura. As a result of very close contact between the Bengalis and the different tribes of Tripura a new dimension in the society of Tripura incepted.

Apart from various surveys it has been observed that before 1940 there was no opposition to the resentment of the immigration of the non tribal among the tribes of the state. The tribes of the state accepted the non-tribes as their own. There was peace everywhere. Even marriages happened between the nontribal and the tribes of the hills. There never occurred any riot or quarrel between the two communities. Only in 1926 a quarrel broke out between the tribes of the hills on the one hand and the non-tribal businessmen on the other. Although Hindu – Muslim riot was a common incident in British Bengal at that time no such incident took place in Tripura¹. Many Bengali Muslims built their permanent residences among the tribal areas. It still exists even in remote tribal areas one can find many Muslims who lived in isolated settlements among the tribes of Tripura².