From that conversation on the fifteen-foot-long country boat or nouka, the town of Comilla in Bangladesh’s relatively better-off south-west appeared to be the favoured destination. All the men said they were heading to Comilla for not less than three or four months. They would stay through the entire agricultural season: from rice planting to harvest, threshing and milling before returning home.

Comilla abuts on India’s Tripura state and its capital, Agartala, is hardly any distance from the international border. None of the Mohfiz spoke of the proximity of India, and especially, Agartala where daily and seasonal migrants from Bangladesh, coming in search of work for labourers, are seen moving across illegally but without any restriction every day. Although they did not talk about it on that boat journey, I am sure that many were considering the possibility of ‘jumping’ ship. A large number of travellers across the Tripura border are day labourers who work as rickshaw-pullers or at construction sites; they also sell fish, consumer goods and small items before returning home in the evenings.

What is of concern however are those who come to stay.

The Road to Tripura

Agartala is not much of a town to look at. It is, in one word, uninspiring. A town dominated by Bengali-speakers, it is sleepy and gives off an overwhelming sense of ennui. Its markets are desultory and small; its roads are bumpy and its climate is enervatingly humid, sticky and hot. Yet, this was once the home of the Tripuri kings who were great patrons of art and culture. They patronized Rabindranath Tagore and his university at Shanti Niketan. Tagore spent six years in Agartala, part of it in a villa put at his disposal by the royal family. Today, that villa is decrepit and crumbling, reflecting the sense of neglect and alienation that has spread through society in the state.

Tripura is a classic case of ethnic rage asserting itself in rebellion against unrelenting demographic and cultural pressure. In the space of a few decades, the aboriginal hill tribes (comprising of not less than twenty-one different groups, including Hindus and Buddhists and Christians) were pushed aside by a swift inflow of Bengali Hindu refugees and migrants from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The numbers grew even more swiftly after anti-Hindu riots broke out in East Pakistan in the mid-1960s. The result was that the docile Tripuris found themselves driven out of land and home by the aggressive Bengalis, many of whom were traders and farmers.