On the rainy morning of the 4th I left Dhaka (for the third time) on a bus a little before 10, heading for the eastern border and India. The bus was slow, under rainy and then cloudy skies. I got off about 2 at Chandma and had to take two separate CNGs south on a bad road to get to the border at Akhaura. The sun finally came out at 3, about 15 minutes before I reached Akhaura. I must have passed a hundred trucks lined up waiting to cross the border as I walked to the border post. On the Bangladeshi side the border post was little more than a hovel, while on the Indian side it was a big modern building. A high wire fence marked the border. I was processed quickly on the Bangladeshi side while on the Indian side they were very slow, despite my being the only person crossing.
From the border I took a CNG into Agartala, the capital of the small state of Tripura, only about two miles from the border. I arrived in town just in time to see a Communist parade, replete with red flags, which slowed down traffic. By 4:30 (5 o'clock in Bangladesh) I had checked into a nice hotel, for 900 rupees (about $15) a night. I met Fernando, whom I had met in Srimangal, at the hotel and we walked around town a bit and then had dinner.
Until two or three years before, foreigners needed difficult to obtain permits to visit most of the states in northeastern India. Now they need a permit only for Arunachal Pradesh, and that one is not too difficult to obtain. There have been, and still are, anti-government insurgencies in this part of India, where many of the people are not Indian in ethnicity.
Tripura is India's third smallest state and has only 3.5 million people. It is surrounded by Bangladesh on three sides and Bengalis now significantly outnumber the indigenous people, more than two to one. The local insurgency has quieted down recently, and Bengalis and the indigenous people (several different groups) seem to get along in general. In Agaratala the indigenous women predominantly wear western clothes, the Bengalis Indian clothes.
Rain fell early the next morning, and it was still cloudy and wet when Fernando and I took a bus about 8:30 southeast to the Tripura Sundari Mandir at Matabari, just south of the town of Udaipur. I was a little surprised to see an anti-Obama sign on the way, but the Communist Party, in power in Tripura, is very ant-American. Obama had recently been in India.
The sun was out by the time we arrived about 10 at the temple, one of the many places in India where body parts of Sati fell as an enraged Shiva did his dance of destruction. Here it was her right leg. The temple was fairly quiet and uncrowded when we arrived. It is small, with a tall red shikhara (tower) over a small chamber. Bare chested priests were making offerings to an idol inside. An open sided pavilion is just outside the temple, with bells hanging from the ceiling to be rung by worshippers. Among the worshippers were distinctive looking indigenous people, looking more southeast Asian than Indian.
We sat and watched for a while. Small black baby goats, many with red ribbons around their necks, were being brought into and tied up in the courtyard. The crowd increased and about 11:30 a bare chested priest sat on a marble seat in the pavilion, with a basin full of water and red hibiscus flowers next to him. A baby goat on a leash was dragged before the priest, who blessed it by sprinkling water from the basin on it. He pressed the red hibiscus flowers on the goat's head and then lightly touched its head with a thick sword. The goat was then dragged to its execution site just before the priest. A big, bare-chested guy in a red dhoti held the goat by all four of its legs, pulling the front legs and back legs to the back, and then placed its head into a metal device on a sandy floor. A second bare-chested man in a red dhoti then quickly sliced off its head with a big sword. The body was thrown into a long open drain, the head onto the pavement next to the sand. Both were quivering. The other baby goats were bleating, perhaps from the smell of blood.
The goats were sacrificed one after another. Sometimes several were blessed together by the priest. Soon there was a pile of heads, the most recent ones quivering. I counted 38 in all. A big crowd watched. Some white pigeons were also blessed by the priest and taken into the temple. I didn't see what happened to them. When the sacrifices were finished, the goat bodies were dragged off. I didn't see what happened to the heads. As we left, I did see fresh goat meat apparently for sale.
We took a CNG to Udaipur, just three miles away, and from there a small bus about 12 miles west through rolling hills to Melagarh and a lake just outside of town. On an island in the lake sits Neermahal, a white palace built in 1930-38 for Tripura's maharaja. It is quite impressive from afar. We ate lunch about 3 at an otherwise deserted lakeside restaurant in a hotel, and then took a boat to the palace across the vegetation-filled lake. There were lots of lotuses, and many water birds. The palace itself was much less impressive, in fact rather ugly, up close. It was under reconstruction and really quite a mess. We spent about 20 minutes there and then took the boat back. A sumo brought us back to Agartala, arriving after 7. It was dark before 6.
The next morning was sunny and cool, though it warmed up as the day went on. It was Holi, the Hindu festival in which revelers throw colored powder and liquids at each other, and often at anyone else they come across. Things were quiet in the morning, though. I walked to the impressive white Ujjayanta Palace, completed in 1901 by Tripura's 182nd maharaja, but it was closed for the holiday. Instead I went to a small temple on the opposite side of a tank, in fact a sort of reflecting pool, from the palace, with great views across the water to the palace. Lots of egrets were in the trees around the water on the palace grounds. Priests in the temple's sanctuary were constructing some sort of flower and leaf offering before the idols. The temples had interesting decorations, including the many avatars of Vishnu. I spent quite a while there. Worshippers came and went. Bathers washed in the tank.
Eventually I walked to another temple west of the palace. In the compound were lots of interesting and colorful statues. Some rooms had little dioramas, some quite bizarre. In the main temple worshippers were sitting on the floor and chanting "Hare Krishna Hare Rama" over and over. I made a big circle around the grounds of the palace, encountering some heavily painted Holi revelers. I had some close calls. On the east side of the tank about four young people were doing their best to wash off the colors with water from the tank. I got back to my hotel about 1:30 for lunch and decided to spend the afternoon there to avoid the Holi revelers.
The next morning I arrived at the gleaming white palace about 10, looked around outside, and then spent almost four hours in the new museum inside. There are about 20 rooms. The museum had good maps and photos, but generally it was poorly done for a new museum. I did talk to an interesting guy there about Tripura, the communist government, and relations between indigenous people and Bengalis. He was a Bengali whose family, if I remember correctly, had served the maharaja. The palace had some beautiful tile floors and an impressive dome. I spent the rest of the day at my hotel and at an internet café.
The next morning at 9:30 I left Agartala on a train heading northeast to Kumarghat and beyond. The train tracks have only recently been laid to Agartala. The train route wasn't even marked on my map, published in 2010. I arrived at the station at 9 to find the train of about 15 carriages completely packed. A friendly guy, however, led me to his carriage and squeezed me in among his group. We were six to a bench made for three or four people. The carriage windows were small and barred, and there were so many people standing in the aisles that it was difficult to see out. Tripura has four ridges of hill that run north to south. The train passed through three of these ridges, but mostly through tunnels, and even outside the tunnels much of the time you could only see the banks of the railroad cuts, so it was a disappointing trip. I should have taken the bus, but it left very early in the morning.
The train arrived in Kumarghat after 1, and I took an auto rickshaw crammed full of people north to Kailashahar, about an hour trip. I checked in at the government tourist hotel right on the Bangladeshi border. In fact, I could see the border fence from the hotel.
I hired an auto rickshaw to take me 6 or 7 miles from town to Unakoti, where giant rock reliefs, dating from the 7th to 9th centuries, have been carved on stone outcrops in the hills. The biggest are 30 feet high faces depicting Shiva. There are many other figures: men and women (or maybe gods and goddesses), archers, and animals including a bull, a turtle, a frog, and perhaps a tiger. They are scattered over hillsides with a creek running through the area, with three main concentrations of reliefs. The whole area is very pretty, though poorly maintained. There are big trees with gigantic root systems. Lots of birds sat in the trees eating fruit. You could see and hear the fruit dropping.
There has been some reconstruction, too much I think. One Shiva face looked like about 80% of it was reconstructed with cement. On a hilltop above one set of reliefs sits a small shrine tended by a friendly indigenous Hindu priest with a topknot. A few worshippers made offerings. The elevation in these hills is about 500 feet, compared to maybe 40 at Agartala. I spent more than two hours there, leaving just at sunset, and wish I had had more time. Mosquitoes were out at dusk.
I enjoyed the pretty ride back to town through forested hills and small villages. The auto rickshaw broke down for about ten minutes on the way back, fortunately near a pretty girl bathing in a pond. Several people, looking very southeast Asian, walked by while we were stopped. That night the air was cool.
Birds were chirping early the next morning as I took a walk along the border fence. There are actually two border fences, about five feet apart, topped with barbed wire and with concertina wire in between. I saw vegetable plots and cattle, but no people, on the Bangladeshi side. A few houses were on the Indian side. Three Indian soldiers came along the road on bicycles. I walked as far as a little village of Muslim Bengalis and then turned back. I walked to another little village closer to the hotel and right on the border with very friendly people.
About 9 I took a shared jeep about 20 miles east through the forested hills to Dharmanagar, passing the Unakoti turn off on the way. From there, after some confusion at the chaotic bus station, I left on an 11:50 bus to Silchar to the northeast in Assam state. The bus was packed, but I got a seat. It took four and a half hours to cover the 80 miles to Silchar. The asphalt road was in good shape up to the Assam border, then terrible thereafter through hilly terrain. The asphalt had deteriorated to dust, and roadside trees were dusty quite high up. The road improved in flatter terrain, but the trip was still slow, with lots of little towns and traffic jams. It took about three hours to reach the town of Karimganj, near Bangladesh's northeast point. From there the last 35 miles east to Silchar was on a much better road. I had trouble finding a cheap hotel in Silchar, and finally got one for more than $20, high for India.
From the border I took a CNG into Agartala, the capital of the small state of Tripura, only about two miles from the border. I arrived in town just in time to see a Communist parade, replete with red flags, which slowed down traffic. By 4:30 (5 o'clock in Bangladesh) I had checked into a nice hotel, for 900 rupees (about $15) a night. I met Fernando, whom I had met in Srimangal, at the hotel and we walked around town a bit and then had dinner.
Until two or three years before, foreigners needed difficult to obtain permits to visit most of the states in northeastern India. Now they need a permit only for Arunachal Pradesh, and that one is not too difficult to obtain. There have been, and still are, anti-government insurgencies in this part of India, where many of the people are not Indian in ethnicity.
Tripura is India's third smallest state and has only 3.5 million people. It is surrounded by Bangladesh on three sides and Bengalis now significantly outnumber the indigenous people, more than two to one. The local insurgency has quieted down recently, and Bengalis and the indigenous people (several different groups) seem to get along in general. In Agaratala the indigenous women predominantly wear western clothes, the Bengalis Indian clothes.
Rain fell early the next morning, and it was still cloudy and wet when Fernando and I took a bus about 8:30 southeast to the Tripura Sundari Mandir at Matabari, just south of the town of Udaipur. I was a little surprised to see an anti-Obama sign on the way, but the Communist Party, in power in Tripura, is very ant-American. Obama had recently been in India.
The sun was out by the time we arrived about 10 at the temple, one of the many places in India where body parts of Sati fell as an enraged Shiva did his dance of destruction. Here it was her right leg. The temple was fairly quiet and uncrowded when we arrived. It is small, with a tall red shikhara (tower) over a small chamber. Bare chested priests were making offerings to an idol inside. An open sided pavilion is just outside the temple, with bells hanging from the ceiling to be rung by worshippers. Among the worshippers were distinctive looking indigenous people, looking more southeast Asian than Indian.
We sat and watched for a while. Small black baby goats, many with red ribbons around their necks, were being brought into and tied up in the courtyard. The crowd increased and about 11:30 a bare chested priest sat on a marble seat in the pavilion, with a basin full of water and red hibiscus flowers next to him. A baby goat on a leash was dragged before the priest, who blessed it by sprinkling water from the basin on it. He pressed the red hibiscus flowers on the goat's head and then lightly touched its head with a thick sword. The goat was then dragged to its execution site just before the priest. A big, bare-chested guy in a red dhoti held the goat by all four of its legs, pulling the front legs and back legs to the back, and then placed its head into a metal device on a sandy floor. A second bare-chested man in a red dhoti then quickly sliced off its head with a big sword. The body was thrown into a long open drain, the head onto the pavement next to the sand. Both were quivering. The other baby goats were bleating, perhaps from the smell of blood.
The goats were sacrificed one after another. Sometimes several were blessed together by the priest. Soon there was a pile of heads, the most recent ones quivering. I counted 38 in all. A big crowd watched. Some white pigeons were also blessed by the priest and taken into the temple. I didn't see what happened to them. When the sacrifices were finished, the goat bodies were dragged off. I didn't see what happened to the heads. As we left, I did see fresh goat meat apparently for sale.
We took a CNG to Udaipur, just three miles away, and from there a small bus about 12 miles west through rolling hills to Melagarh and a lake just outside of town. On an island in the lake sits Neermahal, a white palace built in 1930-38 for Tripura's maharaja. It is quite impressive from afar. We ate lunch about 3 at an otherwise deserted lakeside restaurant in a hotel, and then took a boat to the palace across the vegetation-filled lake. There were lots of lotuses, and many water birds. The palace itself was much less impressive, in fact rather ugly, up close. It was under reconstruction and really quite a mess. We spent about 20 minutes there and then took the boat back. A sumo brought us back to Agartala, arriving after 7. It was dark before 6.
The next morning was sunny and cool, though it warmed up as the day went on. It was Holi, the Hindu festival in which revelers throw colored powder and liquids at each other, and often at anyone else they come across. Things were quiet in the morning, though. I walked to the impressive white Ujjayanta Palace, completed in 1901 by Tripura's 182nd maharaja, but it was closed for the holiday. Instead I went to a small temple on the opposite side of a tank, in fact a sort of reflecting pool, from the palace, with great views across the water to the palace. Lots of egrets were in the trees around the water on the palace grounds. Priests in the temple's sanctuary were constructing some sort of flower and leaf offering before the idols. The temples had interesting decorations, including the many avatars of Vishnu. I spent quite a while there. Worshippers came and went. Bathers washed in the tank.
Eventually I walked to another temple west of the palace. In the compound were lots of interesting and colorful statues. Some rooms had little dioramas, some quite bizarre. In the main temple worshippers were sitting on the floor and chanting "Hare Krishna Hare Rama" over and over. I made a big circle around the grounds of the palace, encountering some heavily painted Holi revelers. I had some close calls. On the east side of the tank about four young people were doing their best to wash off the colors with water from the tank. I got back to my hotel about 1:30 for lunch and decided to spend the afternoon there to avoid the Holi revelers.
The next morning I arrived at the gleaming white palace about 10, looked around outside, and then spent almost four hours in the new museum inside. There are about 20 rooms. The museum had good maps and photos, but generally it was poorly done for a new museum. I did talk to an interesting guy there about Tripura, the communist government, and relations between indigenous people and Bengalis. He was a Bengali whose family, if I remember correctly, had served the maharaja. The palace had some beautiful tile floors and an impressive dome. I spent the rest of the day at my hotel and at an internet café.
The next morning at 9:30 I left Agartala on a train heading northeast to Kumarghat and beyond. The train tracks have only recently been laid to Agartala. The train route wasn't even marked on my map, published in 2010. I arrived at the station at 9 to find the train of about 15 carriages completely packed. A friendly guy, however, led me to his carriage and squeezed me in among his group. We were six to a bench made for three or four people. The carriage windows were small and barred, and there were so many people standing in the aisles that it was difficult to see out. Tripura has four ridges of hill that run north to south. The train passed through three of these ridges, but mostly through tunnels, and even outside the tunnels much of the time you could only see the banks of the railroad cuts, so it was a disappointing trip. I should have taken the bus, but it left very early in the morning.
The train arrived in Kumarghat after 1, and I took an auto rickshaw crammed full of people north to Kailashahar, about an hour trip. I checked in at the government tourist hotel right on the Bangladeshi border. In fact, I could see the border fence from the hotel.
I hired an auto rickshaw to take me 6 or 7 miles from town to Unakoti, where giant rock reliefs, dating from the 7th to 9th centuries, have been carved on stone outcrops in the hills. The biggest are 30 feet high faces depicting Shiva. There are many other figures: men and women (or maybe gods and goddesses), archers, and animals including a bull, a turtle, a frog, and perhaps a tiger. They are scattered over hillsides with a creek running through the area, with three main concentrations of reliefs. The whole area is very pretty, though poorly maintained. There are big trees with gigantic root systems. Lots of birds sat in the trees eating fruit. You could see and hear the fruit dropping.
There has been some reconstruction, too much I think. One Shiva face looked like about 80% of it was reconstructed with cement. On a hilltop above one set of reliefs sits a small shrine tended by a friendly indigenous Hindu priest with a topknot. A few worshippers made offerings. The elevation in these hills is about 500 feet, compared to maybe 40 at Agartala. I spent more than two hours there, leaving just at sunset, and wish I had had more time. Mosquitoes were out at dusk.
I enjoyed the pretty ride back to town through forested hills and small villages. The auto rickshaw broke down for about ten minutes on the way back, fortunately near a pretty girl bathing in a pond. Several people, looking very southeast Asian, walked by while we were stopped. That night the air was cool.
Birds were chirping early the next morning as I took a walk along the border fence. There are actually two border fences, about five feet apart, topped with barbed wire and with concertina wire in between. I saw vegetable plots and cattle, but no people, on the Bangladeshi side. A few houses were on the Indian side. Three Indian soldiers came along the road on bicycles. I walked as far as a little village of Muslim Bengalis and then turned back. I walked to another little village closer to the hotel and right on the border with very friendly people.
About 9 I took a shared jeep about 20 miles east through the forested hills to Dharmanagar, passing the Unakoti turn off on the way. From there, after some confusion at the chaotic bus station, I left on an 11:50 bus to Silchar to the northeast in Assam state. The bus was packed, but I got a seat. It took four and a half hours to cover the 80 miles to Silchar. The asphalt road was in good shape up to the Assam border, then terrible thereafter through hilly terrain. The asphalt had deteriorated to dust, and roadside trees were dusty quite high up. The road improved in flatter terrain, but the trip was still slow, with lots of little towns and traffic jams. It took about three hours to reach the town of Karimganj, near Bangladesh's northeast point. From there the last 35 miles east to Silchar was on a much better road. I had trouble finding a cheap hotel in Silchar, and finally got one for more than $20, high for India.
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