The Dam and the Tribal

At 10,039 square kilometres, Tripura is northeast India's smallest state. But this was not always so. The Manikya rulers controlled much of East Bengal's Comilla region during medieval times, and later Maharaj Bijoy Manikya is said to have had the rein from the hills all the way west to present-day Dhaka. With royal patronage, tolerance and multiculturalism flourished in an area otherwise divided by ethnicity and religion. As late as the year 2000, readers of the Agartala-based daily Tripura Observer voted Maharaja Bir Bikram as 'Tripura's Man of the Millennium' in preference to those who have led the state since the end of the royal order.

Even after the advent of the British, when the Tripura kingdom was restricted to its present hill confines, Bengalis and indigenous tribes-people lived in peace. No riots, not even sporadic ethnic clashes were ever reported between Bengali settlers and the original populace of princely Tripura. If the Manikyas welcomed Bengali professionals or peasants to modernise their administration or increase their land revenue through the spread of settled wet-rice agriculture, they also created a tribal reserve, which, in many ways, is the precursor of today's Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council.