"We Live Only As Long As the Knives Are Sharp"
By:RK Debbarma, Category: General, Posted on:2009-11-21 13:14:29

In 1821 Lt. Fisher marked the boundary between British Tipperah and Hill Tipperah. The boundary, which came to be known as 'Fisher's Line', served two groups of people the English and the Bengalis. For centuries, Bengali merchants, traders and farmers had been trying to control and establish permanent markets on the foothills between present day northeast India and Bangladesh, but lacked superior power against the 'uncivilised' and 'wild' hill people. The British wanted to make the region commercially 'viable' and 'profitable', but the hill people don't do commerce. The English needed the Bengalis for commercial purpose; and, the Bengalis needed the superior fire power of the English. Their combined enterprise pushed the Khasis, Jaintias,and Kacharis into their present day hills. The then rulers of Tripura wanted to replicate the English by opening its newly marked border to Bengali farmers, traders and merchants to similar purpose. More than a century later Tripuri armed groups, with the objective of ousting the Bengalis from Tripura, started driving them out of Tripuri majority areas, especially interior marketplaces. One such place is the Thal cherra market, locally known as Mairang twisa, in the Chawmanu region. To cut off the armed groups from the inhabitants and to control the sparsely populated hill (though the stated objective is development) a project called 'cluster village' or 'village regrouping' has been implemented by the Government of Tripura at various places in the Dhalai and North districts. Thal cherra is about 25 KM from Chawmanu proper. The road is well fortified with military camps, which dots the roadsides at almost every five kilometre, and an outpost (known as Road Opening Duty) at every strategic hillock. On this road, we passed by the Khakwchang Kami, a newly regrouped or cluster village. The tiny bamboo-thatch houses dotted along the road bore a miserable look.

The Thal Cherra market is situated on the bank of the river Mairang twisa or Thal Nadi (the British Surveyors used Bengalis inhabiting the so called British Tipperah as guides therefore the name thal instead of twisa mairang came to be used). A military camp is situated from where the entire village can be gazed. On both side of the river Tripuris still live in bamboo huts. These days the shopkeepers and buyers are the Tripuris who come from far off villages, including Tripuris from Bangladesh. I asked a shopkeeper, who seems to own the biggest shop, about the absence of Bengalis in the market. "All the shops here were once owned by the Bengalis, I used to make tea on this shop before, they have all left because of the trouble few years ago, now I owned this shop" he said.

In the middle of the market is a ramshackle party office of the communist party of India, where a fairly large crowd gathered to campaign for the by-election to the village council. A dozen women in tattered blouses were dancing to the drum beats. It was the time of the Panchayat election August, 2009. I glanced at the shop keeper I was talking to and smiled, suggesting that I was amused. He smiled back at rue that unless we take part in rallies of the ruling party we dont get B P L Card (Below poverty line card) On the other side of the river bank, we could hear a leader of the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Twipra taking a dig at the government led by the Left front. So we crossed the river to see the crowd. But by the time we got there, the crowds were leaving the venue a government school. After a bit of snooping around, we entered, rather climbed, the house of an old woman to have taste of the local brew. Going by her appearance I judged she must have been 75 plus. As she was narrating about her two sons, who are working in the huk or jhum, I looked around and saw a whet wood (a piece of wood where knife or da is sharpened) almost breaking away on the middle where the da is sharpened everyday. She had lived here, and cultivated the lands before the Bengali traders came, before the state intervened into their lives, their lands. More than half a century of state intervention the village remained a forever village. There has been no change in their material conditions whatsoever. What has changed is their gradual lost of control over their land and subsequently over their lives. The logic behind formation of cluster village is that the region is sparsely populated, which makes it difficult to bring development and give them access to welfare programs. Here is a village, from the beginning large and well grouped. For the last fifty years the inhabitants of this village have remained poor, in fact poorer. How do we ground or justify the logic of development and advancement in the cluster village then?

On our return from Thal Cherra we stopped at Khakwchang Kami to buy chicken. We asked an elderly woman, who was breast feeding her child, if coming to this village had changed her life in any way? She had come from Thal Cherra. She did receive some help from the government in the form of livestock and pineapple for cultivation. The promise of a house is yet to be fulfilled. And the land the government gave her is just large enough to construct the promised house. So what is the point of giving pineapple for cultivation which she can not produce in large scale? We still live only as longs as our knives are sharp she bemoaned. I remembered the whet wood, I saw in Thal Cherra , where the poor sharpened their knives every day.

We spent three days at Chawmanu. I realised, how the claims for development, progress, conservation and rehabilitation by the state constitute project for displacement of indigenous people from their ancestral lands. Long before state intervened into their lives, long before the Bengali traders controlled the markets, they lived on this land. They have preserved the forest. Today they are accused of deforestation. In the name of preservation of forest their, lands are declared Reserved Forest and are evicted from their homes, forced to live in or rehabilitated on the margins of the partitioned reserved forest. In the name of development, the state formulates schemes for bringing the scattered the inhabitants to roadside villages as village reorganisation or cluster village so as to be make them accessible to various welfare schemes. Never mind there are thousand tribal villages which do not need reorganisation but under developed. How do we conceptualise the present where land once own by them is now partitioned, marked and given to them as a gift by the government? The act of gifting land becomes the basis on which political parties in the helm of affairs mobilise the poor in their search for power. As the poor whet their knives on the whet wood every day, their poverty becomes the whet-wood on which political parties whet, sharpen their political slogan and mobilisation. Like the whet wood at Thal Cherra about to give away in the middle, the life of the poor in this region have already wearied owing to constant mobilisation through promises of a B P L card, pine apple plants and a piece of land which they once owned. I remembered the world famous failures about village regroupings: The Meratus in Indonesia were forced to settle in planned villages on the road side and the Ujamaa village campaigns in Tanzania. Both the projects were disaster despite the concern states good intentions.


The debates in the Tripura Assembly, 1963 to 1980, mostly revolved around the issue of rehabilitation of people: Bengalis immigrants from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the tribals dependent on Jhum or huk. One can understand Bengali refugees need to be rehabilitated. But why do the Tribals, who live in Tripura, need to be rehabilitated? One of the reasons is that Tripuris have to be stripped of their ownership right over the land. By applying the term rehabilitation Tripuris were designated as landless and places, just like the Bengali immigrants. By doing this the state can rehabilitated as many refugee Bengalees as they want. While the Bengalis were settled or rehabilitated in government established colonies, the various Tripuris like the Uchois, Tripuras and Reangs coming from East Pakistan were described as illegal and sent back. I was amazed how the idea of rehabilitation was being used to confer lands on the Bengali immigrants and how the same idea was deployed to remove Tripuris from their forest land in the name of forest preservation. Half a century later, Tripuris attempting to control a small portion of vacant land near Agartala, were subjected to brutal police kicks and rifle butts and sticks. Because Tripuris right over land has already been stripped with the notion of rehabilitation applied to them since 1947: Tripuris are landless and placeless. After taking over power over Tripura in 1949, the new state had to produce new idea, new notion of Tripura. Tripura became the place (site) upon which new story (text) had to be incorporated and the old story erased (incompletely). In the new story Tripuris are imagined, conceptualised and narrated as placeless.

The recent attempt by Tripuris to take control of land on the outskirt of Agartala has to be placed in this context (landless and placeless). The amount of brutality inflicted by the state on those people is reflective of the nature of state or the nature of the present in which we live. Very often what is deployed is the question of right and wrong in order to justify acts of brutality on people. The question we need to ask is: what is the context of claim or the act? Across Tripura Tripuris are today mobilised on the promise of a B P L Card: the promise to make them poorer. It is a land where the indigenous people want to be poor. One can only survive if one is poor. This then is the context, the condition of the present. In Thal cherra and every where state intervention in the name of development, rehabilitation and preservation has succeeded in denying people land, forest and lives

In Tripura, land is no longer merely land. Way back in 1960s, when the late Aghore Debbarma raised a question in the Assembly about the establishment of Ambar Charkha centres in Tribal areas the Government wanted to know what he meant by tribal areas and refused to answer the question by stating that we do not know if there is anything called tribal areas. Land is no longer a mere surface on earth where one live. Land has become a place. Taking over of that small piece of land on the outskirt of Agartala by Tripuris would destroy the notion of place on which the state is organised. Tripuris are given a place; we can not appropriate land and make it a place. As in khakchang kami where Tripuris are given a place to live, not appropriate land as place. For that would destroy the very idea of place as defined by the state and in fact destroy that very state which is dependent on that particular notion of place. It is like saying know your place. If you dont live in a place defined by the state as your place you are not entitled to B P L Card. How do you live without that card? For those seeking to dismantle and dislocate this state sponsored story about Tripura you will be subjected to both ends of the rifle butt, and bayonet. If you do not fall line: BULLET.

(I would like to thank my friends Peter Uchoi, Tara S. Debbarma, and Abhijit Debbarma for their help in my journey)

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