Barak Valley


Barak Valley is the southernmost region and administrative division of the Indian state of Assam. It is named after the Barak River, whose watershed roughly forms its northern border. The Barak valley consists of three administrative districts of Assam: Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi. The main and largest city is Silchar, which seats the headquarter of Cachar district and also serves as administrative divisional office of Barak valley division. The valley is bordered by Mizoram and Tripura to the south, Bangladesh and Meghalaya to the west and Manipur to the east respectively. Once North Cachar Hills was a part of Cachar district which became a subdivision in 1951 and eventually a separate district. On 1 July 1983, Karimganj district was curved out from the eponymous subdivision of Cachar district. In 1989, the subdivision of Hailakandi was upgraded into Hailakandi district.

Etymology

The name "Barak" is derived from the Dimasa words 'Bra' and 'Kro'. Bra means bifurcation and Kro upper means portion/stream. The river Barak is bifurcated near Haritikar in the Karimganj district in to Surma River and Kushiyara River, respectively. The upstream of this bifurcated river was called "Brakro" by the Barman Kacharis of Cachar plains.
Barak valley excluding Karimganj was once part of the Kachari kingdom. Some have suggested the word "Kachar" in Bengali language means a stretch of land at the foot of a mountain and Cachar might have been the name given by Bengalis of Sylhet to the land surrounded by mountains from all the sides. Others have pointed out that the name "Kachari" is widely prevalent in the Brahmaputra Valley and that the Dimasa people were known as "Kachari" even before they came to rule the Cachar plains, suggesting that it was the Dimasa people that gave the name Cachar to the plains.

Districts

Barak valley Division comprises three districts, namely Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi.
CodeDistrictHeadquarterPopulation Area Density
CACacharSilchar1,736,3193,786460
HAHailakandiHailakandi659,2961,327497
KRKarimganjKarimganj1,228,6861,809680
Total3—3,624,3016,922523.59

History

The Barak river today splits into the northern Surma and the southern Kushiara between the towns of Badarpur in the east and Karimganj in the west. Inscriptions suggest that in the 10th century the region around Surma and Kushiara formed frontier settlements called Srihatta and Khanda Kamarupa established by Kamarupa kings in the 7th century. Till 1787, when Brahmaputra changed its course to meet the Meghna a hundred miles farther south, the land between Netrokona in the west and Sylhet in the east was inundated for half of each year forming haors which made the higher plains of the upper Surma-Kushiara basin not as easily accessible from the west as it was from the Cachar plains in the east.
The three districts of the Barak Valley have their own historical origins; nevertheless the region came to be defined not from a natural growth from political, historical or cultural lives of the vernacular groups present in these regions, but as a by-product of colonial empire building under the East India Company and the British Raj. The pre-colonial kingdoms were not cartographically defined; they were rather defined according to heartlands and the defense of the margins were not important. Territories were not necessarily contiguous and communities living in different places owing loyalties to different royal lineages implied territories. The EIC interests led to drastically differently defined cartographic territories—for example, it was in the interest of the two contending parties, the Tripura and the Kachari kingdoms, to define a boundary running east to west across the Dalasuri to determine trade and transaction of goods along the river flowing south to north north and to determine whether Hailakandi was in the control of the Tripuri or the Kachari polity; whereas the EIC was more interested in defining a north–south border along the Dalasuri so it could be defended.

Pre-colonial formations

Cachar

In the 16th century, the Tripura kingdom was in control of the Cachar plains, when in 1562 the Koch general Chilarai annexed the Cachar region to the Koch kingdom and it came to be administered from Khaspur by his half-brother Kamalnarayan. After the death of the Koch ruler Nara Narayan, the region became independent and was ruled by the descendants of Kamalnarayan and his group, and they became known as the Dehans. Between 1745 and 1755, the last Koch ruler's daughter married the king of the Kachari kingdom, and the rule of Khaspur passed into the hands of the Kachari rulers who adopted the title Lord of Hedamba.
The Kachari kings at Khaspur appointed Brahmins as rajpandits and rajgurus and provided land grants to Muslims from Sylhet for cultivation. Some people from Manipur and the Ahom kingdom too moved to the Cachar plains following disturbances in those lands. In 1835, Pemberton reported that the population of the Cachar plains was around 50,000 dominated by the Dimasa people, followed by Muslim immigrants from Sylhet and their descendants; a third group was Bengali and Assamese immigrants and their descendants and Naga, Kuki and Manipuris forming the smallest groups.

Hailakandi

Hailakandi, claimed by both the Tripura and Kachari kingdoms, was a market town on the banks of the Dalasuri river which connected the resource-rich southern hills with the markets in the north along the Barak river. In 1821-22 when Thomas Fischer surveyed the area, he found that Hailakandi was controlled by the Kacharis, though it was surrounded by villages of the Kuki Tanghum community that owed allegiance to the Tripura kingdom. In this region a past Tripura king received a princess from Manipur. It was uncertain which of the three kingdoms the communities paid their tributes to and it effectively formed a boundary zone, a concept that differed significantly from the idea of clearly defined borders between kingdoms.

Karimganj

East India Company had pushed into the region east of Sylhet town slowly after it won the right to collect land revenue under the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765. Among these, Karimganj became a sub-division of the eventual colonial Sylhet district which became a part of Assam in 1874. Following a referendum in 1947 Sylhet was attached to East Pakistan during partition of India in the same year, except for four thanas of the erstwhile Karimganj subdivision that was attached to the Cachar district of Assam, India.
Sylhet is farther to the west of Karimganj, also on the Surma. No state control existed in the Sylhet region till the establishment of Sarkar Sylhet when the Mughals established a Faujdar at Sylhet in 1612. In 1303, Shah Jalal had established rule around Sylhet; and during Ibn Battuta's visit in 1346, the region was inhabited by Khasi, Garo, Hindus, Muslims, and others. The Mughals began the practice of settling cultivators in the region around Sylhet, which picked up significantly only after 1719 and lasted till the beginning of East India Company rule in 1765. The expansion of Mughal domains in Sylhet was part of an ancient process of Gangetic territorialism that displaced or assimilated extant populations consisting of Munda, Khasi and other peoples. The Mughal administration granted land in Sarkar Sylhet to talukdars, called Chaudhuri, in smaller land parcels called taluks, as opposed to larger zamindars in the rest of Bengal. Sylhet was itself a borderland when the EIC acquired the Mughal Sarkar Sylhet in 1765.

Colonial boundaries

EIC acquired Sarkar Sylhet, primarily the frontier town, bounded by regions that were not in their control—Mughal holdouts moved freely in the lowlands controlled by the highland rulers out of Company reach; Khasi chiefs held most of the land north of the Surma; the land north and east of Sylhet town belonged to the Jaintia kingdom; and Tripura kingdom held most of the southern highlands and the adjoining lowlands. The EIC, an erstwhile mercantile company, got into the revenue-farming and judiciary business with the diwani grant of 1765 and developed a keen interest in monopolising traditional trade routes and expanding settled farming for revenue. This was achieved by marking boundaries—company officers served the EIC interests in generating more revenue and confronting Ava militarily, but they also served their own private commercial interests.
According to David R. Syiemlieh, up to 1837 A.D. the plains of Cachar Valley were sparsely populated and were dominated by the Dimasa Cachari, a Tibeto Burmese tribe, under the rule of the Kachari Raja, who have established his kingdom's capital at Khaspur, Cachar plains. He had a good number of Bengali advisers around him and gave grants of land to some of them, but the population resembled that of the North Cachar Hills of today as evident from various historical chronicles and sources. Bengali settlers from neighbouring East Bengal poured into the Cachar plains after the British annexation of the region in 1832 A.D., turning it into a Bengali-majority region. Once, Barak Valley from A.D. was a part of the Bengal Presidency under the British Empire. The British Annexation of Cachar transformed the demographic patterns of the valley overnight. There was a sudden phenomenal growth in population, while the plains of Cachar had about 50 thousands inhabitants in all in 1837 A.D. that is five years after its annexation, which eventually indicates that there was a large-scale immigration. The population rose to more than five lakhs a few years later. The population of Muslims in the colonial era Barak Valley decreased in the late 19th century largely because the fertile lands were occupied by earlier settlers of the region and later they immigrated to the present Hojai of Assam which was also a part of Kachari Kingdom up to 1832 AD. A population 85,522 of diverse backgrounds including hill tribes, in the 1851 Census, Muslims and Hindus, 30,708 and 30,573, respectively, mostly Bengalis, constituted 70% of the total population of Cachar Valley, followed by 10,723 Manipuris, 6,320 Kukis, 5,645 Naga and 2,213 Cacharis. Karimganj district, which have become a part of Cachar Valley plains after 1947, was a part of Sylhet before the Partition of Bengal. The region of Karimganj was under the rule of Pratapgarh Kingdom from 1489-1700s.