Gazing at Neighbours: Travels Along the Line That Partitioned India

by Bishwanath Ghosh

The story goes that sometime during the eighteenth century, the king of Cooch Behar would routinely sit down to play chess with the governor of neighbouring Rangpur state, which was a part of Mughal-ruled Bengal. On stake would be the most fertile pieces of farmland in their respective domains. The king must have been a better player, because by the time the two stopped playing chess, the kingdom of Cooch Behar had 111 enclaves in Rangpur, whereas Rangpur had only 51 enclaves in Cooch Behar. After Partition, while Cooch Behar acceded to India, Rangpur came under East Pakistan which subsequently became Bangladesh. As a result the ownership of the enclaves—called chhit locally—also changed hands. Chhit means a sprinkle, a definition that goes well with the joke that the enclaves were created by a drunken British clerk who spilled ink while drawing the Radcliffe Line on the map. The truth is that the British had no hand whatsoever in their creation, but the line drawn by Radcliffe—and the animosity between the two new nations that were created by his line—reduced the enclaves, basically villages, into near-prisons. For close to seven decades, their residents were left to fend for themselves, surrounded by the territory of another country and having no administrative access to what was supposed to be their own country. Stepping out of their village technically meant illegally stepping into another country, which could land them in prison. Life in a prison can be better: you ma...

cooch behar Bengal Chittis