Escaping a Delhi summer is too tantalising to turn down, but
the sight of Tripura’s rolling green land, as our plane descended on Singerbhil
airport in Agartala, was a bigger relief than I imagined. To parched eyes
longing for green trees and cool shade, Tripura seems like paradise. Like most
people outside the Northeast, I knew next to nothing about the state, but
having got the chance I was determined to find out. I was armed with books,
printouts, more books, a carefully devised itinerary and a plan to cover as
much of the state’s cultural landscape as possible.
the Manu river
After a day wandering about Agartala, we were on our way up
to north Tripura to the town of Kailashahar through the densely forested hill
ranges of Baramura and Teliamura (mura means head). These verdant forests,
extremely troubled not so long ago, are home to some of Tripura’s indigenous
tribes - the Lushai, the Jamatiya and the Reang, among others. The winding hill
road then descended into the lush rice-growing valley of the Manu river, home
to the millions of Bengalis who first came here as refugees from neighbouring
Bangladesh. The land is folded, with even a few scattered tea gardens. Leaving
NH-44 and heading towards Kailashahar, we were in hilly country again. Deep in
these forested hills bordering Sylhet lies one of the crowning glories of
Tripura’s cultural heritage.
A passenger ferry
crossing the Rudrasagar lake to Neermahal
No one can tell with any certainty the identity of the
people who created the unique sculptures of Unakoti hill in these clouded
valleys of the Chawra stream. We arrived on a hot and humid Sunday afternoon.
Entire families of Bengalisand Reangs from Kailashahar and the neighbouring city
of Dharmanagar were out in force, taking in the sights and offering puja. The
object of their veneration was a stupendous thirty-foot bas-relief of a Shiva
face, locally called the Unakotishwar Kalbhairava.
A giant Buddha
To suddenly encounter it is a shock. A cursory view
convinced me that I was looking at a giant Buddha face, what with the shape of
the head and the gigantic ears. Then I noticed the third eye. And then I saw
the massive ear-rings, distinctly tribal, the slightly showy moustache and the
un-Buddhist toothy grin. And finally the ten-foot long crown, reminiscent of
both classical Tamil sculpture as well as the face sculptures of the Bayon
temple in Cambodia. This image, along with two other similar faces on an
adjacent wall, and another collapsed one, forms the cornerstone of this amazing
valley. Although their antecedents are not known, informed guess-work by
historians suggests that these faces are the centre piece of a memorial gallery
for a now-forgotten tribal king who probably identified himself with a totemic
deity, Shibrai, the ur-Shiva of Tripura. Shaivite and Vaishnavite cults had
been firmly established among the tribes of the Tripuri hills by the ninth
century, vying for patronage with a strong Buddhist tradition.
Udaipur's tripurasundari
temple is a classic example of Tripuri architecture of a Bengali char chaala
roof surmounted with a buddhist stupa-like crown
Further uphill lay a plethora of images, large and small,
including a charming little grinning archer with a crown of feathers and two
giant female figures of astonishing vitality. The lack of historical
information has given rise to many myths, including the widely accepted one
that the word Unakoti (one less than a crore) refers to the number of petrified
Brahminical deities that lie in this valley, cursed by Shiva to remain here
till eternity for some minor infraction. However, what can be asserted with
some certainty is that these sculptures span a period of three hundred years
from roughly the ninth to the twelfth centuries AD.
Ganesha Brass
Figures
This is evident in the range of carving styles. A little
further down the valley, the stream descends in a small water fall, and flanking
it is a massive seated Ganesha, along with two equally huge standing
elephant-headed figures. You could call them Ganesha figures, except that
unlike that cuddly Puranic god beloved of merchants, these menacing forms had
up to six tusks each. They were quite different from the figures of the upper
pavilion if still tribal in their attire. A little to their left was a discreet
standing Vishnu, of even greater technical sophistication. It’s all extremely
dramatic, and it’s very tempting to wonder just how many more sculptures might
lie hidden in the surrounding forest, and how many more have been irreparably
lost in the intervening millennia.
