Barak Valley

Barak Valley (Bengali pronunciation: [bak uptka]; Sylheti pronunciation: [bax uitxa]) 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. As this Bengali speaking region is situated in the northeastern corner of the greater Bengal, was once identified as "Ishan Bongo"(Northeastern Bengal) in local folklore.

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. Another origin of the name is that Veraka finds it's mention on the Harikela Coins. Which is identifiable to 'Barak' valley. 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.

Barak valley Division comprises three districts, namely Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi.

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 (EIC) 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, th

Data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).