Do you know there existed a piece of India within Bangladesh within India within Bangladesh?🤯🤯
This is the story of how some historical laziness led to a weirder geography for our country.
An interesting midweek story for you 🧵
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An 'Enclave' is a geographical territory of a country/state that is entirely surrounded by the territory of another country.
During the partition of 1947, Cooch Behar district in West Bengal and Rangpur in East Pakistan ended up with hundreds of enclaves on either side
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The folk history of how these small enclaves came to be is that the Rajas of Cooch Behar & Rangpur traded them hastily as stakes in gambling leading to this weirdness😃
The more reliable story is that the war of 1713 between Behar & Mughals ended without deciding on borders
An enclave is present in many countries. But this mess went to another level.
India had 102 Enclaves in Bangladesh which in turn had 21 Counter Enclaves! Territory of Bangladesh within the Indian enclave 🤯🥺
Bang had 71 Enclaves in India of which 7 were counter enclaves again!
But the best part comes now.
Dahala Khagrabari was the world's only Counter - Counter Enclave!
India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh!
Imagine people here having to cross 5 national borders to go to school few kilometres away! 😇😃
Dahala Khagrabari is only 7000 square metres in size - a size of a jute field there but it held an unique geographical record!
We even had a small road protected with fences for citizens to go to these enclaves separately. One such is the Tin Bigha Corridor just 85 metres wide!
Ideally these should have been exchanged between India & Pakistan during the partition in 1947. But by the time the courts could decide what to do, India-Pak relations had worsened & we had to wait until 1971 to start talks with Bangladesh again.
But it took another 45 years..
In 2015, this situation was fixed when the 2 govts decided to exchange the enclaves on either side to put an end to this anomaly with citizens given option to choose sides
Laziness from 1713 was finally addressed in 2015!
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Today, we go on a short Art History tour! India has several unique painting styles - one of which is Kalighat Paintings. Started in a small scale by artists around the Kalighat temple in Calcutta to be taken back as souvenirs by the devotees, today its an art form by itself!
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As one would expect, it started mainly with mythological themes but over time interest grew & even daily life started getting depicted. British interest grew & today many of the Kalighat paintings are in museums in Britain. Lets look at a few of them
Ravana & Hanuman c 1880
You can see an unique range of locally available colours and simple but beautiful designs
As we all pay homage to #LataMangeshkar , a short story that showcases her genius
Kamal Hassan & Ilaiyaraja were composing songs for the 1988 movie Sathyaa when they chanced upon a great tune! Raja insisted that only Lata can sing such a composition & Kamal agreed to it
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Raja sat down with Vaali for writing the lyrics. He told him Lata ji is going to sing - so let’s make the Tamil words easy for her. They settled on using a grammatical form called ‘Rettai Kilavi’ which has small words repeating in every line like Kala Kala, Kulu Kulu
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As the song got written down, eventually it turned out to be so pacy and complex to sing eventually!! When Lata ji came down to the studio to record, she was surprised by the lyrics & the difficulty of the rhythm of words!
What connects King George V, MS Subbulakshmi and Kanchipuram Silk? 🤔🤔
This is a story about a living historical legacy that we can all still witness today!
About Nalli Silks, one of the most famous brands in the country for silk sarees.
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Chinnaswamy Chetty was a weaver whose ancestors had moved from the village of Nalli in Andhra Pradesh to Kanchipuram. He was a gifted weaver of silk sarees himself and started selling under the Nalli name in 1900.
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His first claim to fame happened when King George V visited India in 1911 for his coronation at the Delhi Darbar. Then Chetty presented him a new weave called the 'Darbar Pattu' or 'Coronation Border'
This gave him popularity & the design was sought after by the public!
1) The word 'Budget' is itself derived from the French word 'Bougette' which means a small purse used for carrying coins. Till couple of years ago, the budget document was still printed and carried in a leather briefcase
2) The practice of presenting the Indian Budget was started by James Wilson in 1869 in the parliament in Britain to explain the colony's finances. One of most popular economists of his time, he also started the magazine 'Economist'
3) The Indian Budget was presented after the British Budget was presented - which was around noon. So over years, the Indian budget became an evening affair. Which we continued until 1999 where the budget was presented at 5pm!! Yashwant Sinha broke the tradition in 2000! :)