ABSTRACT
On map F.1 with which this book started, the most permanent of South Asia’s borders runs northwest-southeast along the Terai between Nepal and modern India, and then almost due south along the eastern edge of Bengal. Contrast that map with Figure 11.5, which shows a constituent part of modern India beyond that border. Figure 11.5 also makes clear that this is a linguistically complicated area, with a number of small states, and that the whole is hanging onto the rest of India by the narrowest of threads. In modern political slang, the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, are referred to as the seven sisters. The strip of Indian land which connects them to West Bengal is only 21 kms wide at its narrowest, and is popularly known in India as the Chicken’s Neck. The neck is of course narrow because what was once a constituent part of India – East Bengal – became first part of a hostile state as the East Wing of Pakistan, then the independent and sovereign state of Bangladesh. Squeeze through the neck by road or rail between Nepal to the northeast and Bangladesh to the southwest, and you arrive in the valley of Assam, the broad wet plain of the Brahmaputra. In the days before rail and road, when the British first established regular communication between Bengal and Assam it was by steam boat. Following the river upstream, in Bengal the river craft would be travelling north, then they would go round a very distinct bend to enter Assam, where the river is much more west-east.
