Barak Valley division
— — the valley that kept its language.
Not only on a wall.
“The southern division of Assam, where the Barak River runs west toward Bangladesh and the language of the valley is Bengali, not Assamese. Silchar is the heart of it. On May 19, 1961, eleven protesters were killed at Silchar railway station defending the right to read and write in Bengali. The date is remembered every year. The tea gardens climb the surrounding hills, and the river carries the rains down toward Sylhet.
Barak Valley division, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Barak Valley division covers the three districts of Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi in southern Assam, a basin of roughly 6,900 square kilometres drained by the Barak River and its tributaries. Silchar serves as the divisional headquarters and the cultural centre of the valley. The basin is enclosed by hills: the Barail range to the north, the Mizo and Manipur hills to the east, and the Tripura hills to the south. The river flows west into Bangladesh, where it is known as the Surma and the Kushiyara.
Every year on May 19 the valley observes Bhasha Shahid Dibos, the Bengali Language Martyrs' Day. On that date in 1961, eleven people were killed by Assam Police gunfire at Silchar railway station during a non-violent satyagraha against the imposition of Assamese as the sole official language of the state. Kamala Bhattacharya, nineteen years old, was among the dead; she is remembered as the first woman language martyr in the Indian subcontinent. A state amendment that followed recognises Bengali as the official language of the three Barak Valley districts.
The Barak River rises in the Manipur hills, runs roughly 564 kilometres through the valley, and divides at the Bangladesh border into the Surma and Kushiyara distributaries that feed the Meghna system. Within the division, the river floods regularly during the southwest monsoon between June and September, sustaining the wetlands and the wet-rice agriculture of the basin. The Son Beel wetland in Karimganj district, one of the larger seasonal lakes in Northeast India, expands and contracts with the monsoon cycle each year.