Word: bengalis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rachel McDermott, a Ph.D candidate in Religion, will depart on October 1 for Calcutta, India, in the hope of improving Western scholarship on the Bengali goddess, Kali. McDermott said that her investigation will consist of studying the Bengali poetic tradition, especially during the 19th-century, devoted to this deity...
...moved between the cots, delivering a tin plate of food to one or trying to spoon-feed another. As he cradled patients in his arms and traced the sign of the Cross on their brows, he sometimes seemed at a loss for words. When a woman cried out in Bengali, he asked his guide, Mother Teresa, to translate. "She's saying she's very, very alone, and she's telling you, 'Come back again.' " The Pontiff, his eyes misting, grasped the woman's head and gently kissed her forehead. Emerging later into the teeming streets, he seemed emotionally drained...
...outbreak of tribal warfare caught authorities by surprise, although resentment had been building for a long time against Bengali settlers who had immigrated to Assam from the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh. In the turmoil surrounding the election, dissidents practically shut down the state. They forced shops, banks and government offices in the capital to close as part of an 18-day "noncooperation movement." Mobs stormed police stations, blew up bridges, assassinated one candidate, and blocked roads with huge boulders as a warning that anyone who dared pass risked death...
Even then, the territory was an exotic ethnic mix that included Indo-Aryan Assamese, Assamese-speaking Hindus in the Brahmaputra valley, dozens of hill tribes of Mongoloid stock, and indigenous plains tribes. Then came successive waves of Bengalis, both Hindus and Muslims, who were first brought in by the British to run the tea plantations and the civil service of the British raj. Bengali immigration intensified during partition in 1947 and again after the creation of Bangladesh. Although its population is one of the fastest growing on the subcontinent, Assam has only 254 people per sq. km. West Bengal...
...majority, taking 90 out of the 108 seats in the state legislature and four of the five seats for Parliament. That came as no surprise, since the small Communist Party (Marxist) was the only other party contesting the election. Officials said that voting had been heavy (70%) in the Bengali districts, where there was no violence, but that 18 state and seven parliamentary contests had had to be nullified. It was not a victory that anyone could take satisfaction from - and hardly a happy note on which to welcome the 80 heads of state who will arrive in New Delhi...