Word: cooch
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Devi, known to her friends as Ayesha, was born into the royal family of tiny Cooch Behar in eastern India. In her autobiography, she recalled an idyllic childhood of English governesses, big-game hunting and finishing school in Switzerland. Her mother, a daring socialite in her own right, disapproved of Devi's joining the orthodox royal house of Jaipur, whose women lived in purdah--hidden from the gaze of men outside their families. But Devi had already fallen in love with the jet-setting, polo-playing maharaja, and she soon made Jaipur her own. She started an élite girls...
...unlikely to allow people in the disputed areas to simply choose a side. A referendum there would inevitably renew demands for the long-promised plebiscite in Kashmir. But political parties on the border have not been shy about using these residents to swell their vote banks. Subhasis Ghosh, the Cooch Behar official in charge of dispensing development funds, says he received 10,000 applications for voter ID cards last year and rejected 8,000 for dubious family and residency ties to his district. "A voter card is the most valuable thing in this area," he says. It makes sure that...
...Nowhere is this more apparent than in the enclaves of Cooch Behar. The story, as it was repeatedly told to me by various BSF officials, goes like this. The Raja of Cooch Behar and the Nawab of Rangpur, the rulers of two minor kingdoms that faced each other near the Teesta River, staked games of chess with plots of land. To settle their debts, they passed chits - pieces of paper representing the territory won or lost - back and forth. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the law lord who partitioned India, drew the 1947 border, Cooch Behar went to India and Rangpur...
...stone's throw from the Dhangars' camp stands a tent housing a dozen men dressed all in white. They're representing the Greater Cooch Behar People's Association, which is demanding that eight districts currently divided between the states of Assam and West Bengal be recognized as a separate state of Cooch Behar. "Our language and culture are different from these states," says Babua Barman, who, along with other Cooch Behar activists, has been camping near Jantar Mantar for two years...
...stone's throw from the Dhangar camp stands a tent housing a dozen white-attired men, representing the Greater Cooch-Behar People's Association. They are demanding that eight districts currently divided between the eastern states of Assam and West Bengal be instead recognized as a separate state of Cooch Behar. "Our language and culture are different from these states'," says Babua Barman, a central committee member of the GCBPA, whose activists have been camping near Jantar Mantar for two years now, joining a chorus of calls for separate statehood from more than half a dozen regions across the country...