Tripuri

Clans and Kinship

Deb Barman (1983) calls the patrilineal lineage sandai or vasam. Lineages bear the names of animals and birds but have lost any totemic meaning; members share periods of pollution at births and deaths; an adopted son takes his foster father's lineage, and a woman takes her husband's at marriage. The Tripura Tribal Research and Cultural Institute's status analysis (2011), following Pravanshu Tripura, divides the community into dafa, clans: thirty-six in an older list and twenty-one today. Deb Barman also describes three regional groups, Beri, Dona and Daspa, with their own speech, songs and weaving: the Beri around Kamalpur, the Daspa in Khowai and the Mohanpur and Jirania areas, and the Dona around Bishalgarh. Land passed from father to sons, the eldest taking the larger share, and daughters inherited only if the father wished; Deb Barman writes that sons now take two thirds and the widow and daughters share the rest. Each village had a council chosen by the adult villagers for a year, headed by a choudhuri or sardar with a secretary, the karbari, and a messenger, the khandal; women did not sit on it.

The twenty-one dafa that the 2011 status analysis by Das, Choudhury and Tripura, following Pravanshu Tripura, counts in the Tripura community today. Its older list of thirty-six includes names that are now separate tribes, such as Reang, Jamatia, Halam, Koloi, Murasing, Molsom and Rupini. Hutchinson (1906) and Lewin (1869) gave other lists of Tipperah septs. Spellings differ.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Tripura

  Listed as: Tripura, Tripuri, Tippera

The Noatia, who also use the surname Tripura, have a separate entry in Tripura's list (Das, Choudhury and Tripura 2011). Checked against a compilation of the Order and the Census 2011 table for Tripura; amendments of 2022 to 2024 were not checked.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Debapriya Deb Barman (1983), himself a Tripuri, sets out the accounts of the name. One derives Tipra from twi, water, and pha, father or god: the children of the water goddess. The royal chronicle, the Rajmala, traces the kings to Druhyu, son of Yayati of the Lunar line, and names the land after Tripur, a descendant of that line; others connect it with the goddess Tripura Sundari of the Udaipur temple, or with Shiva as Tripurari. Scholars he cites place the origin of the Bodo-speaking peoples, Tripuri among them, in western China, from where they came down the Brahmaputra; Hunter called the rulers of Tripura Tibeto-Burman in origin, and Fisher and the Rajmala note a connection with the Kachari. Lewin wrote in 1869 that a Tipperah, asked his race, would give the name of his clan, such as Puran or Osuie, and use the general name Tipperah only when speaking Bengali.

History

The kings of Tripura, the Manikya dynasty, were drawn from this people, and its Thakur and Karta lines belong to the royal family (Deb Barman 1983). In the royal court the Puratan Tripura were organised in twelve hada, groups with set duties: the Bachal, Siuk, Kuatia, Daityasingh, Hujuria, Siltia, Apaia, Chhatratuia, Deorai or Galim, Subenarayan, Sena and Julai. With the end of the kingdom these groups faded, except the Galim, who still serve as priests at the Ker and Kharchi pujas (Das, Choudhury and Tripura 2011). Under Maharaja Radha Kishore Kokborok speakers of the Sadar and Khowai areas used the surname Tripura or Tring; later they took the title Debbarma, which the 2011 study says the court granted for a fee of a five-rupee silver coin at the Hosom feast. The 1971 census counted 250,382 Tripuri, 55.57 per cent of the tribal people of the state. Hutchinson (1906) found 23,341 Tipperahs in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Faith and Worship

Deb Barman (1983) writes that the Tripuri worship Hindu gods such as Kali, Lakshmi, Krishna and Mahadeva with rites of their own, together with their own deities, most of them male: Garia, Lampra, Owathap and others, with Naksumatai, the guardian of the homestead, chief among the goddesses. Garia and Kalia, gods of success, are worshipped in the first week of Baisakh. The deities have no fixed form: an altar is made of two poles of green muli bamboo, with cross-pieces for certain deities, or a stone, and offerings of rice beer and water are made in bamboo tubes. The priest, the ochai, is a man chosen by the villagers, not a hereditary office, helped by the barua and the khandal; women take part in few rites. In the north the Tripuri hold Langtharai in awe, and at Pous Sankranti many go to the Dumbur falls on the Gomati to worship and to commit relics of their dead to the river.

Deities named in the sources: Garia, Lampra, Naksumatai

Customs

A marriage is arranged through a go-between, the raibai. In the older form the groom, called chamari, went to live and work in the bride's father's house for one to three years, now much shorter, before the wedding was held (Deb Barman 1983). Dances belong to the seasons: the Garia dance at the Garia puja in Baisakh, the Lebang Bumani, danced by men and women together, and the Mamita dance in October and November after the harvest is stored. The 2011 status analysis records a long list of titles once given by the court, from Thakur and Narayan to Sardar and Ray.

Festivals