Mekhliganj

 town, municipality, taluka headquarter

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Tehsil Mekhliganj, District Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bharat.

Lush green fields of paddy and jute, there is nothing to suggest that we may have, a moment ago, crossed a patch of 'foreign country'. "That's Bangladesh territory," the local guide explains, pointing towards a small cluster of thatched huts. There are no boards or barbed wire fence to divide the two nations. "That's further ahead, near Mekhliganj," he says. And then it dawns on you that you are standing outside one of the 51 Bangladesh 'enclaves' within India. For almost 60 years, the peculiar phenomenon of these enclaves has confounded everyone on both sides of the India-Bangladesh border. In the Cooch Behar district administration records, there is no document to explain how certain pockets of land and its people inside Indian territory came to be ruled by present-day Bangladesh, and vice versa. Popular folklore, however, attributes the phenomenon to battles of chess between the then rulers of Cooch Behar and Rangpur (in present day Bangladesh), two centuries ago, purely for fun or in a bid to augment their territories without having to fight a bloody war.