Agartala

Agartala is the second largest city in northeast India and the old seat of the Manikya dynasty, which ruled Tripura for some five hundred years and kept unusually close ties with Bengal; Rabindranath Tagore visited seven times and the family were among his earliest patrons. Their palace, Ujjayanta, was built between 1899 and 1901 for Maharaja Radha Kishore Manikya, three tiled domes and Indo-Saracenic arcades set in a Mughal garden between two tanks. It served as the state legislature until 2011 and now houses the Tripura State Museum, whose galleries on the Tripuri, Reang and Chakma communities are worth an unhurried afternoon.

Fifty-three kilometres away at Melaghar, Neermahal stands in the middle of Rudrasagar lake, a red-and-white pleasure palace begun in 1930 for Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya and finished eight years later, half Mughal and half European, reached by rowing boat and floodlit at night. A short drive south is Udaipur and the Tripura Sundari temple, raised by Dhanya Manikya in 1501 on a mound shaped like a tortoise, one of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas and busiest at Diwali. The Bangladesh border sits two kilometres from the centre at Akhaura, which is why the fish here is river fish, the sweets are Bengali, and the same kitchen will serve you mui borok and machher jhol.