BY TC News Desk
Agartala, 4th January 2026: In the villages of Tripura, the rhythmic sound of the traditional rice-beating dheki—once an integral part of Bengali households during the winter harvest and festive season—has become increasingly rare. Once a common sight across the countryside, the dheki now survives in only a few pockets, while urban areas have almost completely lost touch with this age-old tradition.
For generations, the Bengali community has associated the dheki with the joyous preparation of pithas (traditional rice cakes) during the festive month of Poush. Villagers, particularly mothers and daughters, would gather in the cold winter mornings, taking turns at the dheki to pound rice for pithas, creating a rhythm that resonated with the season’s celebration.
But those nostalgic scenes are increasingly confined to memory. Today, the younger generation often prefers ready-made pithas from sweet shops over the labor-intensive, hand-pounded variety. In the past, starting from mid-Poush, women would dedicate hours to beating rice under the winter sun, barely pausing to eat, to prepare an array of pithas for family and festivals. Names and varieties of these pithas—like patisapta, malpua, and puli pitha—were passed down from mothers and aunts to the younger women of the household.
The change, however, is undeniable. Speaking from Kalyanpur Market Colony, a young schoolteacher said, “With work and children to manage, there’s hardly time to make pithas at home. We rely on shop-bought ones.” Others, like Radha Rani Das from Kamalnagar, continue to make pithas as a livelihood, selling them at local fairs and markets, especially during Poush. Yet even here, traditional dheki-pounded rice is gradually giving way to machine-processed flour.
In some villages, the dheki still exists. At the home of Khokon Debnath near the Kalyanpur Forest Office, women can be seen bringing rice to pound for homemade pithas. Despite the labor, they insist that machine-processed flour cannot replicate the authentic taste of traditionally pounded rice.
The winds of modernization have also brought a new solution: the Poush month has seen the opening of a rice milling unit in Purba Kunjaban village, Kalyanpur Block. Here, rice is mechanically ground into flour at just 15 rupees per kilogram, with the capacity to produce 20 kg per hour. Villagers and shopkeepers flock to the mill daily, making the process far easier than the traditional dheki.
Even as the convenience of machinery wins over time-pressed families, the enduring charm and flavor of dheki-pounded rice remain unmatched. The humble dheki, a symbol of tradition and togetherness, may be fading, but for those who cherish authenticity, it still holds a sacred place—its echoes of the past quietly reminding us of simpler, joyous winter mornings in rural Bengal.
