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This cultivation takes place during the winter and the crop is harvested in early summer. The boro plantation is a relatively new practice, and has been popularized with the emergence of new irrigation techniques among the Bengali farmers. The next most important plantation is aush, which is planted around May-June and harvested during August-September. Among them a man cultivation is important, when paddy is planted during monsoon and harvested in the late autumn. Paddy cultivation is practised in Bengal three times a year.
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Nearly 5,000 years ago, paddy cultivation came to Bengal from Southeast Asia and rice became a major calorie resource of Bengali daily life (Murshid 2008:483). Apart from fish and rice, Bengal has had a rich tradition of many vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes, and most of these, such as dal (lentil soup), posto (vegetables made with poppy seeds), fish curry, and mutton curry, are consumed with rice. That is why, from the ancient times, rice and fish emerged as the staple food for the Bengalis. At the same time, the rivers of Bengal are an apparently inexhaustible resource of different varieties of fish. Traditionally, Bengal has been renowned for its extraordinarily fertile agricultural land and production of paddy.
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This landscape constitutes more than 222 million people of which Bangladesh has 141 million and West Bengal 81 million, which helped the Bengali ‘nation’ to become larger than many sovereign countries (Banerji 2005). Bengal has been famous for its food and cuisine ever since the establishment of civilization in the landscape of gluttons, made up of the sovereign state of Bangladesh (earlier East Bengal or East Pakistan) and the Indian state of West Bengal, with a total area of more than 228,000 square kilometers (Banerji 2005:xx).