Call it a coincidence. Or even destiny. But Tathagata Roy still cannot get over it. The newly appointed Tripura Governor's ancestors come from a place, which, also happened to be called "Tipperah or Tripoora" in British India.

What's more, the distance between Agartala, the capital of the northeastern state where Roy is now based, and his ancestral home, now in Bangladesh's Brahmanbari district, is barely 30km or so.

"I had no idea that I would be a governor, much less that of Tripura, which is so close to my ancestral place," says the former Bharatiya Janata Party president of Bengal when we meet on a recent morning at his Calcutta's Lake Road apartment.

Pointing to a glass jar filled with clay on a bookshelf in his office-cum-library, he says somewhat emotionally: "This is the earth from our home, from what was once our land. I collected it on a trip to Brahmanbari last January.''

Roy, who will be 70 in September, is in Calcutta on his way back to Agartala from Delhi, where he had gone to see President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi after being sworn in on May 20.

Clearly, governorship is not what the BJP ideologue - and a staunch proponent of Hindutva - had aimed to attain after an eventful life as a civil engineer, professor, writer and a lawyer of sorts.

Roy - the oldest of four brothers (who include Trinamul MP Sougata Roy) was born in a well-placed family in south Calcutta with roots in what is now Bangladesh - says he had actually longed to "participate actively in the development of Bengal".

Whether as chief minister or not, he says is something that "people of Bengal would have decided."

But with the hope of the BJP coming to power in Bengal receding in the recent elections, where the party fared miserably, he says he has decided to move on.

"I wanted to do something else but it was not to be. So I accepted what my BJP central leaders had decided for me," he says.

Yet, his present assignment could well be a baptism by fire for him.

For one thing, Roy, a self-confessed "anti-Communist," has been put in charge of a state long ruled by the Marxists, leaving the door open for, some analysts say, "constant friction".

For another, his espousal of a somewhat militant form of Hindutva -which he expressed in his controversial tweets in recent times - may not go down well with not just the ruling establishment in Tripura but also the people of the state with a strong Bengali and tribal population.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury has publicly castigated Roy for his stance on Hindutva while disapproving of his controversial tweets on the 2002 Gujarat riots. (Roy says his tweets on Gujarat were misinterpreted.)

The party's Tripura state secretary Bijan Dhar has gone a step further, threatening to launch a mass agitation if the Governor crosses the constitutional line.

After all, with the CPI(M) having lost Bengal and Kerala, Tripura is the last bastion of the Left. And the last thing the Marxists are going to tolerate is any interference from a governor ideologically opposed to them.

A burly man with a raucous voice and a hearty laugh, Roy - who does not use a bell in his home office to call in his staff but simply shouts - seems unfazed.

Yes, the man, attired in a dark brown kurta and white pyjama and black shoes, contends that he will as a Governor steer clear of politics and political tweets, a habit he picked up in 2010 while responding to a newspaper article by his favourite columnist Tavleen Singh.

But where his "beliefs" are concerned, he says he still stands by them.

"I won't give up my belief in Hindutva, come what may. I will only put them on the backburner as a governor while discharging my constitutional duties," an unapologetic Roy says.

He adds that he has already made it clear that "just as you cannot change your parents, you cannot change your beliefs simply because you have become a governor."

Roy, however, emphasises that there is little chance of any future conflicts between him and the ruling party in Tripura.

"They have been firmly ensconced in power in Tripura. It is not a minority or unstable government, so a governor has little role to play there," he notes.

Besides, Roy says he finds Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar, a CPI(M) politburo member who was present at Roy's swearing in, "polite and gentle". And he sees no reason why they should not get along in their respective constitutional positions as governor and chief minister of the state.

<,>R<,>oy has been an active member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and has even written a book on "the Hindu exodus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh". He has also penned a biography of Hindutva icon Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the earlier avatar of the BJP.

A disciple of late Bengali litterateur and Gandhian leader Pramathanath Bishi, Roy says he had grown up to be a Congress supporter without any right-wing beliefs.

Bishi and Roy's late father Debesh Roy, a Survey of India official, had studied together at Rajshahi College in what was then East Bengal. They were close friends living in two houses facing each other in Calcutta's Lake Gardens.

"We called him uncle and he influenced me in a big way. Like him, I became anti-Communist and I remain so. But I had no political consciousness as a Hindu in those days," he says.

But it all changed when Roy - who had studied at St. Lawrence School in south Calcutta and stood sixth in the Higher Secondary examinations in Bengal in 1961 - was a fourth-year civil engineering student at what was then Bengal Engineering College in Howrah's Shibpur.

A group of students, driven out of Dhaka, now Bangladesh's capital, enrolled in the engineering college as fourth-year students with horror stories to tell. "They told us how they were persecuted and hounded for being religious minorities there,'' he recalls.

For the first time, Roy says he "realised that there is something wrong about our secularism and that how hollow it is as an idea".

He says he subsequently embraced "the idea of Hindutva'' as more and more Hindu families were driven from Eastern Pakistan after 1947.

"Few fought for them in independent India and fewer wrote about them," he says, adding this is why he wrote the book on the refugee exodus.

After graduating in civil engineering in 1966, Roy got into the railways in 1967, becoming chief engineer of the Calcutta metro railway in 1988.

The seeds of Hindutva, sown in his mind as a fourth-year engineering student, had sprouted by 1985 and he had started going to the RSS office in Calcutta, accompanied by two of his Metro Railway colleagues who he says were covert RSS members.

"I had by then almost decided to quit the government and get into politics. I had also enrolled in a law college in south Calcutta as I looked for an alternative career," he says.

<,>A<,>s luck would have it, Jadavpur University was looking for professors for its newly opened construction engineering department in 1990. Roy applied and got the job, becoming the first head of the new department.

"I resigned as general manager of RITES, a rail subsidiary where I was on deputation, on June 30, 1990, and joined Jadavpur University on July 1," he says.

That same day, much against his wife Anuradha's advice (they had married in 1970), he joined the BJP.

"My wife has no interest in politics and she is now happy that I have taken up this assignment which will keep me out of active politics," Roy, whose two daughters, Malini and Madhura, live in the US, says with a chuckle.

While at JU, Roy participated in the RSS training camps called Poura Barga, first in Ranchi in 1999, then in Bengal in 2000 and finally in Nagpur in 2001, where the Hindu organisation's headquarters is located. "I have a long association with the RSS and I still go to a sakha in Safari Park near my home in south Calcutta whenever possible," he says.

He also took up arbitration, emerging as a key arbitrator in several legal disputes between construction companies.

In 2002, the BJP central leadership picked him as president of the party's state unit, a post he held till 2006.

"It was absolutely unexpected since I was never an organisation man. I have always seen myself as a leader who has provided the party with intellectual inputs," says Roy, who has modelled himself on the late BJP ideologue K.R. Malkani.

Roy says his appointment as governor was a "pleasant bolt from the blue". He says Union home minister Rajnath Singh had asked for his resume some time ago. "He had only smiled when I asked him why," he says.

While at Raj Bhavan, Roy, who has travelled extensively from Alaska to Manas Sarovar and loves going on cruises, says he will be mindful of "the Bengali as well as tribal population,'' especially of a tribe living in camps after being driven from a neighbouring state.

At the same time, he says he has to finish translating his book on the refugee exodus into Bengali. "It's a priority now," he says.

If he has time, he will also try and finish the autobiography he says he is writing for his granddaughters living in and around New York.

As for tweets, he says he can't kick the habit even if he wants to.

"But I will now be tweeting on Agartala's weather and topography to avoid any controversy," the Tripura Governor says, his tongue firmly in his cheek.