South Asian History and Culture

ISSN: 1947-2498 (Print) 1947-2501 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20

Mobility aspirations and indigenous belonging

among Chakma students in Dhaka

Jacco Visser & Eva Gerharz

To cite this article: Jacco Visser & Eva Gerharz (2016): Mobility aspirations and indigenous
belonging among Chakma students in Dhaka, South Asian History and Culture, DOI:
10.1080/19472498.2016.1223718

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2016.1223718

Published online: 31 Aug 2016.

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SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2016.1223718

Mobility aspirations and indigenous belonging among

Chakma students in Dhaka
Jacco Vissera and Eva Gerharzb
a
School of Communication and Culture, Department of English, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; bSociology
of Development and Internationalisation, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In recent decades, indigenous people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts Mobility; belonging;
(CHT) in South-east Bangladesh have experienced increased social and university education;
spatial mobility. This article investigates how indigenous students from Chittagong Hill Tracts;
the CHT region who have migrated to Dhaka redefine indigenous Bangladesh
belonging. By highlighting the juxtaposition of different forms of mobi-
lity (physical and social) the paper responds to a recent trend which has
only rarely been the subject of scholarly enquiry. In particular, it exam-
ines the experiences of mobility of individual students and explores the
ways in which these students justify their quest for higher education to
fulfil their aspirations for a better future. The paper also reveals the
obstacles students experience in their everyday lives, mainly in the
form of stereotypical, often racist talk. It discusses the structural disad-
vantages indigenous students face as members of ethnic minorities as
well as the strategies employed by the students to counter them.
Furthermore, the paper illustrates how indigenous students negotiate
urban lifestyles and redefine modernity and indigeneity simultaneously
and how migrants face exclusion based on static interpretations of
people from the CHT as put forward in mainstream discourses as well
as by transnational indigenous activist networks. These lead to feelings
of alienation between indigenous students and their Bengali
Bangladeshi peers, leaving students to increasingly draw on indigenous
networks to achieve mobility.

Shortly after independence in 1971, the state of Bangladesh ‘refused to acknowledge the
ethnic diversity and difference within its boundaries’.1 This refusal can be read as a response
to the nation’s founders, who claimed that the unifying features of the nation should be
culture and language. Indigenous groups, seen as ethnic non-Bengalis and as lagging behind
‘mainstream’ Bangladeshis in civilization, should assimilate to the national mainstream. This
was the reply of the founding father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to a delegation
of indigenous people requesting constitutional recognition in early 1972.2 Constituting no
more than 3% of the population, ethnic minorities were associated with ‘hills, forests and
other marginal places’,3 and the regions in which indigenous groups lived, such as the
Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in the south-eastern part of the country, were perceived as
jungles with vast open spaces, where most ‘hill people’ still lived simple, ‘primitive’ lives.
Assimilation to Bengali culture and the transformation into Bengalis, which was proposed
by the Sheikh, was regarded as a way to overcome backwardness and adapt to more modern
lifestyles.

CONTACT Eva Gerharz eva.gerharz@rub.de

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

Over the following decades, some space was created to accommodate perspectives acknowl-
edging the existence of ethnic diversity, as illustrated in the book ‘Bangladesh, A Land of Cultural
Diversity’, which has been handed out by Bangladeshi embassies to account for the country’s
‘cultural diversity’. At the same time while recognizing diversity in the imaginary upon which it
relies – and which is also maintained by representations in media, academic texts and school-
books – this book and other texts continue to propagate images of the alleged inferiority and
backwardness of ethnic minorities.4 The image of cultural diversity that is put forward is
characterized by a paternalistic attitude towards minorities and an essentializing overtone, as
the following description of ‘the Chakma’, the largest group of indigenous people living in the
CHT, illustrates:

The Chakma possess good health and are physically fit as a result of climbing hills. They are very
hardworking. Nowadays more and more of them are becoming literate and many are studying in schools,
colleges and universities.5

The initial disregard of the claims of ethnic minorities to be recognized as culturally different
triggered an armed conflict in the CHT, which lasted from 1975 until 1997. Although formally
pacified by means of a peace treaty, the region continues to symbolize not only cultural diversity
but also resistance against the dominant nationalist imaginary of a homogeneous society. With the
armed conflict having been resolved to a major extent, identity politics in the CHT today embarks
on the global language of indigeneity that has been institutionalized in the last two decades for the
Rights of Indigenous People, called for by the United Nations.6 The notion of indigeneity,
however, is employed by both its opponents and proponents. While special provisions pertaining
to land and ownership are made for by the proponents of indigeneity, opponents tend to proclaim
the stasis of the ancient lifestyles of ‘backward tribals’ and argue that by embracing the concept of
indigeneity, such images may be reproduced. While the first line of argument highlights the
concept’s potential to facilitate the politics of recognition and the claim for minority rights,
the second remodels depreciative perspectives as protectionist ones. Although these positions
concerning identity politics and the position of culturally diverse populations within the nation
state may be considerably divergent, they agree when it comes to conceptualizing indigenous
people and their mobility practices. That is, they agree that it is quite common to describe
indigenous people as dependent on traditional modes of (agricultural) production and lifestyles.
They are seen as enclosed communities attached to their natural environment, and as remaining
untouched by the ‘evils of modernity’. Furthermore, most academic literature describes these
populations in terms of homogeneous communities committed to their traditional way of life,
which includes a clear-cut set of cultural practices and rituals.7
Essentialist, static interpretations of indigeneity black out the increasing willingness of indi-
genous people to be mobile and their incorporation into national and global economies. This has
resulted in a gap in understanding how individuals belonging to so-called indigenous populations
navigate new environments. With its focus on young Chakmas who have migrated to the urban
context of Dhaka for educational purposes, this paper is an attempt to address this gap in the
present scholarship. In particular, we wish to demonstrate that indigenous migration and aspira-
tions of migration are more salient than they used to be. Our aim is twofold. First, drawing on the
specific historical context of the CHT, we show that a number of reasons for and various forms of
mobility can be identified. Social and economic change in the region, as well as increasing
connectivity nationally and globally, has altered people’s aspirations towards a better future. At
the same time, images of indigenous people as ‘noble savages’ or ‘primitive backward people’
persist, as they have become deeply entrenched in contemporary Bangladeshi society. Although
the acknowledgement of recent changes (as described in the quote above) has become common
sense, cultural differences which are played out in the form of discrimination and depreciation
continue to dominate popular imaginaries. Thus, a second argument made in this paper is that the
persistence of essentialist images, as they are reproduced by nationalists as well as indigenous
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 3

activists, turns indigenous students’ encounters in metropolitan Dhaka into an incriminating

experience. This not only limits their upward social mobility but also forces them to negotiate
alternative paths to achieve their goals. We also infer that indigenous students develop strategies
to counter alienation by reasserting cultural difference and demonstrating the significance of their
ethnic belonging. Our findings are based on empirical material collected during various research
visits to Bangladesh. Gerharz visited Bangladesh several times from 1999 onwards till the present
and, alongside participating in people’s everyday lives, interviewed people belonging to different
social realms including a number of indigenous activists. Visser conducted in-depth fieldwork
among Chakma students living in Dhaka in 2012, 2014 and 2015.8

Belonging and mobility

While acknowledging critical perspectives over essentializing images of culture and ethnic belong-
ing, we find it particularly problematic to completely disregard popular images and perspectives
for two reasons. First, we explicitly refrain from taking a position that undermines or contradicts
the positions proposed by those activists who advocate for the rights of indigenous people.
Embarking on recent global initiatives to work for the recognition of indigenous people and
focusing on the discrimination they face from nationalist majorities within nation states, indi-
genous activists in Bangladesh have put forward quite clearly defined claims concerning special
rights to land and other forms of positive discrimination.9 In order to pursue this project, activists
engaged in identity politics promote the idea of indigenous people as original inhabitants, which
goes along with romanticizing images of ‘nature-loving people’ who cling to their traditional ways
of life – in contrast to the modernized lifestyle of the national majority. However, while we do not
deny that politics of nationalism have produced and reproduced inequality, we also try to refrain
from conceptualizing indigenous people in a strategic way, as this entails the kind of normative
assumptions noted above.
Second, we do not seek to repudiate the existence of cultural diversity and its importance in
people’s everyday lives. Religious beliefs, dietary preferences, clothing and language may differ, as
may attitudes concerning sexuality and gender relations; there may also be different practices in
agricultural production and other economic activities. While these are a source of pride for many
and are seen to warrant protection, cultural differences also serve as reasons for discrimination,
exclusion and, henceforth, social inequality. Cultural differences translated into ethnic terms thus
have real consequences for people and become manifest in their everyday lives, as they determine
the allocation of resources and individual life chances. This gives reason to promote protectionist
measures – a dangerous venture which in turn consolidates essentialist images, and which, as
Kuper has quite convincingly pointed out, may lead to the ‘return of the native’.10 Acknowledging
the power of ethnicity when it comes to structuring access to (collective) resources, however, does
not necessarily presume a categorical perspective. As Brubaker has noted, the existence of groups
is taken for granted, and they are mostly seen as the basic unit of analysis. He argues that:
Ethnicity, race and nation should be conceptualized not as substances or things or entities or organisms or
collective individuals – as the imaginary of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded and enduring ‘groups’
encourages us to do – but rather in relational, processual, dynamic, eventful and disaggregated terms. This
means thinking of ethnicity, race and nation not in terms of substantial groups or entities, but in terms of
practical categories, cultural routines, institutional forms, political projects and contingent events. In means
thinking of ethnicisation, racialization, and nationalization as political social, cultural and psychological
processes.11

In line with this school of thought, we thus refrain from clinging to groupism and wish to make
an argument for a relational perspective, which has rarely been applied in the context of research
on ethnic relations in Bangladesh. In particular, we wish to shed light on the relationships
between individuals and collectives who identify or are identified with a particular group. Here,
the notion of belonging, which has gained much attention during the last few years, becomes
4 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

important. In contrast to the notion of identity, ‘belonging’ denotes not only formal membership
and labelling but also highlights imagined and narrated constructions of we-groups related to
sameness, unity and togetherness.12 Apart from performances of commonality, it highlights the
ways in which people relate to each other in terms of ‘mutuality’ as well as material and
immaterial attachments.13 The notion of belonging thus enables differentiation between the
ways in which people themselves construct belonging to collectives and to places (such as cities),
and the ways in which their individual and collective quest for belonging is denied to them.
Membership in particular is a social property which depends heavily on the ability and willingness
of groups to admit a person.
In our view, investigating such dynamics of belonging requires a focus on actual encounters,
perspectives, and images of the ‘self’ vis-à-vis the ‘other’. Empirically, this can be done in fields
where people who identify with different groups meet. In our case, this is the particularly vibrant
field of the university, as the number of young people belonging to the indigenous population
who decide to migrate to the city for educational purposes has been on the increase in Bangladesh.
Within this context, those students who identify as Chakma are among the largest group to have
witnessed increased social and spatial mobility.
To understand the ways in which the students negotiate their belonging in a wider sense, we
take up contemporary concepts of mobility, which we consider to be particularly fruitful for
several reasons.14 First, mobility is a constituting phenomenon of contemporary society; it is about
transcending geographical space, as it comprises the movement of people, collectively and
individually, over long and short distances. Furthermore, mobility allows for a more thorough
conceptualization of migration across physical space and place as a dynamic process embedded in
power and meaning, taking into account agency and the fluidity of shaping identities and
aspirations.15 People move physically within nation states and across borders and so do goods,
finance, ideas, images and know-how.16 Apart from ‘corporeal travel’, thus, the movement of
objects and virtual travel structure people’s lives.17 Second, mobility also relates to social mobility –
people aspire to better positions; they dream of a ‘good life’, and they try to achieve it by various
means. Education is a particularly promising strategy to better one’s own position in a sustainable
way and to pave the way for upward social mobility. Third, different mobilities are related to one
another; intensifying modes of imaginative travel and the travel of knowledge to distant places
either through media or the movement of people provide new perspectives to people. It shows
them, to put it simply, how life could be and what options they could have if they lived elsewhere.
While these images of a different life (which does not necessary imply upward mobility in
conventional terms) have transformed the ways in which people consider the world and the
global (unequal) world order, Dhaka, as the capital where modernity can be found in an
aggregated form, appears to be within reach and may therefore be chosen as a (first) destination.

Why people move: reasons for leaving the Chittagong Hill Tracts
Dhaka has been particularly affected by the drastic restructuring of the economy through
which the significance of international aid has to a large extent been replaced by the garment
industry.18 Being a major impetus for social change during the last couple of decades, this has
been identified as a major factor for urbanization, expressed in high rates of rural–urban
migration, with the urban population increasing by 3.5% annually.19 Dhaka is the main
recipient of these migrants, since 74% of the manufacturing of ready-made garments takes
place in the city.20 This has resulted in Dhaka becoming one of the 20 largest megacities in the
world, creating challenges for the effective management of processes of urbanization.
Urbanization processes, however, are concerned with much more than industrialization in a
particular sector. Like in other parts of the world, people migrate to the city for a variety of
reasons. As well, although the increasing scarcity of land is not a problem unique to
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 5

Bangladesh, it is particularly impressive there, and has become especially virulent in the parts
of the country where concentrations of indigenous populations live.
The CHT are a case in point because this region, which had the status of an Excluded Area
during British colonialism,21 has a history of massive in-migration. Since decolonization, devel-
opment and settlement projects have led to a demographic shift in the region.22 In the 1960s, the
construction of a hydroelectric dam led to the displacement of approximately 100,000 indigenous
people, mainly Chakma.23 After independence was realized, the main marker of belonging to the
new nation became being an ethnic Bengali, as this group had been suppressed during the
Pakistan era and accounted for over 95% of the new nation’s population.24 Although a secular
state ideology was initially adopted,25 soon Islam became a more important marker for
Bangladeshi identity. In opposition to the model of (Bengali) nationalism, military regimes
from 1975 until 1990 used the idioms of religion to create legitimacy for their rule, which,
it has been argued, distracted attention from the way they monopolized power and public
resources26 while acknowledging the neglect of the role of Islam in the lives of many apart
from the urban elites.
Once culture, language and later religion had been adopted as crucial markers of nationalism
in independent Bangladesh, the state failed to incorporate non-Bengali populations and instead
antagonized those seeking recognition of their distinct cultural identity with their assimilationist
claims. This led to a hostile relationship and eventually an armed conflict between the state and
the local resistance movement which sought to represent the interests of the indigenous popula-
tion. The state responded with not only militarization of the region27 but also several settlement
programmes under which landless Bengalis from the plains were given supposedly unoccupied
land. In reality, this measure carried out at the expense of the indigenous population, among
whom collective land use without individual rights to own land was common practice.28 After
more than two decades of war, a peace accord was signed in 1997 between the Government of
Bangladesh and the Parbattya Chattagram Jana Sanhati Samiti (PCJSS – United People’s Party of
the Chittagong Hill Tracts). Survival International has estimated that around 125,000 victims,
among them many civilian casualties, lost their lives in the conflict between 1947 and 1997.29
Members of all indigenous groups in the CHT were affected by the displacement caused by
development and settlement, but the Chakma population were especially hard hit. Not only are
they the largest group in numerical terms but they mainly lived in the territory that was swallowed
by the lake constructed in the course of the hydroelectric dam project in Kaptai. This resulted in
several waves of migration to Northeast India, where a large number of CHT people – especially
Chakma – live today. The massive transformation of the modes of production due to land
scarcity, and the insecurity produced by the armed conflict had triggered long-term migration
movements. During the armed conflict, migrants crossed the border and resettled in India for a
variety of reasons, including the fact that the political leadership had well-established relationships
with the governments of neighbouring Indian states and controlled the refugee camps to a large
extent. At the same time, Chakma migrants have also managed to establish themselves in India
despite exclusion and obstacles to attaining citizenship.30 Interviews taken in 1999 and 2000 also
confirmed that aspirations to attain education became prevalent among the Chakma population
immediately after the construction of the Kaptai Dam. This resulted in the construction of a
variety of educational facilities in both the CHT and Dhaka, under the aegis of Buddhist
institutions.
Despite the Peace Accord, the armed conflict continues at a low level. The level of militariza-
tion in the CHT is still high, and the conflicts over land are far from settled. The prevailing
insecurity and obstacles to a peaceful and undisturbed life continue to prompt people to move,
but their motivations have become more complex. First, aspirations to migration are fed by
images of modernity, which today travel through the world via the mass media. A yearning for
faraway places, as Bal recently termed such quests for mobility, is the result of intensifying
encounters with images from ‘more developed’ parts of the world.31 Second, the destinations
6 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

have changed; instead of seeking immediate refuge in politically secured neighbouring locations,
young people in particular aspire to migrate mainly for educational reasons. If migration to other
parts of the world32 is not an option, Dhaka’s urban space offers not only new lifestyles but also
better education facilities than those found locally.

Education and mobility: Chakma students in Dhaka

For Chakma students, migration to Dhaka has increased as a result of further integration of the
CHT with Bangladesh as part of the politics of centralization that were set in motion in the
Pakistani era, which led to a concentration of industries as well as institutes for higher education,
particularly in Dhaka and Chittagong. At the same time, improved (communication) infrastruc-
ture to the economic heartlands further enabled migration from the CHT, primarily to Dhaka and
Chittagong.33 In addition, the increase in migration for educational purposes was furthered by
more far-reaching quotas for indigenous students which came about as a result of a clause in the
CHT Peace Accord requiring the Bangladesh Government to maintain a quota system for ‘tribals’
in government services and educational institutions. In the same clause of the Accord, the
Bangladesh Government pleads to increase the number of scholarships for ‘tribals’ in educational
institutions, research and education abroad, although it does not quantify the number of scholar-
ships given.34 Furthermore, the increasing investment in education by Chakma people, enabled in
part by their inclusion in paid labour, and the lack of educational opportunities in the CHT have
led more and more Chakma students to migrate towards Dhaka to pursue higher education. Thus,
the migration of Chakma students and the integration of indigenous people in Dhaka and other
major urban centres is part of a process of ongoing urbanization in Bangladesh. The students
Visser interviewed – 70 in total, divided over 3 periods of fieldwork – are relatively well-off
compared to other indigenous youngsters of the same generation who cannot afford to study in a
major city like Chittagong or Dhaka. Almost all of them are from middle and higher classes in the
CHT, with students’ family members often employed by the state, local and foreign non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) and/or owning land in the CHT. Although many respon-
dents faced financial problems, depression and/or unemployment, they expected to have better
future prospects than most of their peers in the CHT, mainly due to family and social networks
and their higher level of education. When interviewed, all the students were living in Dhaka and
had for at least part of their upbringing lived in the CHT. The participants all came from one of
the three sub-districts of the region. A large majority – approximately 90% – of the participants
came from the districts of Khagrachari and Rangamati, where the Chakma population is con-
centrated. Apart from belonging to different ethnic groups, the students varied greatly in their
field of studies and the universities they attended. A narrow majority of participants studied at the
two most prominent public universities in the greater Dhaka area – Dhaka University and
Jahangirnagar University. Others attended one of the many private universities, which provide a
varying quality of education. Participants in the study were from different disciplinary back-
grounds, although economics and engineering were more common than others. This is a reflec-
tion of perceived career opportunities and seems to mirror study choices in Bangladesh more
broadly.
Previous studies on urbanization in Bangladesh have not taken migrants from the CHT into
account, and it is hard to estimate the proportion of Chakma or CHT rural–urban migrants in
Bangladesh. In addition, documenting Chakma migration is complicated further since many
migrants do not own property in the city and are not registered in Dhaka but in the CHT districts
in which they were born. Therefore, the estimates provided below are based on conversations with
the interviewed Chakma migrants and observations during fieldwork. The aim is to provide
indications of a process rather than exact numbers. While in the 1980s, there were only several
dozen, or at most several hundred Chakma migrants, today this number has increased to over
10,000 people, and possibly considerably more. The neglect of these CHT–Dhaka migrants in
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 7

studies and unbalanced representations of such people as rooted in the CHT have further fuelled
images of Chakmas as isolated, static people.
Based on observations during fieldwork, the largest group of Chakma migrants, estimated to
make up around 70% of the migrants, work in industrial production, primarily the garment
industry in the outskirts of the city. These people are usually found in clusters, with several
Chakma families living in the same area. These clusters in working-class neighbourhoods are
often found in the outskirts of the city or just outside the city, for example, in the city of Savar,
north-west of Dhaka. In these neighbourhoods, there are mainly nuclear families, with one or
both parents working in factories or other low-paid blue collar jobs.
Apart from a small group of more educated migrants working for one of the (inter)national
NGOs, a company or within the state bureaucracy located in Dhaka city, the second major
group of educated migrants comprises the students. Many live on student campuses at Dhaka
University or one of the private universities in the neighbourhoods of Mirpur and Hazaribag.
Others stay with better-off relatives who have established themselves in Dhaka, or share
apartments with other Chakma students located mostly in lower-middle-class neighbourhoods
within daily commuting distance. The students are usually financially supported by their
parents. Most respondents, although in the city for study purposes, expected to stay on in
Dhaka due to the expected difficulty in finding jobs in their field of study in the CHT or other
regions after graduating; in doing so, they reaffirmed their engagement, voluntarily or not,
with Dhaka and Bangladesh.
As in many parts of the world, in Bangladesh education plays a crucial role in improving
individuals’ socio-economic circumstances35 and it constitutes a key asset in reducing poverty and
accessing the lines of social mobility.36 Most of the indigenous students who recently migrated to
Dhaka are typical examples of upward mobility as they are the first in their families to receive a
university-level education. These opportunities have arisen as a result of the transformation of the
Bangladeshi economy in recent decades and increased access to higher education in Bangladesh.37
In addition, the commitment of students’ families to formal education has further opened up
access to higher education for indigenous students from the CHT. Studying in Dhaka is the
primary reason for coming to the city, and gaining entry to its universities is also perceived as the
best way to access the lines of social mobility in Bangladesh. Broadly held perceptions on
education among indigenous students are well captured by Jani, a female development studies
student at Dhaka University:
We want our children to go to school and complete higher education. That is not just us, it is part of the
culture in Bangladesh. If people are not educated they cannot have a good lifestyle and it is impossible to get
a formal job, and without a formal job you cannot have a family. So education is very important to make
something out of this life.38

While the significance of education has become a global standard repertoire in relation to
aspirations for upward social mobility, for indigenous students from the CHT there are factors
that make both education and coming to Dhaka a top priority when making choices for the
future; Peter explained this as follows:
I came to Dhaka for the good universities here. There are no universities in the CHT. But also Dhaka is
better than other places, it has a different status and the best universities are in the city. I also wanted to
come here because if you want to be someone in this life you have to be in Dhaka. It is just not the same as
somewhere else.39

For Peter, studying in Dhaka is more prestigious than elsewhere in Bangladesh. This is related to a
perceived gap in opportunities between the ‘rural’, ‘local’ CHT and ‘urban’ cities, and holds for
Dhaka in particular. It underscores the perception that life in the urban environs of the capital
offers the opportunity to achieve an unprecedented upward social mobility. Contrasting the urban
space of Dhaka with ‘somewhere else’, he relates to prevalent images of modernity as they relate to
social status, in the same way as Stacy Leigh Pigg has argued for Nepal, where rural space is
8 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

integral to the ‘developmental subject’.40 Uddin, too, shows that in Bangladesh people living in
rural parts of the CHT equate life in urban spaces with modernity and ‘development’.41
An important consideration when selecting an institution for higher education is the status a
certain programme can provide students, since this influences which pathways for mobility are
opened or closed to them. This is clarified by Priya, a 26-year-old student whom Jacco Visser met
several times in 2015 for coffee in the luxury of an air-conditioned lunchroom in the well-off
neighbourhood of Dhanmondi.
Priya studies engineering at BUET, an exclusive public university for engineering. She grew up
in the Rangamati district of the CHT and refers to herself as ‘from the Tripura community’.42 Her
parents never went to university, although her father works for the local government and owns
land in the CHT. She explains to Visser that she aspires to become an engineer because this would
make her parents proud. Her parents have made great sacrifices as she is financially dependent on
them for her education. She confides about her future aspirations and how crucial education is to
fulfilling them. Priya decided on BUET and her discipline based on how helpful they would be in
making her successful in Bangladeshi society. About her choice to go to BUET, she explains:

… it is not just the education. If you go to BUET you will have a certain status. Also you will know other
people that went to BUET. The people you know will later be very important since you can ask for favours;
people can help you find your way. If I stayed in Rangamati, I would not learn enough but I would also not
have the connections to people who matter43 outside the CHT. And we will always be dominated by the
Bengalis there, they keep us small.44

As Priya’s case illustrates, going to university is perceived among indigenous migrants to be a

gateway to the upward social mobility needed to escape a marginalized position resulting from
being indigenous. Personal networks are crucial here in order to be safe and have a better chance
of getting a paid job and material security. These personal networks converge with more
institutionalized initiatives to some extent – examples of this are activist networks such as
Kapaeeng Foundation or the Bangladesh Adivasi Forum, or religious institutions such as the
Buddhist Vihar, the latter also providing accommodation for some newly arrived students. Status
and a meaningful network are seen as crucial for one’s safety, both in Dhaka and for relatives in
the CHT. While discussing the CHT and education, students often voiced their concerns about
being exploited by state and army officials if they did not have the right connections to the state
apparatus. Badiuzzaman and Murshed have recently shown that there is a relationship between
the increase in children being sent to school and experiences of land possession, fears of eviction
and experiences of violence among indigenous people in the CHT.45 Education is thus perceived
as the means to enabling one to escape the challenge of earning a livelihood from an ever-
dwindling volume of cultivatable land and to acquire qualifications to escape the conflict area.46
The expectation of improving one’s security and escaping violence was reflected among indigen-
ous students in Dhaka as well, for example, by Kishan when we discussed education and the
precarious situation in the CHT.

Education is all we got left. The people from the CHT are divided47; education is how we can make a
difference now. If every family has one person going to university, that person can reason critically, he can
make sure, see, that what is happening is not good. He can make sure that the generation after him will go to
school and is not forced into exploitation by the army, the settlers. An educated mind is an independent, free
mind.48

It is important here to underscore the link the students make between insecurity and being
uneducated. A lack of confidence in the future caused them to emphasize the importance of
education, since it is perceived as crucial for ‘future survival’. Or, as Kamong clarifies:

My parents were easy to exploit; most people in the CHT are because when someone grabs their land they
don’t know what to do; they have no papers, no law. However the students here in Dhaka do a good job;
they are aware and work to get more students in higher education, helping them with admission tests. This
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 9

way these students can help their families and community, since they know that what is done [in the CHT]
is against the law.49

However, for students from the CHT, there are additional obstacles to completing higher educa-
tion. While attending primary, secondary, and university-level education, students have a relative
disadvantage because of their limited linguistic competence in Bengali vis-à-vis their Bengali
Bangladeshi peers. This creates a barrier, since a different language, in the form of a dialect or a
limited vocabulary, is an effective guarantee of a separate social world that is not easily navigated
by outsiders.
Many students must also compensate for having limited cultural capital. In particular, those
indigenous students who are the first in their family to acquire higher education are less familiar
with the mainstream Bengali culture which is crucial for networking to gain access to the higher
echelons of Bangladeshi society. In addition, due to their migrant and indigenous background,
they are unable to rely to the same extent on networks as the higher classes in Dhaka, thus
limiting their ability to achieve upward social mobility. The discriminatory structures, favouring
the Bengali and Muslim segments in Bangladeshi society, as discussed at the beginning of this
paper, find their way into the formal education system in Bangladesh as well, which favours
certain higher classes, particularly from Bengali backgrounds.50 Still, indigenous students studying
in Dhaka usually have better career prospects than previous generations of middle-class indigen-
ous youngsters from the CHT, while education also allows them to explore new opportunities and
acquire the linguistic and cultural competences crucial for achieving social mobility.

Being a Chakma in Dhaka: experiencing alienation

‘She asked me the question right away’, Sander (24), tells Visser while sitting on the floor in his
sweltering room on the top floor of a six-storey building in the noisy, middle-class neighbourhood
of Mirpur in Dhaka. He and another Chakma friend prepared dinner with some ingredients
Visser brought from a visit to the CHT, including some dried shark meat from Sander’s home
village. The question Sander refers to is ‘Do you people really eat frogs and snakes and such?’ It
was asked by the mother of the hospitable Bengali Bangladeshi family that had been hosting
Visser during the first period of fieldwork, who was eager to find out whether her Chakma guests
really ate anything they could find. Wondering how it felt to have to defend yourself every time
these racial stereotypes were brought up, Visser asked Sander about this, and he explained:
It doesn’t matter, she didn’t really mean it in a bad way but every time something like this happens, it
doesn’t feel good. They don’t know anything about us except these kind of things, so we have to convince
people that we are not like that, that is why it is not so comfortable for us sometimes to be around
mainstream people. They don’t see us as Bangladeshis, so we have to prove to them that we are constantly.51

Sander is in his mid-20s and aspires, like many students his age, to become a Bangladesh
Government civil servant in a few years. The conversation illustrates the difficulties encountered
by Chakma migrants in Dhaka because of the stereotypical assumptions people make about those
from the CHT. When Chakma student migrants arrive in Dhaka, they deal with stereotypes about
indigenous people from the CHT that are linked to their cultural practices, food habits, their
distinct phenotypical characteristics. Jash, a student at Dhaka University, remembered:
What I really had problems with were the people here. When I first came here my classmates made fun of
me because of how I look, how my nose and eyes are. They used to say I am from the jungle, primitive and
so on. They called me ‘Nak Chapta’ [flatnose] too. Now it is better – they know I am not like that – but in
the beginning it was bad.52

For students, this kind of racial stereotyping challenges their perception of themselves as
Bangladeshis living in the nation’s capital and engaging in its educational institutions. It limits
the extent to which they can participate in non-Chakma and non-indigenous networks, since they
10 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

are constantly classified as outsiders. Accordingly, while they have the opportunity of migration,
of physical mobility and access to university education, social mobility is limited outside their
immediate networks because they are seen as being out of place in Dhaka. Being subjected to
remarks on their being at home in ‘jungles’ affects the students’ self-esteem. It also forces them to
constantly refute the stereotypes and prove their identification with the mainstream. Abhik says,
‘At first when I came here my classmates at the university asked if I ate frogs and snakes and if we
run around naked all day. But now they know I am OK, but we constantly have to prove it’.53 He
also emphasizes his belonging to the Bangladeshi society. Despite the hardships his parents had to
face, he sees himself as a person successfully integrated into national society and the city. He
recurs to the marginal position that the CHT and the people living there played within the nation
state of Bangladesh in the past and, acknowledging that his place of origin continues to be
peripheral in relation to Dhaka, he stresses his willingness to integrate (if not assimilate).
Although others might refuse to acknowledge a sense of belonging to the national society, he
continues to emphasize it:
I have been raised here. I speak Bengali fluently; I had to work hard to do so since my parents, who still live
in Rangamati,54 are not so good in Bengali – we spoke Chakma at home. But still they [Bengalis] will never
see me as a Bangladeshi since I do not look like a Bengali. But I am a Bangladeshi and I have lived in this
country all my life. So when they ask me where I am from, I say I am from Bangladesh.

The above illustrates that although they have experienced physical mobility, spatio-temporal
fixtures are remade when Chakma students settle in Dhaka. This does not mean that there is
no scope for social mobility among students – quite the contrary, their university education has
opened potential career paths for them to which their parents or grandparents had no access.
Respondents see themselves securing jobs in the financial sector, the NGO sector or in education
when they graduate. These aspirations, however, are often tied to their own indigenous network,
which they would draw on to get such jobs. A female student, Karen, put it as follows when Visser
met her at an event to celebrate the diversity of indigenous languages – among them the Chakma
language – and demand their formal recognition:
It is not that I don’t care about our language, but I cannot say I am too interested in the event itself. But I
know all the people here and I have to show myself to them in order for them to know that I am still
involved. The ILO, the NGOs here, they have the good jobs. You know how it is in Bangladesh – if you want
a job you have to know the right people; if they know me I have better chances.55

Chakma students also face challenges in integrating into the Bengali mainstream by negotiating
religious identities. There are numerous Buddhist monasteries in the CHT; openly practicing
Buddhist rituals is more complicated in Dhaka. This at times creates further tensions and also
leads to new ways of negotiating being both Bangladeshi and Buddhist, as was revealed during a
visit by Visser to a Buddhist temple in the Mirpur neighbourhood. While entering, he noticed that
the entrance gate of the temple was painted in the colours of the flag of Bangladesh, green with
red spheres in the middle. When asked a monk inside the complex about the entrance, the monk
explained:
See it as protection. Usually when it is Ramadan the boys from the quarter throw rocks at the building and
break all the windows. By showing that we are part of Bangladesh I hope it diminishes.56

These tensions are also carried over into personal spaces, as Karen, a female student from Dhaka
University, living on campus in a dorm shared with eight female students explains:
In my room the elder sister57 does not allow us to pray. She also forbade us to hang Buddhist pictures on our
walls because the other girls are Muslim and they do not allow us to hang a picture of another god, and they
cannot have pictures of their own god because that is forbidden for the Muslims.58

Many students were sent to Dhaka to live among family, particularly aunts and uncles; other
students and high school children from the same families went to Dhaka together. It was
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 11

extremely rare for families to allow female students to go by themselves – usually a brother,
nephew or uncle was to accompany them. One group of participants Visser spent time with was a
group of friends from a village in the Khagrachari district in the CHT. The friends’ families had
close connections, particularly through intermarriages and joint business ventures (although small
in scale). These families had even decided to send children from different families to Dhaka
together in order to prevent them from ‘losing their tradition’ as one mother described it to Visser
when visiting her son, James in Dhaka. James would later explain:
My closest friends are Chakmas and other tribal people. Others are also friendly but we are not so close.
Their habits are a bit different, their food, and their language. That ours are the same creates a certain kind
of intimacy among us. If I hang around with my friends from the CHT we are closer. We spent much time
among each other so we grow towards each other.59

Achieving social mobility: being indigenous becomes an asset

Despite their attempts to integrate into the dominant society in Dhaka, the Chakma students are
aware that in order to achieve social mobility, they should rely upon their ethnic networks, and
that indigenous activist networks are crucial for Chakma students’ career prospects. The institu-
tions founded and maintained by indigenous activists and to which some of the students relate
have well-established relationships with international organizations and NGOs which offer well-
paid jobs and a high level of social acceptance. Being political in the first place, initiatives such as
the Kapaeeng Foundation and the Adivasi Forum fulfil important social functions because they
serve as a meeting point for students where ethnic loyalty is transformed into a kind of ethnicized
moral economy.60 Here, therefore, indigenous activism becomes an asset for the students as it
structures transnational and translocal relationships.61
The transnational networks maintained by these organizations also gave the students reason to
debate the significance of the various classifications that they commonly encounter. The students
discussed the importance of naming, groupings and classifications and their relation to modernity
and belonging in Bangladesh. Particularly those students that were politically active, for example,
in student organizations or the Adivasi Forum, organized and contributed to discussions about
the value of using terms like indigenous and Adivasi while demonstrating their uneasiness with
pejorative terminology. The most widely cited example of such terminology by students is the
Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Bangladesh, passed on 25 June 2011. The amend-
ment adopts the terms tribes (upajati), minor races (khudro jatisaotta) and ethnic sects and
communities (nrigosthi o shomprodai) instead of indigenous or Adivasi. The students rejected the
use of the former terms and their designation as ‘minor races’ (khudro nrigosthi) claiming that it
fuelled feelings of inferiority and enhanced experiences of alienation. In general, this was seen as a
major drawback of the amendment, since the nomenclature of ‘indigenous’ would have offered
access to certain enabling provisions under the rubric of the internationally recognized repertoire
of indigenous rights. Despite its essentializing overtone thus, the language of indigeneity never-
theless provided a common ground for political activists in their attempt to counter existing
discrimination and devaluation.
That Chakma students in Dhaka constantly have to prove that they are not ‘simple hill people’
but ‘modern’ Bangladeshi students neither means that being indigenous does not play an
important role in their lives nor that it is discarded in a desire to be modern and Bangladeshi.
Rather, students reconcile indigeneity and modernity quite easily. By examining how students
refer to the CHT – which is for them closely related to being indigenous, since it is the land to
which the indigenous claim relates – related issues of modernity and indigeneity surface. Joshua,
an economics student, stated the following about Banderban,62 the district in the CHT that he
belongs to: ‘I am from Banderban and I am proud of this. I am proud of our culture. I am proud
of being indigenous. They are my people; we have a good history’.63 While most students feel
proud of being indigenous, they also understand the value of being located in the capital city,
12 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

which for them signifies modernity. Monica, a female student, explained that she appreciated
Dhaka because:
Here I can buy things I cannot buy in the CHT, I can get a good education, I am in contact with the world,
the internet on my phone works, you have so many stores. That is not so where I grew up. I really feel like I
am a city girl now.64

The access to communication technology and consumer goods referred to by Monica does not
contradict self-identification as indigenous, despite the often-emphasized link between being
indigenous and being rooted in the CHT. In fact, the indigenous people’s discourse allows
indigenous students to redefine modernity in a way that does not exclude being indigenous.
There is a negotiation and constant navigation to find a way to be both modern and indigenous.
Monica clarifies:
If I work at a bank when I am older and I travel to Europe, it does not change who I am. I do not become
European; I do not become Bengali, but still (sic) I will be indigenous to the CHT. I cannot change that. For
example, some Chakmas went to France a long time ago. They still live there; they were adopted at the time
of the war. They are not the same any longer, but they still come to the CHT because it is where they are
from.

The above illustrates how students continue to emphasize indigenousness as an important

category of belonging, since it provides them with what the Bangladeshi nationalist project has
failed to provide – a metanarrative that helps in identifying their place in the world. At the same
time, indigenous discourses allow articulations of the connection students feel with the CHT,
providing a sense of security and belonging that reconciles their separation from the area. In this
way, the CHT and the notion of indigeneity are important signifiers, allowing for an identity
linked to a place to which one will always belong, as Monica stated, but which allows, or perhaps
needs, negotiation between different and coexisting social positions.

Conclusion
An ethnographic perspective on young Chakma students from the CHT in Dhaka and the ways in
which aspirations of physical and social mobility intersect opens new ways to conceive of
indigeneity in contemporary Bangladesh. First, we have shown that there are a number of reasons
for this form of mobility. On the one hand, increasingly scarce resources for agricultural produc-
tion push indigenous families to consider alternative income sources, for which education
constitutes an important asset. On the other hand, people’s aspirations change, and education is
seen as the key to envisioning a more ‘modern’ future. Higher education is an important
prerequisite for indigenous students to enter the higher echelons of Bangladeshi society, since
formal education itself is a mark of distinction and a way to acquire linguistic and cultural
competencies.65 It, thus, also relates to some individuals’ quest to become integrated into
Bangladeshi society, which is not always met with approval among their peers. Stereotypes and
racist connotations are one way in which the mainstream society denies those that represent the
(inferior) ‘other’. Some students therefore see education as a necessary step towards emancipation
and an active role in indigenous identity politics. Feeling alienated by the Bangladeshi nationalist
project, they search for alternative collectives to belong to and seek to embrace the global
networks of indigeneity in order to create space for themselves within the mainstream society.
Quite often these processes run parallel to each other. Migration by indigenous students to Dhaka
increases student engagement with mainstream Bangladesh, thus resulting in expressions of being
Bangladeshi and setting in motion a process of redefining and challenging dominant notions of
who is perceived as Bangladeshi and who is not. At the same time, indigenous students continue
to emphasize the importance of being indigenous in an urban environment.
By adopting a mobilities lens and accounting for the ways in which both state and indigenous
people’s discourses transcend physical borders, we believe mobilities may provide a missing link
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 13

in understanding the present social transformations that are taking place within indigenous
communities. By documenting not only the physical migration of Chakma students but also
how they relate to lifestyles, nationalism and indigenous people’s discourses, we have challenged
notions of being indigenous as essentially rooted in rural areas and as related to a non-industrial
mode of production. Moreover, we have illustrated how students express being modern and being
indigenous interchangeably, negotiating between different kinds of identities, discourses and
positions, revealing the complexities of indigenous identity formation in the context of the
megacity of Dhaka. For Chakma students, being indigenous does not preclude being
Bangladeshi, leading an ‘urban’ lifestyle, or aspiring to a professional career in the city. Instead,
both urban lifestyles and a redefinition of modernity and indigeneity occur at the same time.
However, the exclusion these migrants face on the basis of static interpretations of people from
the CHT as put forward in mainstream discourses as well as by transnational indigenous activist
networks, frequently creates feelings of alienation between students and their Bengali Bangladeshi
peers. For the students who draw on indigenous networks, their tendency to rely on essentialist
interpretations of indigeneity often creates uneasy and complex situations. They see themselves as
indigenous but often do not fit the mould of indigeneity that is cut out by the available paradigms.

Notes
1. Karim, ‘Pushed to the Margins’, 307.
2. Mohsin, The Politics of Nationalism, 57–58.
3. Bal, ‘Becoming the Garos of Bangladesh’, 210.
4. These interpretations can be traced to the colonial era when British anthropologists started using the
classifications tribal and aboriginal, illustrating the need to examine how these classifications were put to
use to reconstruct social worlds in South Asia. Dirks, Castes of Mind; Pannikar, Colonialism.
In these colonial discourses of difference, the way in which status became inscribed in the physical exteriors of
colonial subjects has contributed to stereotypes in the present. Bal, We Eat Frogs.
People classified as tribal or aboriginal were described in texts and treated by various administrations as living
in timeless harmony with nature, disturbed only in recent times by the market and the state. Shah, Shadows of
the State.
The ways in which the importance of these classifications increased has had a lasting impact in Bangladesh,
influencing contemporary perceptions of indigenous people as ‘exotic’, ‘tribal people’, notions that resemble
romanticized images of noble savages during colonialism. Bal, We Eat Frogs.
5. Uddin Siddiqui et al., Bangladesh, 94.
6. Gerharz, ‘Recognising Indigenous People’.
7. See Uddin, ‘Decolonising Ethnography’; Ahmed, ‘Bangladesh’; Badaruddin, ‘The Chakmas and their
Customary Laws’.
8. Semi-structured interviews were taken and discussion groups with students were organized. The discussion
groups provided additional insights due to the interaction between different respondents and the explanations
they provided to each other, for example, on the importance and interpretation of certain concepts. In addition
to the interviews, Visser also employed participant observation, which was carried out by living among
Chakma student migrants. Throughout the study, a multistranded methodological approach has been adopted,
focussing not on bounded fields but on shifting locations reflecting the multiple entry points in respondents’
lives. See Gupta and Ferguson, Anthropological Locations.
Gerharz spent several months of fieldwork in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and Dhaka between 1999 and
2000 and from 2008 onwards. Her focus has been on ethnicity and development, post-conflict CHT and the
translocalization of indigenous activism.
9. Gerharz, ‘Approaching Indigenous Activism’; ‘Indigenous Activism in Bangladesh’; ‘Recognising Indigenous
People’.
10. Kuper, ‘Return of the Native’.
11. Brubaker, ‘Ethnicity without Groups’, 167.
12. Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin, ‘Belonging and Multiple Attachments’.
13. Ibid.
14. Kaufmann, Re-thinking Mobility; Hannam et al., ‘Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings’; Urry, Mobilities.
15. Massey et al., ‘An Evaluation of International Migration Theory’.
14 J. VISSER AND E. GERHARZ

16. This argument builds upon the vast body of globalization theories which, relying upon Harvey’s time–space
compression thesis, conceptualize globalization in terms of intensifying global flows. Appadurai, Fear of Small
Numbers.
17. Urry, Mobilities, 47.
18. Ishtiaque and Ullah, ‘Factors of Migration’; Feldman and Geisler, ‘Land Expropriation and Displacement’.
19. Lewis, Bangladesh, 163.
20. Islam, ‘Bangladesh’.
21. A crucial marker in the region’s history is 1860, when the British colonial administration took control of the
region and introduced state institutions, including central taxation and a land system. In addition, the British
sought to cut the region off from bordering areas, thus limiting the otherwise self-evident flow of migration
and cultural influence between plains and hills, which led the region’s inhabitants to form a largely separate
identity. van Schendel, ‘Invention of the “Jummas”’.
22. van Schendel, ‘Invention of the “Jummas”’, Mohsin, Politics of Nationalism.
23. Chakma, ‘Post-Colonial State’, 285; Karim, ‘Pushed to the Margins’, 306.
24. Mohsin, Politics of Nationalism.
25. van Schendel, History of Bangladesh; Hasan, ‘Democracy and Political Islam’.
26. Haque Khondker, ‘Secularism in Bangladesh’.
27. Arens, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’.
28. Roy, Land Rights.
29. Levene, ‘“Creeping” Genocide’, 340.
30. Singh, Stateless in South Asia.
31. Bal, ‘Yearning for Faraway Places’.
32. The Australian Development Agency AusAid initiated an Australian Development Scholarship Programme for
the CHT in 2006, under which a large number of students pursued higher education at Australian universities.
33. van Schendel, ‘Invention of the “Jummas”’.
34. As stated in the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord 1997, clause D10.
35. Krueger and Lindahl, ‘Education for Growth’.
36. Nath, ‘Students’ Learning Achievement’, 50.
37. Lewis, Bangladesh.
38. Interview with Jani, 6 March 2015.
39. Interview with Peter, 28 February 2015.
40. Pigg, ‘Investing Social Categories’.
41. Uddin, ‘Paradigm of “Better Life”’.
42. Tripura are one of the groups living in the plains of Bangladesh, the CHT, and also in neighbouring India.
43. On enquiring later what ‘people who mattered’ meant, she clarified that these were politicians or people with
political connections.
44. Fieldnotes, 10 July 2014.
45. Badiuzzaman and Murshed, ‘School Enrollment Decisions’.
46. Ibid.
47. Here, referring to the different indigenous groups inhabiting the CHT.
48. Interview with Kishan, 28 June 2014.
49. Interview with Kamong, 2 February 2015.
50. Rahman, ‘Education Policy for Indigenous Minorities’.
51. Interview with Sander, 25 January 2012.
52. Interview with Jash, 12 March 2012.
53. Interview with Abhik, 7 March 2015.
54. Rangamati is the district capital of the CHT.
55. Interview with Karen, 3 March 2012.
56. Interview with anonymous monk, 18 March 2012.
57. Elder sister refers to her roommate who is 2 years older here, not a sister in kinship terms.
58. Interview with Karen, 27 February 2012.
59. Interview with James, 8 February 2012.
60. Thompson ‘Moral Economy’; Scott, Moral Economy; Evers, Moral Economy of Trade.
61. Gerharz, ‘Indigenous Activism in Bangladesh’.
62. Banderban is the name of one of the three sub-districts of the CHT, the others being Rangamati and
Khagrachari. Banderban translates as ‘monkey forest’.
63. Interview with Joshua, 24 June 2014.
64. Interview with Monica, 3 March 2015.
65. See Bourdieu, Distinction.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 15

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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