Hunger has brought us into this jungle.docx

The recent history of the Chittagong Hills in Bangladesh is marked by ongoing conflicts between minority (non-Muslim and non-Bengali) locals and state-sponsored (Bengali Muslim) immigrants. In general, these immigrants are framed as land grabbers who have been receiving protection from a pro-Bengali military force. We propose instead, that the understanding of these Bengalis as a homogenous category of mobile perpetrators fails to take into account their complex histories as mobile landless peasants. Our ethnographic research reveals that the framing of the local minorities and the mobile Bengalis as two antagonistic categories with opposing interests obscures the fact that both categories have fallen victim to very similar regimes of mobilities and immobilities of the state and national and local (political, economic and military) elites. Here, we reject binary thinking that counterpoises mobility and immobility as two antagonistic concepts and argue that mobility and immobility are intrinsically related and their relationship is asymmetrical.

Contemporary perspective : history and sociology of South Asia, 2007

Press, pp. 75-82. 3 In other cases, it is the fear of becoming such a minority, rather than actually being one, which has been instrumental in triggering off ethnic conflict among communities, usually led by their elites. 4 Raja Devasish Roy, 'Land Rights, Land Use and Indigenous Peoples in the CHT', in

2017

The Indigeneity question: State Violence, Forced Displacement and Women's Narratives in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh Zobaida Nasreen Abstract This research aims to examine the experiences of forced displacement arising out of decades of militarisation and land grabbing perpetrated by the Bangladesh Army and Bengali settlers on the indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. Situated within the context of the anthropology of violence, displacement, indigeneity and South Asia this is rooted in the paradigm of historical and social anthropology. The approach of the study is multi-sited, discursive, uses qualitative methodology and is based on nine months of ethnographic research between 2012 and 2013 in two districts in the CHT among four indigenous groups. I focus on ordinary (non-activist) indigenous hill women‘s narratives of violence and forced displacement in the pre- and post- peace accord (signed in 1997) periods. Ordinary indigenous...

2011

In May 2008, at the High Court of Bangladesh, a ‘community’ that has been ‘stateless’ for over thirty five years were finally granted citizenship. Empirical research with this ‘community’ as it negotiates the lines drawn between legal status and statelessness captures an important historical moment. It represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. The thesis argues that in certain transition states the construction and contestation of citizenship is more complicated than often discussed. The ‘crafting’ of citizenship since the colonial period has left an indelible mark, and in the specificity of Bangladesh’s historical imagination, access to, and understandings of, citizenship are socially and spatially produced. While much has changed since Partition, particular discursive registers have lost little of their value. Today, religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘pur...

JOURNAL OF BORDERLANDS STUDIES, 2023

This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the life histories of an extended family with two households characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.” However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees. Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may well become permanent.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh lies on the country's international borders with Myanmar and India. The present boundaries of the CHT were carved out of the British colonial empire in 1860. CHT is about 10% of the total land area of the country. Formerly, CHT was a single unified district, but administrative reorganization has led to its division into the three districts of Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandarban. The CHT differs from the rest of Bangladesh, which is a flat terrain. Scattered along this mountain range, there live 11 different ethnic minority groups. Customary laws and practices within these communities vary, but they share commonalities in terms of their social and political organization. The hills are relatively rich in natural resources, particularly timber and bamboo. In recent years, parts of the region have been developed for pulpwood and rubber plantation by Bangladeshi companies and investors. The paper exploresthe changes of administrative system of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and how the government policies regarding natural resources specially land and forests have created and a situation of 'dispossession' for the ethnic minority groups in Bangladesh. The field material for this paper has been collected from Bandarban and Rangamati districts of CHT during June-December 2013 through participant observation. Focusing on the period after independence of Bangladesh in 1971 it becomes evident that government initiatives to improve the situation of the multi ethnic region through land and forest governance, improvement of the transport and communication systems, the offering of more schools and better of education, creating markets and job opportunities have created mutations in citizenship and the encroaching borders of the nation has over ridden some aspects of the ethnic boundaries. The paper entails that smaller ethnic groups are in a disadvantageous, unequal and marginalized position because of the Government's differential treatment of populations through bio-politicial mechanism which have inserted different groups of people differently in the process of development. This situation sometime overlaps with pre-formed racial, gender hierarchies and creates fragmented citizenship for the people of the same country.

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

Re-bordering Camp and City: 'Race', space and citizenship in Dhaka The relationship between 'race', space and citizenship has been a central feature of urban sociology since the studies of African-American urban segregation at the end of the nineteenth century (Du Bois, 1899; Haynes, 1913). It is typically associated with the study of the 'ghetto' or 'ethnic enclave' and with immigrant communities rather than displaced people or refugees. With a few notable exceptions (Sanyal, 2012; 2014) interest in forced migration on the other hand has been more commonly associated with refugee studies and development studies, than urban studies or sociology. As such it has tended to consider citizenship through the lenses of ethnicity and nationalism rather than 'race' and class. In this chapter I bring some of these disparate literatures together to examine how the urban refugee camp, much like the ghetto or ethnic enclave, racializes residents and configures claims to citizenship in the city, but also how the everyday movement and mixing characteristic of urban space reconfigures those claims in complex and unexpected ways. I argue that when we look at the refugee camp through its relationship to the city, particular features of the camp that have been otherwise neglected are brought to the fore. In recent years with growing scholarly interest in transnational phenomena, population movements from South Asia have attracted considerable attention. The emphasis in this field of research however has been on those who migrated to the West, overlooking far greater movements of displaced within the South itself. These 'other' south-south diasporas have been comparatively ignored by western academies. The Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent in 1947 generated what is now regarded as one of the largest involuntary migrations in modern history, much of which took the form of internal movement to

Drawing on ethnography, this paper unravels the intricate relationship between survival tactics and legal status in the complex process of survival mobility in the ungoverned enclaves of India and Bangladesh. In doing so, I explicate the spaces of survival of the undocumented enclave dwellers. The survival mobility in the enclave shows how states’ construction of legal immobility in effect compels illegal mobility. Besides, enclave dwellers’ survival mobility neither symbolises liberty nor characterises resistance. Rather, it represents a form of vulnerability, concern and unavoidable necessity. These practices show a nuanced understanding of the politics of mobility need to consider legality and tactics as two very essential factors for assessing the movement of individuals.