CLOSE your eyes and think about Rangamati, Khagrachhari, Bandarban, or any other Hill Tracts area. What do you see? Most Bangali Bangladeshis I know, those from the plains that is, would visualise lush, unspoiled nature, small and ‘harmonious’ communities of indigenous people living ‘simple’, primitive lives, and most prominently, adibashi women who will intrigue you with their dual charm of innocence and playfulness. In fact, it would seem that Bangalis cannot imagine the Chittagong Hill Tracts and its adibashi locals without bringing adibashi women into the picture. Popular Bangali songs and poetry will testify to this obsession. They are profuse with such romanticisations — adibashi women (commonly referred to by Bangalis as meye/girl) as fun-loving, sprightly creatures of nature (‘duronto meye’, ‘chonchol meye’), whose body follows the wild language of nature (‘pahari jhornar chhonde’), who will steal your heart, who you fantasise of wooing and courting (‘kobe jabo paahare, mala debo tahaare, ahaare…’), yet whose seductiveness also incites suspicion about her moral character (‘chhol, naki jol?’ - Baaji, Coke Studio Bangla, 2025), and who can even be used as a wager in a bet (‘tomay ami paite pari baaji’). There are, of course, nominal exceptions to this trend of portraying adibashi women. Take, for example, Farzana Wahid Shayan’s song ‘Eta Kalpana Chakma’r Gaan’ or Al Mahmud’s poem ‘Liana Go Liana’. Interestingly, Al Mahmud also could not avoid bringing up the adibashi woman to portray the community’s distress. And who does not know that damsels in distress are a classic patriarchal hit? So, in general, women of a particular type have been at the centre stage of Bangali imagination about adibashi people and land. And yet, despite this range of emotions and concerns that hill women evoke within Bangali hearts from the plains – from eroticisation/romanticisation to sympathy and saviour-mindedness — Kalpana Chakma’s killer is happily on the loose, hundreds of Bawm women and children rot in custody because ‘their men’ have been declared ‘terrorists’ by the state, and justice for adibashi rape victims seems like a far-off dream amidst increasing political and economic atrocities under heavy military presence. Moreover, while we Bangalis take it upon ourselves to voice our ‘concerns’, do you see adibashis participate and engage significantly in the mainstream? Do our intellectual events, policy discussions, national debates and decisions involve and include people from adibashi communities? The answer for both is ‘no’, even though we do sometimes see token representation on issues considered especially ‘adibashi’. Considering the material reality of adibashi peoples in Bangladesh, the aforementioned Bangali imaginations of and about adibashis in popular culture are not only unhelpful for adibashis, but I contend, in fact, are helpful for the state to comfortably perpetuate historical violence that has shaped the Bangali nation’s relationship with minoritised indigenous polities. The way adibashi women are represented and essentialised in Bangali, especially in the male imagination, obscures the structures of violence functionalising the power difference between the national majority and the national minorities. In this context, the obsession of seeking out women to star in the stereotypical fantasies about adibashi lives is not an innocent artistic pursuit; rather, these majoritarian fantasies are faithful to nationalist categorisations and nourish nationalist divisions. Adibashi women caught up in these entitled majoritarian narratives in the post-colonial nation-state, Bangladesh, face additional layers of precarity on top of many others, such as on account of being women, adibashis, and non-Muslims.
What is the Bangladeshi adibashi woman’s identity all about? The term ‘adibashi’ (indigenous) itself has been a much-contested item. British colonials imposed indirect rule over hill and forest polities which they classified as tribes — primitive, non-modern and in need of being governed by the superior race, according to the needs and goals of the colonial-’capitalist contract that produced ‘tribeness’ as the economic form of indigeneity and ‘tribe’ as the political form of chiefdom’ — reminds political theorist Prathama Banerjee. This entire identification process is the source of contemporary debates in Bangladesh over what is adibashi and who qualifies to be so. The Bangladesh government’s strict prohibition on the use of the term adibashi (popularly understood as indigenous, and interchangeable with tribe) in public discourse and prescription for its replacement with ‘khudro nree-goshThi’ (ethnic minority) clearly shows Bangali majoritarian existential priority to propagate a coherent, homogenous, intact national identity. Introducing adibashis as equal citizens disturbs this unified picture. The state does not owe an ethnic minority much apart from militarised ‘protection’ and ‘preservation’ the way it owes someone identified as indigenous their rights as binding to international laws. Women from ethnic minorities in their upper-class finery can be ‘showcased’ to the world on special occasions as ‘exotic’ samples of tiny, ‘traditional’ cultures, as artefacts of uncivilised times, boosting Bangladesh’s international image, and blurring the history of a particular injustice that began with colonial times and that got reaffirmed with the establishment of the Bangali nation state. Tourism and development can be hyped up to justify displacement and extraction since it makes indigenous land available and productive for the national good. Meanwhile, adibashi children will be bullied with ‘naak-chepta’ (flat-nosed), ‘shaap-byang khawa’ (eats snakes and frogs), and ‘cannibals’, among numerous other horrific condemnations in Bangali Muslim-dominated Bangladeshi mainstream society. What irony it is for an adibashi studying under the national curriculum, whose first language the state does not acknowledge, to read about the glorious Bangla Language Movement, which sped up the struggle for Bengali emancipation from Pakistan!
For women in adibashi polities, then, their identity as belonging to a minoritised group always already marks them as people who do not, and cannot, know what they need, and as people who need Bangalis to describe adibashi women’s problems better. In other words, adibashi women are considered people without communal or national agency. Bangalis hold the license to imagine and describe minoritised adibashi women as their nationalist fantasy pleases because these women’s identification with ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ communities makes them inferior citizens in comparison to Bangalis. Still, we do not question our imagination of the ‘duronto meye’, or why her elf-like qualities are what make her desirable, or why her atavistic innocence is so inviting. The cognitive inferiority of the tribe is thrust upon adibashi women, which manifests in Bangali imagination as ‘innocent and unaware of what causes distress’. That this view can make a woman without access to a just political identity even more physically and sexually vulnerable is something public intellectuals do not stop to think about.
Our nationalism, an inherited model of colonial-capitalist governance, has made the management and reproduction of majority and minority identities its core occupation. ‘Other’ languages, ‘other’ faiths and many such ‘others’ are presented as though the nation is always under threat. Marginalised/minoritised categories are helpful for continuously confirming and maintaining the sovereignty of the majority. Like in the colonial era, in present-day Bangladesh also the existence of such groups is politically and economically profitable. Militarisation based on historically generated nationalist fears of secession can be justified. Unequal development due to historical deprivations can be justified by tropes of backward and innocent people’s deception by our geopolitical rivals. Even adibashi women’s problems and crises also get defined in accordance with nationalist priority over sovereignty. Adibashi men are either emasculated (according to the myth of all adibashi societies being matriarchal societies), or dehumanised as ‘terrorists’ who want to break the nation apart and gift the pieces to Bangladesh’s geopolitical rivals. So, the type of woman an adibashi will be considered as depends on the type of man she is attached to. Of course, the popular solution to all of adibashi women’s problems is to marry Bangali Muslim men and raise ‘their’ children, because the future and progress are in the deserving hands of the majoritarian. The ‘bounties of nature’ that adibashi women supposedly embody are a prize that belongs to the nation’s majority. That the adibashi woman is either the object of Bangali male desire or of protection is derived from a dangerous nationalist narrative of Bangali superiority. Where else do Bangali men get the authority to claim that they ‘know’ about adibashi lived experience and to exoticise and eroticise adibashi women with impunity?
As anthropologist Prashanta Tripura points out, one of the harmful nationalist myths about adibashi women is that they are the bearers of their community culture and tradition. Nationalism, in the process of homogenisation and boundary demarcation/regulation, allots two essential and natural genders distinct roles and duties at the service of the nation. Bearers of the national tradition and culture, women are expected to reproduce the nation through their primary role as caregivers in the heterosexual family whose preservers and protectors are men. But not all women qualify to be fit and deserving wife and mother ‘material’, as popular parlance goes. There is a long list of criteria to fulfil to be in the ‘ideal woman’ list, and no ‘ideal’ can be a stable, unnegotiated category, but a key criterion in nationalist discourse is that an ideal woman’s psychological and physical boundaries would begin and end with her family/domestic/community boundary set by men. Where does this context place adibashi women? In Bangali nationalist eyes, they are symbols of their ‘tradition’ and tribe, with deep mysterious connections with nature, pitiful mothers suffering under the guardianship of inadequate, powerless men. Alternatively, their almost mythical existence is fancied by the Bangali nationalist men as different, inviting, and in lieu of being primitive, promising openness to erotic adventures, like some forbidden fruit, possibly promiscuous. And they wonder, which woman worth her salt could refuse the charms of the majoritarian hero, who looks down with benevolence on the adibashi woman and sees a woman needing to be saved and possessed? Adibashi minoritisation adds valour to Bangali men’s masculinity and makes militarisation of adibashi polities feel necessary. When we majoritarians glorify our essentialised portrayals of adibashi women, we feed into these normalised nationalist categories of identification, which set into motion a complex, hierarchically oppositional power play between Bangali and adibashi.
As Bangali nationalists paint a picture of a singular, universal adibashi womanhood, of a cis heterosexual woman, they share this imagination with adibashi nationalists. For adibashi women not only have to negotiate Bangali nationalist macho politics but also have to struggle under the double, counter-dominance of adibashi macho nationalist politics. Women’s bodies are symbols of sovereignty for both camps, and they are continuously engaged in launching rival offences to each other’s nationalist macho sensibilities and pride. An adibashi woman who falls in love with a Bangali man may invite wrath from her community, as their community sovereignty is as sacred as Bangali national sovereignty. In the same logic, the Bangali nationalist regime’s militarised surveillance and violence, especially unchecked sexual violence, place adibashi women at extra risk — they can easily become pawns, wagered in a nationalist ‘baaji’.
Thus, the Bangali majoritarian audacity to label adibashis as ‘khudro’ (tiny, insignificant) goes hand in hand with the audacity to essentialise and romanticise adibashi women, as these romanticisations become a mockery of their lives, misrepresenting them and thereby adding to layers of historical oppression and injustice. It is this same audacity that enables Bangalis to tell adibashis to become Bangladeshis and abandon the small-tribe, ‘separatist’ mentality. Note that this is not the same as when some urban adibashi youth in recent times have demanded to be treated as Bangladeshi and not as an ethnic minority. These young people want an end to the discrimination which they have been subjected to as the national other. They want equal citizenship with Bangalis. What Bangalis mean by ‘become Bangladeshi’, on the other hand, is that in order to be certified as good Bangladeshi, adibashis should stop seeking recognition and reparations, forget about their land, their history, and their scientific knowledge, never resist settler and military dominance, and never protest against any act by the government that displaces and disorients them. In other words, never question Bangali Muslim supremacy in Bangladesh. Bangali nationalists can pretend as much as they want that ethnic identity does not factor into citizenship today, yet no matter how neutral we pretend the term ‘Bangladeshi’ is, from the above discussion it is obvious how racial/ethnic/sexual identifications can shift the status of someone’s citizenship. (All this talk about only citizens deserving rights is also problematic, as citizenship in our context is an exclusionary category.)
So, what is the way forward? If, as human beings, we no longer want to be related through the historical contract in a hierarchical, reciprocally threatening relationship, what may be the way(s) to categorise and organise ourselves? What framework of togetherness can we create to fight and resist a system that profits off our identity politics? We better stay wary of any totalising, homogenising idea such as the kind of nationalism where Bangali fantasisations of adibashi women are perpetuated. Knowing history is important, and learning how to ask questions about it is no less important if we want to figure out how we got to this position. How can that be achieved together, as in, how do we collectivise this building of new knowledge together with those we now consider as ‘others’? How do we heal from the trauma of generations of conflicting relations? Moreover, how we identify and organise ourselves has far-reaching connections to bigger power structures like the global capitalist heteropatriarchal imperialist system. How should we rethink our relations with each other when each of us negotiates not with an isolated power structure but in a system involving many global-local nexus points? What kind of political entities do we need to think of transforming into for diagnosing, challenging and dismantling any form of supremacist or authoritarian logic? Who would we be if we were neither ‘everybody’ (majority) nor ‘nobody’ (minority)? As history has exposed, there can be no nationalist resolution to human problems. If we want to change things, we could start with these thoughts and questions.  
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Mithila Mahfuz is a teacher and writer.
