The Indigeneity question: State Violence, Forced Displacement and Women's Narratives in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

Abstract

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 people were drawn into the armed conflict between the Bangladesh army and the Shanti Bahini (SB), the armed wing of Parbatya Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samiti (PCJSS). Women‘s participation was in the form of direct and organised resistance as well as unorganised, everyday resistance and negotiation, yet none of it is acknowledged in the peace process. While there is some work on the narratives of indigenous woman activists there is little documentation of ordinary (often assumed to be passive) indigenous women’s narratives of violence and everyday forms of protest and negotiation. Instead, I argue that the various kinds of non-activist women’s everyday experience of terror as a result of Forced Displacement in the CHT is not a singular experience. Their experience can only be understood through the confluence of their encounter with state and army violence; as well as through interactions with activists, infra-politics in the local community and at the conjuncture of their own various locations. In the process, the ethnography of the ordinary indigenous women interrogates and challenge the concept of indigeneity