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Being and Seeing Chakma

Chapter · January 2015

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-6300-124-3_4

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 Raqib Chowdhury

4. Being and Seeing Chakma

Constructing Self and Other through Images

And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
East Coker, Four Quartets. (T. S. Eliot, 1940)
The increased politicisation of the question of ‘who is Indigenous’ can be seen as a
result of success in the attainment of legal recognition – often through international
laws – of Indigenous peoples around the world. Consequently, international
organisations, host states, non-governmental organisations and researchers have
each attempted to develop their own definitional standards of native peoples over
the last five decades, although, as Corntassel (2003) points out, this is best answered
by Indigenous communities themselves. This chapter does not aim to add to this
debate; nor does it attempt to reproblematise the definitions. Rather it looks at how
“invisible social realities” (Stanley, this volume, p. 4) have been exposed through
images drawn by children across ethnicities.
Bangladesh has been labelled as one of the world’s most “uniquely homogeneous”
(Ahsan & Chakma, 1989, p. 960) states with “no ethnic conflict” (Hussain, 2000, in
Barua, p. 60) – claims predicated on statistical facts such as 99% of the population
speaking Bengali and identifying as Bengali, and 85% of the people professing Islam
as their religion. Over the years such convenient generalisations have legitimised the
persistent cultural homogenisation that has been enacted in the country through state
machineries and, with that, the suppression of ethnic minorities.
However, there are at least 45 ethnic minority communities in Bangladesh. The
Chakma represent the largest of these. Commonly referred to as pahari (hill people),
the adivasi (Indigenous) or the jumma (those who subsist on swidden cultivation),
the Chakma are of Sino-Tibetan and Mongoloid descent and share linguistic,
racial and ethnic ties with South East Asia and the hill peoples of Assam of North
East India, Thailand and Upper Myanmar. They are conspicuously distinct from
mainstream Bengalis in terms of clothing, language, food habits, religion, beliefs
and rituals, mode of cultivation as well as sociocultural structures and political and
economic practices. The Chakma for example primarily subsist on slash and burn

J. Brown & N. F. Johnson (Eds.), Children’s Images of Identity, 41–56.

© 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
R. CHOWDHURY

jum (swidden) cultivation as opposed to ploughed cultivation characteristic of the

rest of the country.
The Chakma, who claim descent from the Shakya Buddhist line of Gautama
Buddha, have lived in Bangladesh for many centuries alongside both medieval
Muslim imperialists and later British colonialists retaining distinct sociocultural
norms. Ethnically they represent a “continuum” placed in between the two “cultural
models” (van Schendel, 1992, p. 117) of the South-Asian and the Southeast Asian or,
according to Chakma (2010, p. 283) the “confluence of two regions”. Today Chakma
identity is firmly established in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh
where they have sought to develop an Indigenous model of state, society and culture
(van Schendel, 1995, in Damodaran, 2006).
The CHT represents a distinctive identity in terms of geography, racial distribution
as well as cultural and political history. It comprises of an area of 12,181 square
kilometres of a geographically isolated region which topographically contrasts with
the rest of the plain land of Bangladesh. For two centuries the CHT was a remote
hinterland of colonial rulers and then a part of the post-colonial state of Pakistan,
and is currently within the state of Bangladesh inhabited by these minorities who
constitute less than one per cent of the country’s population.
However, aside from representing a region of rich ethnic diversity, CHT also
marks a historical setting of significant ethnic conflict (Uddin, 2010, p. 283). Despite
their cultural and linguistic diversity, there has been a “systematic reluctance” to
recognise the “plural and heterogeneous nature” of the ethnic minorities within
modern Bangladesh’s legal-constitutional framework (Adnan, 2008, p. 27). Uddin
(2010) has documented the historical marginalisation of ethnic minorities based
on the binary of upland-lowland relations in Bangladesh and the tensions which
characterise the division between ethnic minorities living in hilly areas and the plain
land Bengalis who regulate state institutions.
Other academic scholarship has documented significant research on the
historical, political and ethnographic accounts of the CHT in general and the
Chakma in particular (see for example: Ahsan & Chakma, 1989; Bhaumik, 1997;
Chakma, B., 1997; Chakma, S., 2000; Guhathakurta, 1997; Mohsin, 1997a,
1997b, 2001a, 2001b, 2003; van Schendel, 1992), especially focussing on their
political strife, language, history and culture. Little research to date has examined
the changing mental landscape of the region through the lens of children’s eyes,
and in particular their views manifested in drawings, or what we can call ‘visual
narratives’ (Bach, 2007). These private and individual narratives provide rich
and complex stories of identification and self-identification through the naïve,
spontaneous and unstudied eyes of children who are largely uninformed of
the discursive constructions of themselves and others as enacted in academic
scholarship.

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The Chakma – A Brief Cultural-Historical Background

In order to understand how the Chakma are discursively constructed, and perhaps to
understand the readily available binaries the children of this study are likely to have
relied upon in drawing their images of self and other, it is important first to briefly
highlight two distinctive and often conflicting nationalisms enacted by the citizenry
in Bangladesh, both of which have imposed invisible but almost irreconcilable
boundaries between the two groups. While Bengali nationalism constructs unity
on the basis of language and cultural commonalties, Bangladeshi nationalism is
primarily religion-based, although it is also the term used to denote any citizen of
Bangladesh, including her ethnic minorities. In both of these forms of nationalism,
the Chakma are excluded.
Datta (2003) argues that historically Bangladesh has always adopted policies
“detrimental to the minorities” (p. 245). Guhathakurta’s (2012) more recent study
documents how throughout the postcolonial South and South East Asian countries,
minorities have been historically marginalised and removed from centres of power
on the basis of their minority ethnic status through the dual mechanisms of unitary
constitutions and centralised state politics. In fact, despite the Paharis being the
earliest inhabitants of the CHT, their status as” economically self-sufficient,
culturally distinctive, and socially egalitarian” (Uddin, 2008, in Uddin 2010,
p. 284) people, and their exceptionally high rate of literacy – estimated to be 70% in
comparison to 28% among the Bengalis (Rashiduzzaman, 1998, in Gerharz, n.p.) –
they were gradually marginalised by the successive rule of the British (1858–1947)
and Pakistan (1947–1971).
The Chakma suffered several human rights violations, including ethnocide
and genocide in the Liberation War of 1971. Through the ‘legitimacy’ attained
through allegations against Pahari people of being collaborators of the anti-
liberation movement, the state’s atrocity over the CHT people continued after
independence when Bangladesh’s new constitution espoused an explicitly
hegemonic form of Bengali nationalism, which restrained ‘other’ ethno-linguistic
identities and nationalisms among the people of the country (Adnan, 2008, p. 39).
Post-independence assimilationist strategies of the state over four decades saw the
continued marginalisation, alienation and extermination in the name of nation-
state building (Chakma, 2010) – a phenomena that continues to this day. Indeed
Karim (1998) reports that a “new regime of truth” has “violently” replaced the older
discourse of the Pahari as “simple” and “childlike”: the Chakma are now seen as
a “terrorist, separatist and an insurgent” (p. 304) people – much like other ethnic
minorities elsewhere.
Over a period of more than 150 years the colonial policy and the postcolonial
state’s attempts at building a homogenous nation-state have created the dichotomised
entity of the Paharis and the plain dwellers in the region (Uddin, 2010, p. 284)

43
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which has trickled down into the populist discourses of the common Bengali and
today largely inform their divisive and binary views. Some of these binaries were
clearly reflected in the drawings made by the children of this study.

Identity and nomenclature

The politics of cultural difference, dictated almost exclusively by the state and its
policy of stratifying people as belonging to different cultural ‘groups’, as well as
contestations between rival nationalisms espoused by dominant groups (Adnan,
2008) have created Chakma identity as we know it today (Uddin, 2010). Sometimes,
identity has been constructed in collaboration with an elite class within the central
power structure, while at other times, identity has been constructed by how others
(outsiders) intend to look upon them and describe them. Colonial administrators
branded the CHT people as ‘hill-men’ or ‘hill-tribes’ (Pahari) while during
the Pakistan period, the government referred to them as ‘tribal people’. In post-
independence Bangladesh, the state referred to them as upajatee (literally ‘sub-
nation’ or ‘tribe’) – often used pejoratively by Bengalis to denote the Hill people as
primitive and backward farmers.
The Chakma, largely “passive spectators” (Adnan, 2008, p. 38) to such labelling,
gradually adapted to the identity constructed for them by others. Today all of these
labels are often used interchangeably by the Chakma. Adnan has pointed out how
the “crystallisation of the collective Jumma identity of the Hill peoples” (p. 38) can
be viewed as being driven by the “need to distance themselves from the Bengali
assimilationist project” (p. 38) – essentially identity formulation by negation as a
mechanism to distinguish the community with the dominant Bengali population.
In this continuum of naming and labelling the self and the other, this study
provides new elements in the discursive construction of the Chakma identity, and it
does this through the eyes of children’s images.

The study

Children often “imbue their creations with meaning” (Alland, 1983, cited in Stanley,
this volume, p. 1) and therefore visual narratives can be particularly convincing sources
of data. They can provide visceral and personal accounts of children experiencing
unity and otherness, adding legitimate voices hitherto absent in research literature on
the Chakma. More importantly, images can be seen as a window into “intercultural
interfaces” and “intercultural relations” (Stanley, this volume, p. 2). The images of
Indigenous and mainstream children drawing the self and the other therefore provide
an illuminating lens on readings of enacting and understanding identity.
In this chapter I adopt Alerby and Bergmark’s (2012) real-world phenomenological
approach of using images as a “form of language” (p. 95) to capture human experiences
– such as self- and other- identification through such forms of visual art. Drawings

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 BEING AND SEEING CHAKMA

can be seen as “lived experiences” manifested into “transcended configurations”

(van Manen, 1990, cited in Alerby & Bergmark, 2012). Such “multimodality” allows
a “broadened perspective of language” where visual forms of communication allow
the exploration of the “silent dimension of human experience” and become a form
of language in itself in its ability to communicate (van Manen, 1997, cited in Alerby
& Bergmark, 2012).
I also propose Foucault’s (1990) notion of invisibility and silence as alternative
forms of text (or a ‘coded’ form of speech) in which layers of power can be embedded
(or hidden). Silence or the reluctance/forbiddance of utterance can be a space that
accommodates the ‘unspeakable’ or as Manen (1997) calls it, the “epistemological
silence” beyond the language of words and verbal utterances. Foucault cautions
against drawing “binary divisions” (p. 27) between what one says and what one does
not say. The more important matter is to find alternatives to capturing and engaging
with silent text through a multiplicity of forms of silences. This is to be done in view
of discourses that are allowed (or “authorized” – p. 27) and the discretions required.
In this study, therefore we consider children’s drawings as an “integral part of the
strategies that [can] underlie and permeate discourses”, utterances not allowed or
permitted in other forms of expression, such as traditional academic research based
on quantitative surveys or qualitative case studies and focus groups.
A child who creates a drawing is visually depicting their lived experiences as
manifest in their ‘unthinking lines’ (Stanley, 2014). To that extent the image becomes
the text (van Manen, 1997), a “methodological implement when attempting to grasp
people’s experiences concerning different phenomena around the world” (p. 97).
Following Alerby and Bergmark’s study, it is significant in the context of this study
that the participants were told that it did not matter how skilful they were in making
the image, since it was merely a means to elucidate their experiences.
Rather than drawing conceptual distinctions between ethnonationalist and
Indigenous groups (and their mainstream counterparts), this study has focussed on
the depiction of the self and the other, in particular through drawings of attire and
physical appearance, which was considered to be an age-appropriate and a more
immediately implementable way of asking children to draw images.
Dress is an important characteristic as an instantly recognisable identity marker.
As common in ethnic communities, traditional dresses are a female phenomenon.
Wichterich (1998) has shown that in South Asian countries women typically
“preserve” traditions expressed by clothing, while men’s clothes often symbolise
modernity (p. 198). Kabeer (1991) explains this as a result of the predominantly male
occupation of the “public space” as opposed to the primarily female domain of the
more “domestic spheres of social life” (p. 129). In the context of gender seclusion, a
characteristic of the dominant Muslim Bengali society, ways of dressing can be seen
as embodying a symbolic value to demarcate cultural difference as well as a way of
registering silent resistance. In the case of the Chakma, dress is a “distinctive mark
based on horizontal structures” (Gerharz, 2000, n.p.).

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R. CHOWDHURY

Generally the Chakma are less conservative in their dressing compared to

their (Muslim) Bengali counterparts. Among the CHT minorities, some of the
women’s dresses are more or less similar – for example the Chakma, the Tripura
and the Tanchangya dress alike. The typical Chakma female dress is composed
of a homemade hand-woven cotton skirt with stripes (pinon), a blouse and a scarf
(khadi). Colour and design vary, although red and black traditionally dominate. In
South Asia for women the interpretation of tradition intrinsic to communal identity
has restrictive implementations, especially in the way they dress (Dube 1998, in
Gerharz, 2000). This study therefore looked at dress and dressing as one aspect of
a very complex system of cultural boundary-marking and indeed a manifestation of
the Foucauldian silence explained above.
A total of seven children participated in this study, of whom four were Bengali
and three were Chakma. With the exception of one, they were all primary school
(grades 5 and 6) students from Rangamati – one of the three districts in the CHT.
One participant was in grade 7. All children except one were female.

Participant Ethnicity Age Gender

B1 Bengali 11 M
B2 Bengali 11 F
B3 Bengali 14 F
B4 Bengali 10 F
C1 Chakma 11 F
C2 Chakma 9 F
C3 Chakma 13 F

In collecting data, care was taken so that it did not feel like an intervention or
intrusion. Participants were told to participate in a game – a ‘fun activity’ which
involved expressing their views through drawings. Children in Bangladesh would
often engage in drawing activities which is a common hobby or pastime. In fact three
of the seven participants (incidentally, all the Chakma girls) were home-tutored for
drawing.
One participant asked if it was about drawing flowers or a “natural scenery”. They
were told that they will draw people. They responded saying they were not good
at drawing pictures of people; that their drawings “will not be good”. They were
assured that this fun activity was not a competition and that their pictures would not
be judged by how “artistic” or beautiful they were. Nor was there any right or wrong
way of drawing. They were encouraged to draw using their imagination and assured
that all images would be equally acceptable.

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 BEING AND SEEING CHAKMA

They were then asked to each draw two images – of a Bengali and a Chakma
person. They were asked – do you think they are different? All answered in the
positive, upon which they were asked - how can you tell the difference? What makes
them different? When you hear ‘Chakma’ or ‘Bengali’ what does that make you
think? Can you show that in your drawings?
In a study where the primary source of data is drawing, it is not possible to
achieve total “understanding of a phenomenon” from interpreting participants’ lived
experiences through visual art alone (Bengtsson, 2001, in Alerby & Bergmark, 2012).
Therefore description and interpretation take a supplementary role in conveying as
close a “personal and in-depth meaning of a phenomenon” as we can. Participants
were therefore asked to take us through the images by describing their drawings,
especially in terms of similarities and differences.
While drawing one participant asked if anyone else will view their drawings.
They were told that a few other people would see them, but they were all elsewhere
and that they will be amused seeing that the images were all drawn differently. This
was done to encourage them to be ‘original’ and creative, but at the same time so that
their output was natural and spontaneous.
The participants felt hesitant at first however once they started drawing the images,
they did so engrossingly and took their time. With two exceptions, all other children
drew pictures by themselves without the presence of other participants. Overall it
was observed that the Chakma children had fewer questions for clarification than
their Bengali counterparts, possibly because all three Chakma participants learnt
drawing through private tutors. They were also observed to have greater confidence
in handling colours and outlining their images, although critiquing this was certainly
not an aim of the current study.

Explaining the Bengali and Chakma images

According to Barth (1969), rather than being a result of stratification, ethnic groups
can also be seen as a form of social organisation. Such organisation can be most
visibly manifested though the unique traditional dresses that the various ethnic
groups living in the CHT wear.
Alerby and Bergmark (2012) stress that in analysing data from drawings, it
is important to maintain “openness, humility, and wonder” toward the studied
phenomenon and the participants. A critical interpretation can yield narratives
which help us understand phenomenon and elucidate the meaning of the experiences
the participants communicated through their drawings. In other words, to capture
their reflections of their experiences can be as important as what they physically
depicted.
Alerby and Bergmark suggest four steps in the analysis of such data, all of
which were used in the interpretation of the images: a qualitative comparison of

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both similarities and differences of meaning conveyed through the images and
explanations; the exploration of patterns across the images; the creation of a ‘mind-
map’ to document the findings; and generating themes emerging from these findings.
In doing so the analysis passed through these phases of “reflectively appropriating, of
clarifying, and of making explicit the structure of meaning of the lived experience”
(p. 100–101) of the Chakma and the Bengali children.

  

Figure 1. Bengali child’s (B1) drawing of Bengali and Chakma.

This participant, an 11 year old Bengali boy, draws a Bengali man as one wearing
the most recognisable clothes: he says – ‘Bengali means lungi and genji’ – the
quintessential and most common attire for Bengali males. He is seen with ware on
head, taken to market for selling, a common vocation of subsistence farmers in small
communities in the CHT. The lungi, a local variant of the sarong, is common across
South East and South Asian countries – a loose garment worn around the waist,
appropriate in high humidity countries where trousers or ‘pants’ offer a less practical
and less comfortable experience. While Bengalis often wear trousers, it is far less
common for Chakma males to wear the lungi, who would rather wear the dhoti – a
Hindu variant of the lungi.
The Chakma man on the other hand is wearing pants and shirt – common
attire of men who normally reserve traditional clothes for special occasions
only. Curiously his face is rounder and perhaps representative of facial features
more characteristic of the Chakma. The lighter complexion is another marker to
distinguish the two people, although it is not clear if the distinction in colour was
intended or not.

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 BEING AND SEEING CHAKMA

  
Figure 2. Bengali child’s (B2) drawing of Bengali and Chakma.

The second participant was another 11 year old Bengali, but female. She draws a
Chakma woman wearing traditional Chakma skirt with a top and her eyes are smaller
and narrower. The handwoven cotton skirt is the pinon, which is often colourful
and made of thick and coarse fabric. The Bengali girl wears a frock and has larger
eyes. It can be noted that the Chakma girl has longer hair, another feature that often
characterises them - Bengali women often prefer shorter hair, although by no means
this is a distinguishing feature.
Such ‘less common’ and incidental differentiating features provide interesting
insights into how children have internalised what is normal and ‘acceptable’ in a
society where conformity in dressing can be an expectation imposed upon by the
family and centuries-old traditions. Like the previous images, the Chakma girl here
seems to have a rounder face.

  
Figure 3. Bengali child’s (B3) drawing of Bengali and Chakma.

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R. CHOWDHURY

Oldest among the participants, this 14 year old Bengali girl puts a lot of visual
detail into her drawings – her Bengali girl is wearing a multi-coloured traditional
saree, with an achol and a colour blouse. Like her Chakma counterpart she is wearing
earrings and a necklace, although it is not certain if she sees these as differently worn
by the two girls in the images. While drawing she described the Chakma girl as
wearing a “traditional” dress and having smaller eyes. The variety of colours in the
Bengali girl’s dress is interesting and might suggest the relative simplicity of design
in Chakma attire.

  

Figure 4. Bengali child’s (B4) drawing of Bengali and Chakma.

Our fourth participant, a 10 year old Bengali girl draws the Bengali girl wearing
a long skirt and says she has a “longer nose” and “bigger eyes”. The Chakma girl on
the other hand is wearing a floral top with a frock, shoes and has a purse in her hand.
She mentions, and as can be seen, that the Chakma girl’s hair is longer (also seen in
Figure 2), and has smaller eyes and her “nose is flat”.
It is significant that the Bengali girl’s skirt is longer than the Chakma girl’s
– this denotes the relatively conservative way in which Bengali girls dress as
explained earlier. Like Figures 1 and 2, the Chakma girl’s face appears to be
‘rounder’ too, unlike the Bengali girl’s more pronounced chin, although she
does not mention this in her verbal description of the drawings. It is certainly
possible that some of these physical characteristics are subconscious or based
on incidental observations (“unthinking lines”, after Stanley, this volume) where
“intrinsic facts” blend in with “observer-relative facts”. It is also to be noted that
among the images of the Chakma, this is the only one that had no traditional
dress, which might be indicative of what Gerharz calls “a sign for Bengalisation
or foreign influence” (2010, n.p.) which is increasingly seen among the minorities
in Bangladesh.

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 BEING AND SEEING CHAKMA

  

Figure 5. Chakma child’s (C1) drawing of Chakma and Bengali.

The first of the Chakma participants, this 11 year old girl draws a Chakma girl
walking with a hallong (a bamboo container) attached with a labak to her head. She
is wearing a red and black pinon, and a red blouse. As noted earlier, these two are the
most common colours of the Chakma pinon and khadi. Her hair is done in a sul sudo
or bun, typical of Chakma girls, and she has bare feet. Curiously this image is drawn
from the side, possibly to highlight the hallong.
The Bengali girl is drawn wearing a skirt and top and has a garland around her
neck. Her hair is open and she is wearing shoes. Although the Chakma girl’s eyes
and nose have not been drawn (possibly because this is the rear view), it appears
that the Bengali girl’s eyes are large, proportionate to her face, possibly representing
an emphasis on a differentiating feature. Her clothes are relatively ‘plain’ – block-
coloured – as opposed to the multi-coloured pinon of her Chakma counterpart.

  

Figure 6. Chakma child’s (C2) drawing of Chakma and Bengali.

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R. CHOWDHURY

The youngest among the participants was a nine year old Chakma girl. Her
drawing shows a Chakma girl wearing pinon-khadi and the Bengali girl wearing a
colourful frock. While she did not say much about her drawings, it appears as though
the nose and the eyes of the Bengali girl are larger than her counterpart’s and she is
dressed perhaps less conservatively. She has bare feet too, unlike the Bengali girl,
another feature common among the Chakma, especially those living in villages and
small towns.

  

Figure 7. Chakma child’s (C3) drawing of Chakma and Bengali.

The last participant, a 13 year old Chakma girl, describes the Chakma girl in her
drawing as one from a village wearing Chakma attire “in a very traditional way” –
including a silver necklace and bangles around her wrist. She is on her way to the
market and like the Chakma girl in Figure 5, she has a bamboo hallong attached to
her back. This participant is quite keen to point out that her nose is flat. She is also
seen in theng-haru, or feet bangles, a traditional Chakma ornamentation common
among the Chakma especially in villages, and almost never seen among Bengali
girls.
The Bengali girl she describes as also being from a village. She is also barefoot
but her head is covered in a ghomta – the end of the saree – again signifying the

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conservative way in which Bengali girls often go out in Bangladesh. Her eyes and
nose are described as ‘big’ and ‘long’ respectively.

Discussion

Barth (1969) explained that among ethnic groups, the cultural features that are
highlighted do not necessarily represent the sum of objective differences, rather they
are ones that the actors choose to consider as significant in marking distinction - the
“signals and emblems of differences” (p. 14). As well as being the result of a process
of ascription and self-ascription (Gerharz, 2000), these cultural manifestations can
be seen as an historical evolution which happens due to their occupation in a range
of spaces. Given this, we can say that in the continuum of discourses constructing
identities, through the act of drawing, these Bengali and Chakma children have
presented what they consider to mark difference and how they relate to these
differences at this point in time.
Aside from the descriptions that the participants have provided on their drawings,
these also tell stories in themselves. These stories are often markers of traditional
ways of life rather than anecdotal and incidental details captured physically. For
example the two Chakma girls on their way to the market carrying the bamboo
basket, the skipping Bengali girl and the made-up Bengali girl wearing a traditional
saree tell us more about lifestyles than clothes and dressing. Also the tendency of
Chakma girls wearing more ‘colourful’ clothes compared to Bengali people and
the variety of clothing options might represent the diversity that this group is more
comfortable with.
In addition to the more ‘obvious’ features of clothing, a lot of emphasis is seen
to have been placed on physical features. For example, most drawings have marked
difference through the relative size of eyes, nose, length of hair and the shape of
the face. The words described to note these differences have been based on simple
binaries such as short/long, flat/pointed, narrow/wide, small/large and round/less
round. Interestingly the difference in the length has also been marked in dresses,
showing that the Chakma dress less conservatively. In addition, differences have
also been marked through ornamentation and make up, and through the presence
or absence of footwear. Such spontaneous allocation of cultural categories and the
ascription of what is perceived as ‘typical’ features are observer-relative constructions
rather than deterministic, natural ‘facts’ (Stanley, this volume, p. 6).
As systems for ascription and self-ascription (Rahman, 2010), identities are
perceptions in constant transition involving multiple configurations (p. 149).
Social identity theory defines an individual in terms of group membership (Tajfel
& Turner, 1979, in Rahman, p. 101) and may be understood with reference to self,
in-group and out-group categorisations (Rahman, 2010). While demonstrating
physical markers such as clothing as a means to inclusiveness and belonging to a
group through affiliation, dress is also one that excludes one from ‘others’. Such
dual mechanisms of identification and differentiation is a classification system of

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its own, with “horizontal demarcation lines” (Gerharz, 2000, n.p.) which are quite
clear in the drawings. In their explanations, the children have often used ‘us’ or ‘we’
to talk about a certain way of life, or a practice that is common to their own group.

Conclusion

Despite the narrow and often divisive language of nationalism and nation-state
building that has characterised the discourses on the Chakma and other ethnic
minorities in Bangladesh and is discussed in academic scholarship, empirical
research, national and international forums or indeed among Indigenous groups
themselves, the children’s images have often bypassed these and have provided
alternative ways of looking into similarities and differences.
It can be seen that these children’s images are often built around readily available
binaries, representations which connote self/other, familiarity/exoticness, feelings of
inclusion and exclusion and perhaps, to an extent conservative and liberal lifestyles.
Also has been seen is the tendency of children to explain difference through
narratives, some of which have highlighted cultural nuances of lifestyles and lived
experiences.
Ascribed or indeed appropriated binaries and identity labels are not deterministic
of who we are and what we are like; they are indeed “intersectional” and “narrative”
(Stanley, this volume, p. 15), all coloured by the “social imaginaries” available at
our disposal. Stanley’s argument that we are “paradigm-bound in space, culture and
time” and cannot “depict cultural Otherness except through [our] own ontological,
epistemological and normative paradigms” (p. 8), means that these images tell us as
much about the children’s view of others as they do of themselves.
However, Alerby and Bergmark (2012) warn that while spoken or written language
may not be enough to fully represent knowledge and experience, there are also limits
when a study exclusively depends on visual art as the sole source of empirical data.
They recommend that such data are supplemented with descriptive accounts, which
this study has done. Rather than drawing on generalisations, this study’s aim indeed
was to break generalisations and reifications by presenting the participants’ images
as openly as possible and to present the complexities and discontinuities in their
representations.
Identities can never be stable systems for ascription and self-ascription as
Schlee et al. (1996, in Gerharz, 2000) explains; and as Corntassel (2003) laments,
ascribing identity markers to Indigenous peoples will continue to be problematic.
This study therefore emphasises on these complexities and discontinuities manifest
in the drawings and stresses that the most interesting representations of Selfing
and Othering may be housed in the most banal of findings in this study. Together
with their verbal accounts, these images provide fleeting but important insights into
Foucault’s (1990, p. 27) many silences that “underlie and permeate discourses”.
The author acknowledges the contribution of Ms Sinora Chakma in the collection
of data for this study.

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 BEING AND SEEING CHAKMA

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