Tears Of A Thousand People

Exploring the violence of displacement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

- Surabhi Kanga

IN ONE PHOTOGRAPH in Samsul Alam Helal’s project “Disappearing Roots,” two women stand against a hilly green expanse, their faces covered by shiny aluminum foil. Helal, a Dhaka-based photographer, made this image in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in southeastern Bangladesh. When asked about his decision to hide the women’s faces, Helal said it gestured towards the “silencing and obscuring of the indigenous experience as well as the denial of normal, national protections to vulnerable communities and victims of violence … As members of minority communities in Bangladesh, they are already living behind an invisible curtain.”

Helal’s photographic series focusses on the ethnic communities indigenous to the CHT—the Chakmas, the Marmas, the Tripuras and the Mrongs, among other smaller non-Bengali ethnic groups. It attempts to spark a dialogue about their disappearing way of life in the face of continued displacement and gentrification. The project symbolically gestures to a long history of violence faced by these minority ethnic communities, which includes state-sponsored repression and militarised occupation. One of the incidents that informed this work, Helal said, is of two young women from the Marma community, who were assaulted and raped by Bangladeshi security personnel last January.