Seventeenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The paper is an exploration of identity on the borderlands between South and Southeast Asia. After 400 years of migration to the CHT due to war and famine, a hybrid community of Buddhist refugees came to settle in the hill tracts. From the 1950s, they called themselves the Marma people. Since then, cultural standardization has been hard-wired into the architecture of the Bangladeshi state, but even so, the Marma cultural journey did not result in assimilation. On the contrary, the creation and maintenance of a unique Marma identity has largely been a political project that wields together diverse peoples under one banner and safeguards the community’s existence in a fast-moving and challenging environment. Even when the demographics of the CHT have completely changed due to the influx of landless Bangladeshi refugees, the continued encounters with forces outside the community have pushed the Marma to further differentiate themselves through inventions and inversions of tradition, and the use of material culture. For example, there are stricter marriage rules to maintain access to land, there is an acceleration of the building of Buddhist temples, and there is an intensification of ritual life. When under pressure to assimilate to the majority culture, the Marma community has instead chosen to sharpen its identity.