By Kabita Chakma
A thorn in the side of the colonisers of the Chittagong Hill Tracts continues to offer inspiration today.
Kalindi Rani, who ruled from 1832 to 1873, was the 45th ruler of the Chakmas. Her kingdom was outside the southeastern edge of what was then British Bengal. It had for a century been a target of appropriation by the British, who had been in control of Chittagong since 1760. In 1860, Kalindi’s kingdom was colonised, the British subsequently expropriating land and dividing the territory into parts. However, Kalindi’s kingdom was not only dismembered, but also ‘re-membered’ by the new cartography of the British by naming part of the old kingdom the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT).
Retaken: Kalindi Rani's Rajanagar Rajbari is now part of Chittagong district
Photo: Monojit Chakma
Kalindi herself can be similarly ‘re-membered’ through an exploration of the struggles for indigenous rights in Southasia, particularly with regards to land. Land and resources in the CHT have constituted a major flashpoint since British colonisation. In 1947, while the population of the CHT was only three percent Muslim, the British awarded it to East Pakistan. In 1971, East Pakistan came to be known as Bangladesh. Today, the CHT is the borderland between Bangladesh, India and Burma. It is the traditional home of 11 indigenous hill peoples, of whom the Chakma constitute the largest group. These groups differ markedly from the Bengali majority in physical features, language, culture, religion, dressing, food habit, farming method and architecture.
There was British interest in the land of the Chakma-raj immediately after the former’s colonisation of Chittagong. Initially, the British intended to create a land passage to East Asia. Harry Verelst, assuming the position of the first chief of Chittagong in 1760, reported the following year that he had reason to believe that a passage could be found through the eastern hills adjacent to Chittagong, in order to reach Tibet and the northern parts of Cochinchina. The cessionary treaty of 1760, which placed Chittagong under the British East India Company, did not define a boundary of Chittagong. In 1763, however, Verelst proclaimed the local jurisdiction of Shermust Khan, the Chakma raja, to be ‘All the hills from the Pheni river to the Sangu and from the Nizampur Road [the present Dhaka-Chittagong road] to the hills of the Kuki Raja’. But this demarcation was quickly violated by the British, who continued to extract forest products from the area
without permission.
The British also adopted a policy of settling Bengali peasants and landlords from Chittagong to the western part of the Chakma territory. This land appropriation and unauthorised extraction eventually led to armed resistance against the British by Kalindi’s predecessors, who fought from 1772 until 1798. As the resistance was led by two successive Chakma rajas, historians have referred it to as the Chakma bidroha, or resistance. There were, however, other indigenous groups in the area who joined the resistance, most notably a famous Marma warrior named Kheju Roaza, and other hill peoples referred to by the British as Kukis.
Maps vs courts
Cartography was used as an instrument by the British to colonise the Chittagong Hills. Although there is a Portuguese map of the area prepared in 1550 by Joao Baptista Lavanha, who marked the Chakma-inhabited area as ‘Chacomas’, there was no British map until cartographer James Rennell’s completed ‘A New Map of Hindoostan’ in 1779. Renell’s new cartography completely ignored the British demarcation of the Chakma territory of 1773 and falsely incorporated Ranganya (Rangunia), the capital of the Chakma rajas, with Chittagong. On Renell’s map, Rangamati, the second capital, was marked as Rangamuttya, very close to its Chakma name, Rangamattya, but was located outside the newly demarcated Chittagong district.
The1860s annexation of the hills used an undefined boundary. The newly created CHT territory was dismembered and re-membered by further mapping, to increase tax revenue and to establish control over forests. In order to introduce land revenue, there was further redefining of these boundaries in 1863. The following decade, the British proposed replacing the traditional non-territorial, kinship-based jurisdiction with a territorial jurisdiction called the mouza (a territorial unit, consisting of a number of villages). The British first collected land revenue in the CHT from 1874, but the collection system was not fully operational until 1892 when the mouza were introduced.
In 1873, a plan existed to divide the CHT into seven revenue circles, eventually reduced to four circles of which one included several forest reserves. The implementation of the ‘circle rules’ was not easy, with significant resistance from the indigenous peoples. In August 1891, a frustrated W B Oldham, commissioner of the Chittagong division, wrote a letter to the Bengal government stating, ‘the Chakmas are too intelligent and civilized to be bound by such rules and the wild tribes … too barbarous and too nomad.’ He added that dewans, the tax collectors of the Chakma-raj, ‘frequently clamoured for permanent settlement.’
Interestingly, Kalindi tried hard to gain rights for permanent settlement over all lands, to enable the indigenous authorities to collect taxes as proposed by the British, even as she continued the existing traditional capitation (‘couple’) tax, a kinship-based levy. She appealed to the Revenue Board, demanding her rights for permanent settlement, but this was refused in 1866. She was told that she only had the right to collect capitation tax, as the government was the sole proprietor of the land. She appealed to a higher authority but this also failed.
Kalindi resisted British power through its own institutions throughout her rule. To claim her properties, she fought for 12 years in the courts. In 1844, the court finally issued an order that Kalindi was the sole representative of all the properties of the late Raja Dharam Bux Khan. Yet importantly, while Kalindi’s predecessors took up armed struggle against the British, her resistance strategy was through non-violence, deploying traditional and western institutions of power.
In 1860, there were two chiefs in the CHT: Kalindi Rani in the north and centre, and the Bohmong ruler in the south. A third chief, initially termed sarbarakar (tax collector), was a colonial construction to reduce Kalindi’s power. The 1860 general instructions from the government to the CHT British authorities stated that ‘The customs and prejudices of the people [are] to be observed and respected. We are to interfere as little as possible between the chiefs and their tribes.’ Yet violation of these instructions is evident in the division of the Chakma kingdom into parts, which the rani resisted.
In 1867, Captain Thomas Herbert Lewin appointed Maung Kioja Sain, a Marma subject of Kalindi (without the latter’s consent) as sarbarakar. This individual was vested with collecting capitation taxes from the northern part of the Chakma kingdom, thus effectively ignoring the 1860 instructions. Kalindi took the matter to the court, but her claim was rejected in 1870. In explaining the reason for dividing the rani’s kingdom, it was noted, ‘Though nominally the northern section belonged to the Chakma Chief, yet owing to the distances there was no control over the people, and great inconveniences was experienced by the absence of any head to whom references could be made when occasion arose.’ To protect the southern boundary, Kalindi made a written agreement with the Bohmong chief in 1869.
Kalindi not only lodged complaints against violations of the 1860 instructions. She also sent Harish Chandra, her grandson and heir, to see the lieutenant-governor of Bengal in Calcutta. As a result, an independent inquiry took place, finding that the 1860 instructions indeed were not being sufficiently observed. However, in 1873, the year Kalindi Rani died, the dismembering of her kingdom, initially proposed by Lewin after appointing Maung Kioja Sain, was considered. This was finally brought into effect in 1884 by creating a third circle, known as the Mong circle. Thus, Kalindi’s kingdom was reduced to only one circle.
Flooding the hills
Kalindi’s lifelong resistance to loss of her subjects’ land rights was assumed by many colonial officers to be simply a personal feud. In his 1992 book, Thangliena: Life of T. H. Lewin, Amongst Wild Tribes Of India’s North East Frontier, biographer John Whitehead described Kalindi Rani as ‘a formidable old lady’, and identified her as ‘Lewin’s implacable enemy’. The cumulative outcome of the coloniser’s strategies was that the indigenous peoples of the CHT were dispossessed from the vast majority of their traditional lands, particularly those appropriated as ‘reserved’ forests. Paradoxically, the British period is also widely recognised as a time of relative peace and reasonable living conditions for the hill people. These conditions resulted from the enactment of the CHT Regulation of 1900, which imposed restrictions on the settlement of outsiders and a bar on the sale or transfer of land to non-indigenous individuals.
Pakistan and Bangladesh, however, removed restrictions and encouraged settlements, which resulted in large-scale dispossession of indigenous lands. Prior to 1971, this dispossession resulted from Pakistan’s development priorities. In 1959, the construction of the Kaptai hydro-electric facility created an enormous reservoir, which submerged 40 percent of the CHT’s fertile agricultural land and rendered homeless some 100,000 people – more than a quarter of the population. Only a tiny amount of the promised compensation for submerged lands was ever delivered.
Land dispossession continued as the result of nationalist policies of assimilation and marginalisation. Prime Minister Sheikh Mujib himself is reported to have threatened indigenous leaders with the inundation of the CHT with plainland Bengalis, a threat that led to growing resistance by the hill people. The Bangladesh government responded with intense militarisation and massive transmigration of Bengalis into the CHT from 1975 onwards. As a result, thousands of hill people fled to India, while thousands more were displaced within Bangladesh. While Bengalis constituted only nine percent of the CHT’s population in 1951, by 1991 they made up fully half. The following year, the CHT was described by the CHT Commission as the most militarised area in the world – one security person for every 10 civilians.
Only recently have indigenous-rights campaigns in the CHT been gaining prominence in the national and international arenas. Most recently, this included the 25 May presentation of a report on the CHT by UN Special Rapporteur Lars-Anders Baer to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. This report warns that a third of the Bangladesh Army is stationed in the CHT, which constitutes just a tenth of the country; and that the most important parts of the 1997 Peace Accord, aimed at ending more than two decades of armed conflict in the CHT, remain either unimplemented or only partially implemented.
Fourteen years after the Accord, resistance by indigenous peoples against the dispossession of their lands in the CHT continues. Kalindi Rani’s relentless but non-violent struggle against colonisation and loss of land rights thus remains relevant and inspiring.
~ Kabita Chakma is the coordinator of the CHT Jumma Peoples Network of the Asia Pacific and the Human Rights Coordinator of the CHT Indigenous Jumma Association Australia.
