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 commu-
nities and victims of violence ... As members of mi-
nority 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 at-
tempts 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-spon-
sored 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 secu-
rity personnel last January.
The project, which is still ongoing, takes off
from a major flashpoint in the CHT’s history. In
1962, the East Pakistan government constructedthe Kaptai dam on the river Kanafuli, in the CHT’s
Rangamati district. The construction proved to be
calamitous for the region’s indigenous residents,
displacing eighteen thousand families and a hun-
dred thousand people overall. In Kaptai Badh:
Bor-Porong Duborider Attokothon, a book with
interviews of those displaced by the dam, a retired
teacher, Priyobala Chakma, is quoted saying, “We
were drowned in the water of the dam and swam
towards different countries.”
Several thousands moved to the surrounding ar-
eas, including parts of India and Myanmar. Waters
from the river submerged 40 percent of the CHT’s
fertile land, as well as the town of Rangamati and
the palace of the local Chakma king. The displace-
ment also upended the livelihood of indigenous
farming communities, though few received appro-
priate compensation. The Chakma people, who
formed about seventy percent of those displaced,
termed the event the Bara Parang—the great exodus.
The aftermath of the dam’s construction and con-
tinuing displacement it set off is essential to Helal’s
work. For his exhibition at the Shilpakala Academy
in Dhaka in March 2019, he built a three-dimen-
sional structure modelled on the palace that was
submerged. In a video installation at the exhibition,
he showed this model being submerged by water,
reigniting public memory of the incident. Speaking
at the opening, Sayeed Ferdous, a researcher and
professor, commented on the significance of Helal’sopposite page:
A near-exact
plywood replica of
the Chakma king’s
palace, which Helal
designed based on
a photograph of the
original palace.
right: A still from
a single-channel
video installation at
an exhibition held
at the Shilpakala
Academy in Dhaka.
It shows a three-
dimensional model
of the Chakma
king’s palace being
submerged under
water.