ABSTRACT
After 1971, in Bangladesh, racial ethnography began to be appropriated and developed in the Hill Tracts. This was to justify claims not just to indigeneity, but also to establish a notion of separateness from non-tribal ‘others’. 1 This ethnography was by no means uniform, but was imagined as a diverse and complex entity. The serving Chakma raja summed it up thus:
the indigenous communities in the CHT [Chittagong Hill Tracts] do not form a homogenous group. They come from eleven distinct peoples or ‘jati’, each of which is further sub-divided into clans and subclans with varying cultivation methods and resource management practices. 2
