How the Koch people of Madhupur lost their land and language

Seventy-year-old Niranjan Chandra Barman remembers a time when the world was greener and the landscape wore a vibrant colour. 

In the village of Pirgacha, nestled in the heart of Tangail's Madhupur, Niranjan was born a "Koch". It was more than a surname. It was a title that linked him to a lineage of forest-dwellers who had navigated these hills for centuries.

Today, the name Koch has been scrubbed from his legal identity. He is Niranjan Chandra Barman. The change was not an act of choice, but a strategy for survival — a linguistic and social camouflage adopted to navigate a surrounding that had grown increasingly hostile to the people of the woods.

"The forest is destroyed," he says, his voice a dry rasp that seems to mimic the rustle of fallen leaves, "and so are we".

The vanishing emerald

The journey from the concrete sprawl of Dhaka to the Madhupur tract is a 130-kilometre descent into a landscape in transition. Historically, this region was a geological anomaly — a terrace of red soil and ancient Sal forests. 

It was a place where the canopy was so dense that the sun reached the forest floor only in scattered, golden coins. Peacocks displayed their plumage in the clearings, and the "man-eating" tigers of the Sal forest were not myths, but a terrifying, daily reality.

But as you approach Jalchatra today, the natural world looks like a factory. The ancient biodiversity has been replaced by the ruthless efficiency of monoculture. Miles upon miles of banana plantations line the roads, their heavy purple hearts hanging low. 

Pineapple shrubs are packed into the red earth, often intercropped with rows of papaya. The new asphalt roads are wide and smooth, designed not for the wandering of indigenous feet, but for the heavy trucks that ferry "produce" to the hungry markets of the capital.

The greenery is a lie. These are not forests, but crops. The few remaining stands of Sal trees look like soldiers in a line — planted, managed and devoid of the chaotic undergrowth that once fed a culture.

From a Koch to a Barman or a Roy

In Bhutia Bazar, we meet Gouranga Barman, the general secretary of the Koch Indigenous Organisation. He is a man caught between two eras. 

As a leader, he spends his days mediating land disputes — the messy, legal fallout of a people who once held land by tradition now trying to hold onto it through paper.

"The Madhupur of my childhood no longer exists," Gouranga says, gesturing toward the horizon. He explains that there are roughly three thousand Kochs left in this pocket of Tangail. For them, the forest was not just scenery. It was their supermarket, their temple and their pharmacy.

The tragedy of the Koch identity is tied to the land laws of the mid-20th century. During the Pakistan era and into the early years of independent Bangladesh, Koch was a label that invited dispossession. Indigenous people often found they could not legally own or transfer land under their ancestral names. 

To survive, to keep a roof over their children's heads, thousands of Koch families systematically dropped their surnames. They adopted "Barman" or "Roy", attempting to blend into the Bangali Hindu mainstream.

They traded their distinctiveness for security. But in the process, the community began to dissolve. 

At a tea stall in Pirgacha, a group of elders gathers. Their faces are maps of a lost geography. They speak of Dabrer Chala and Bhanrer Chala — two legendary hills that were the spiritual anchors of their village. Today, those hills are flat.

"I have seen tigers drink from the baid [lowlands] right there," Niranjan points to a flat, dusty field. "Now, there are only a few monkeys left, scavenging for scraps."

The death of a language

The most profound loss, however, is one that cannot be seen on a map: the death of the Koch language, known as Fantai.

The link between ecology and linguistics is visceral. Muhammad Abdur Rahman, director of the Centre for People and Environment, posits a haunting theory: a language dies when the reason to speak it disappears.

"When the Koch were forest-dependent, their vocabulary was a reflection of the wild," Rahman explains. "A father would tell his son to gather Mi [paddy] or Sirsho [mustard] from the forest. These words were tools. But when the forest was cleared for the 3,000-acre government rubber plantation in 1986, those tools became obsolete."

As the forest vanished, the Koch were forced into the market economy. In the markets of Madhupur, the currency is Bangla. You cannot buy salt or trade labour in Fantai. Within a single generation, the language shifted from a living breath to a decorative relic.

Today, Fantai is a language of the dead. It is heard only once a year during Gram Puja (Village Worship). As the winter ends and the leaves of the artificial forests begin to fall, the community gathers to chant mantras. These sacred sounds are the only time the ancient words are spoken. For the rest of the year, water is Paani, not Chika. A hill is a Pahar, not a Hachu. Salt is Lobon, not Khaisem.

"The children," Niranjan says, looking at a group of boys playing with a smartphone, "they think the old words are just noises. They learn at school in Bangla. They dream in Bangla. Their mother tongue has become a foreign language to them."

The youth of Madhupur are increasingly disconnected from their heritage. 

Jacy Chiran, a former language educator, notes that the digital age is accelerating the erosion. "The kids are on their phones. They are watching YouTube in Bangla, playing games in English. A language cannot survive on 'mother's milk' alone; it needs a world to live in. If the world is Bangla, the language will become Bangla."

The history of a clearcut

To understand the present, one must look at the scars of the past. The destruction of Madhupur was not an accident. It was a policy.

It began with the British, who viewed the Sal forest as a timber mine for railway sleepers and ships. They declared it a "Reserve Forest," a legal term that essentially criminalised the indigenous people's way of life. The Pakistan era brought the "Social Forestry" movement, which paradoxically destroyed natural forests to plant commercial species.

After 1971, the pressure only increased. Displaced people from river-eroded areas were resettled in the forest tracts. The Bangla majority, driven by a desperate need for land and food, pushed deeper into the woods. In 2023, data showed that out of 45,565 acres of forest land in Madhupur, a mere 14.82% remains as natural forest. The rest has been swallowed by pineapple, banana, and ginger cultivation.

The cost of progress

As the sun sets over the rubber trees of Pirgacha, the shadows are long and thin. There is a quietness here that feels heavy. It is the silence of a people who have been "integrated" at the cost of their soul.

For the young men of the Koch community, the path forward leads out of the forest. They go to Dhaka to work in garment factories or salons. They send money home to parents who live on land they no longer truly own, in a village that no longer speaks their name.

Narendra Koch, a visionary of the community, once tried to stem the tide. He spent years developing a Koch alphabet and opened a school to teach the children. 

"The children, they think the old words are just noises. They learn at school in Bangla. They dream in Bangla. Their mother tongue has become a foreign language to them." Niranjan Chandra Barman, 70

But the belly demanded a master. To eat, he had to leave his school and move to the city for work. His initiative, like the Sal forests before it, withered from a lack of sustenance.

Shihab Shahriar, a folk researcher who documented the community, sums it up with a grim finality. "The Kochs were cornered. They were forced to adapt to survive," he noted, "But adaptation is often just another word for disappearance."

In Madhupur, the bananas are sweet and the pineapples are plentiful. The roads are paved, and the markets are full. But if you sit with the elders like Niranjan, you realise that the price of this "progress" was a forest, a culture, and a language that will never return.

The forest is destroyed. And the silence that remains is the sound of a people vanishing in plain sight.