A name denied: The long struggle over indigenous identity in Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, for more than four decades, the state has resisted calling its ethnic minorities "indigenous", even as those communities have used the term to describe themselves since long before independence.
Every 9 August, the UN observes the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, a date set aside to raise global awareness about indigenous communities and to press governments to safeguard their rights.
In Bangladesh, for more than four decades, the state has resisted calling its ethnic minorities "indigenous", even as those communities have used the term to describe themselves since long before independence.
A word the state will not use
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"I am a Chakma. I am not a Bengali. I am a citizen of Bangladesh – Bangladeshi."
- MN Larma (1972)
The dispute is not new, and it is not settled. In 2011, the Bangladesh government enacted the "Small Ethnic Group Cultural Institute Law", an act that would classify the 40-45 non-Bengali ethnic tribes as "ethnic minorities".
On the eve of enactment, the then foreign minister, Dipu Moni, said, "Bangladesh does not have any indigenous population"; a similar claim had been made by the Bangladeshi delegate to the 9th UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues a year before.
In 2012, an internal official memo, circulated in the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives, stated that "steps should be taken to publicize/broadcast in the print and electronic media that there are no Indigenous people in Bangladesh".
Government correspondence over the years shows a consistent pattern. A 2006 foreign ministry letter to the Ministry of Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs asked that the word "tribe" replace "indigenous" in official use. A 2008 reply from the foreign ministry to a UN query stated plainly that the country had ethnic groups but no indigenous people.
A 2010 notification went further, instructing officials not to address hill communities as "indigenous" at all, citing the constitution, the Hill District Council laws and the 1997 CHT Peace Accord, none of which use the term.
Then came the 15th constitutional amendment of 2011. Rather than settling the argument, it added another layer to it. The amendment created Article 23A, promising to protect the culture of the country's "tribes, minor races, ethnic sects and communities", while Article 6 declared that all citizens would be known nationally as Bengalis.
Ethnic organisations had hoped for constitutional recognition as "Adivasi", the Bangla term for indigenous. What they got instead was a fresh set of labels, layered onto roughly 16 others the country's ethnic minorities have carried across different regimes: tribal, ethnic minority, backward class, hill people, Jumma nation, refugee, and more.
What the old records actually say
The irony, researchers point out, is that colonial and early Bangladeshi law used the word "indigenous" freely long before it became controversial. The 1900 Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation referred to the "indigenous hillman". So did the Indian Income Tax Act of 1922, the Indian Finance Act of 1941, and the Forest Act of 1927.
A 1991 government circular and a 1996 National Board of Revenue notice used the same phrase. The State Acquisition and Tenancy Act of 1950, later amended in 2004, listed twenty-four ethnic communities under the term "aboriginal", which in Bangla translates as "Adivasi" rather than "tribal".
Government texts have swung back and forth on the question ever since, sometimes within the same institution. The Bangladesh Awami League's 2008 election manifesto used the terms "small nationalities" and Adivasi. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party's manifesto that year referred to "hill and tribal people".
Cultural academies set up by the state in Rajshahi, Rangamati, Khagrachhari, and Netrokona were themselves named "tribal cultural academies", even while some of their own publications used Adivasi in print.
Linguists and lawyers who have studied the dictionaries note a similar inconsistency. Bangla Academy's own English-Bengali dictionary translates "indigenous" as "deshiyo" or "swadeshio" terms rooted in belonging to the land, while its Bengali-English dictionary renders Adivasi as "aborigins."
The disagreement, in other words, is about whether the state will concede that these communities were here first.
Tribal, not indigenous
Officials and sympathetic commentators who back the state's position rest their case on more than politics. They point to dictionary entries and international law.
The English word most Bangla speakers reach for as a synonym of Adivasi is aborigine, but the word is not generic. Oxford's dictionary ties it specifically to Australia's original inhabitants, just as "Red Indian" refers only to Native Americans rather than to indigenous people everywhere.
"Indigenous" itself, in standard dictionaries from Bangla Academy to Chambers, simply means native to a place rather than brought in from elsewhere, the opposite of "exotic".
Critics argue that if this narrow, literal test is applied, none of Bangladesh's ethnic minorities passes it, since most trace their arrival in the region to a window of roughly three to eight hundred years ago, migrating in from Burma and India.
International labour law adds another layer to the argument. The ILO's 1957 Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention and its 1989 successor, Convention 169, define two distinct categories in the same treaty text rather than one.
Article 1(a) defines "tribal people" as those distinguished from the rest of a nation by social, economic and cultural conditions and governed wholly or partly by their own customs and laws. Article 1(b) reserves "indigenous" specifically for descendants of populations that inhabited a territory before conquest, colonisation or the drawing of present state borders.
Critics of the Adivasi campaign say Bangladeshi advocates habitually cite only the second definition while ignoring the first, even though the Chakma, Marma, Santal, and other communities arguably fit the tribal category more precisely.
Bangladesh ratified Convention 107 on 22 June 1972, months before its own constitution was adopted, having already been bound by it as a province of Pakistan since 1960. But the treaty was never widely adopted. Roughly 27 states ratified it in total, and only about 20 have ratified the revised Convention 169, a group made up mostly of African and Latin American nations where indigenous populations form a substantial or dominant share of the citizenry.
Outside Bangladesh, only Nepal has ratified Convention 169 in South Asia.
When the UN General Assembly adopted its non-binding Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007, the vote ran 143 in favour, four against, and 11 abstentions, with Bangladesh among the abstainers.
UN records show Bangladesh explained its abstention by pointing to what it called an unresolved ambiguity in the declaration over who exactly counts as indigenous, an objection some diplomats voiced privately even as governments such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States voted no outright before reversing course later.
There is also a deeper historical argument, and a more contested one. Some writers note that if "indigenous" is read as strictly as its dictionary definition suggests, the term ought to belong to the region's pre-Aryan, animist population, since the Aryan migration into north Bengal predates the presence of the Chakma, Marma, Garo, Hajong or Santal peoples in the territory altogether.
Bengal's Buddhist history, they add, running from the Pala dynasty through the scholar Atish Dipankar to the earliest surviving verses of Bangla literature in the Charyapada, belongs to a separate lineage from Chakma history and should not be folded into it.
Indigenous rights advocates dispute much of this, arguing that migration dates for individual ethnic groups remain genuinely uncertain and contested among historians, and that fixing an arbitrary cutoff for "who came first" says more about a state's political convenience than about any settled fact.
The debate, in short, has not moved past where it started.
Identity beyond the ballot box
What gets lost in the legal back and forth, scholars argue, is that ethnic identity in Bangladesh was never a single, uniform thing to begin with.
The Mandi and Khasi communities trace descent through the mother's line. The Hajong and Koch observe matrilineal inheritance customs in specific respects, while other groups remain patrilineal, and all of them, researchers note, function within broadly patriarchal social structures regardless of lineage.
Even within what the state calls a single "tribe", debate persists: some Barman community members have argued their group is ethnically Bengali and Hindu by faith, entitled to no separate tribal status, while others in the same community insist on recognition as part of a wider Mongoloid heritage shared with the Garo, Koch, Chakma, and Marma people.
That internal diversity, observers say, is precisely why a single imposed label, whether tribal, ethnic minority or indigenous, tends to flatten more than it describes. What remains constant is the demand these communities have made of the state for over forty years, not for a new word, but for the right to define themselves and to have that self-definition acknowledged as a basic condition of citizenship.
As the country marks another Indigenous Peoples' Day, that basic recognition remains the same unresolved question it was in 1972, when the country's first constitution was drafted in a forest clearing that belonged, in every sense but the legal one, to the Mandi, Koch, and Barman people who called it home.
