When I was in school, they used to beat us up for not speaking Bangla, even though it was not our mother tongue.
We were taught Bangla and English — to write them properly, and to speak them in class.
The question
What did the Chakma community say to themselves when Kalpana Chakma disappeared?
Naming a thing is the first move against it. But what happens when the thing itself was imported — when a community must borrow language for a harm it did not invent? The borrowed word carries the fingerprints of whoever brought the harm. Read closely, this lexicon is a map of contact.
What do they call the constant land grab, the surveillance, the threat that arrives from outside? Twelve words follow. They hold experiences largely absent from official records: disappearance, night raid, collective punishment, the practised silence of a village that has learned not to see.
The words
Artist's statement
I did not set out to make a dictionary. I set out to ask people what they called things.
What came back, again and again, was a pause — someone reaching for a word in one language and finding it waiting in another.
A language can be used against you and used by you in the same breath. Bangla came to the Hill Tracts as a requirement: the language of school, of exams, of work, of the state. The words here are not Bangla. They are what happens when a community takes a harm that arrived from outside and makes it sayable in its own mouth.
Somebody needed a word for surveillance and built one out of ordinary Chakma parts: choge choge ragana — kept in sight, the way you keep a watch on someone. That is not a language disappearing. That is a language at work.
The books
The language is on the curriculum now. The question is who is left to teach it.
In Dhaka, in Chattogram, in the district towns, the day runs in Bangla. Children are raised in it, schooled in it, examined in it. Several people interviewed for this project described understanding their grandparents perfectly and answering in Bangla — the mouth was never asked to hold the other shapes. That is not indifference. That is what one language does in one generation.
The state has moved. Since January 2017 the National Curriculum and Textbook Board has printed free Chakma textbooks and sent them out with the rest of the new year’s books, every first of January. Nine intakes of children have received them — ক্ষুদ্র নৃগোষ্ঠীর (চাকমা ভাষার) প্রাক-প্রাথমিক ও প্রাথমিক পাঠ্যপুস্তক, pre-primary and primary books in the Chakma language, opening with the Ajhapath alphabet.
The books arrive. That is the easy half. The teacher in the room was schooled the way everyone else was, in Bangla, and cannot read the script well enough to teach from it. No dedicated teacher for the subject, no training to make one. The alphabet is handed out and not taught. The stories stay in the bag. A language cannot be delivered by truck. It has to be spoken back to a child by someone who has it — and the generation that would have done the speaking is the generation that was punished for it.
Sumita is at university in Dhaka now, in the Department of Bangla. She writes it faultlessly — the language they beat into her, studied to the level of a degree. Somewhere in a hill school this January, a child was handed a book in the language they beat out of her, and is waiting for someone in the room who can read the first line aloud.
Framework
Structural violence is harm embedded in social structures — not a single act by a single actor, but a system that constrains and silences over time. It has no trigger moment. A beating in a classroom has one; a language pushed out of a school does not, and neither does a textbook handed to a child nobody can read it with. Johan Galtung’s distinction is what lets all three sit in the same frame, and it is why the words a community uses for the structures pressing on it are worth recording at all.
- Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191.
- Köhler, G., & Alcock, N. (1976). An empirical table of structural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 13(4), 343–356.
- Armstead, T. L., Wilkins, N., & Nation, M. (2021). Structural and social determinants of inequities in violence risk. Journal of Community Psychology, 49(4), 878–906.