Indigenous Picnic in the Korean Export Zone
Before it drifts too far into the past, I want to record here an extraordinary picnic and its aftermath. My colleague Dr. Ananda Vikas Chakma in the history faculty at Chittagong University kindly invited me along for a picnic with some of the Indigenous people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts who are presently living in Chittagong city. There is a regular association of all the CHT peoples who live and work in Chittagong City, and this was their annual outing. He explained to me that I would be catching a bus to a picnic area outside the city, and after a few back-and-forth messages, I understood that I should go to a particular spot on CDA Road, a few minutes’ walk from my flat, where I would find the 25 bus.
Well, I walked up there at the appointed time. There were a few people gathered in the shade of a shopfront in about the right place, and I asked if this was the right place to catch the bus for the picnic. Another faculty member from Chittagong University introduced himself. Yes, I had found the right place, and the 25 bus would be coming soon. It sounded as though he had actually said ‘25 busses’, but there were only about 20 people there.
It was indeed 25 busses, as well as a few minivans and cars, an impressive caravan. There were well over a thousand people at the picnic, playing, singing, dancing, performing, giving speeches, and doing all the other things you might do at a huge picnic on a lovely day. But first, we had to get there.
Ananda himself was caught up with some organisational detail, but one of his relatives, Mohini Ranjan Chakma, gathered me into his car and off we went. It happens that Mohini Ranjan is a senior manager in the Roads department, so when we crossed the Karnaphuli bridge and got to the toll plaza…we stopped, got out of the car, and sat down to watch all the busses and minivans come through the toll plaza. I have never actually been included in the operation of a toll plaza before. It is one of those zones which is just a threshold for most people, but for others it is more like a factory site, with dozens of specific operations located in adjacencies and sequences. In this photo you can see several of our busses waiting to be waved through the tollgates.
‘There’ turned out to be the picnic ground in the Korean Export Processing Zone. Chittagong has a series of special economic zones that have been defined through trade negotiations with key foreign partners. Koreans make up (I think) the largest community of expatriate garment factory managers here in Chittagong, and it is not surprising that a large area of land has been set aside as a special economic zone for Korean businesses south of the Karnaphuli. As yet there isn’t much there—the foundations for various factories, with company logos carefully painted on signs, lined the well-built road that we drove on through the middle of an otherwise rural landscape. But it seems everyone in Chittagong knows about the Korean Export Zone picnic ground! It is a thriving small part of a yet-to-be-made landscape.
The picnic itself is hard to depict. My field notes ran on for pages. Here are two games: a fighting-rooster game for young men, and a particularly difficult version of the egg-and-spoon race where women wearing saris race whilst holding a spoon in their mouths!
I’m especially fond of the small girl right in the centre of the photo filming her mother as she races along.
In this short film, you can see how the rooster contest is played — each young man is hopping on one foot, and the arena is made up of people in a ring around the contestants. This particular moment shows a sudden ambush attack.
Although the games are clearly gendered, some of the people I spoke to drew my attention to how freely the genders mixed and how women and men were free to dance, sing, and play in public—unlike the norms for public performance of gender in Chittagong city.
After the games there was food and then a cultural programme. I was put, quite firmly, in a special building where the VIPs waited to be put onto the stage. That was an opportunity to meet and learn from a senior leader in the Chakma community, Saradindu Shekhar Chakma, who among other things had been the ambassador to Bhutan. He has a clear vision of the Chakma as a people who have won and lost local autonomy through a series of regional powers: Mrauk U, the British, Pakistan and Bangladesh—and he was very clear on his preference for the Awami League. I hope to get his support for our work around documenting Chakma, Chittagoing, and other local languages.
Eventually we were summoned for the cultural events. It began with the inevitable official recognition of important people but then moved on to performances. There were short didactic plays, a remarkable performance of spontaneous rhyming couplets, folk music and dancing, and then a proper noisy concert which was not at all folkloristic. It reminded me quite strongly of the warmest concerts I have attended—first a few brave people danced, then something changes and everyone winds up dancing. My phone battery died, to my frustration, so I have neither photos nor recordings of the cultural performances. But when the concert got going there was proper Durkheimian effervescence.
I, too, wound up dancing. Honestly, it’s hard to resist a good beat and I hadn’t been out to listen to music for a long time. Somewhere out there on Facebook I think there are pictures of a whole gang of us dancing away. It more than made up for having to sit on stage…and that may explain why I have rather a lot of new Facebook friends.