What we’re reading this week

Amreeta Lethe
Kaptai Baadh: Bor-Porong
Samari Chakma
The University Press Limited, 2024
“Lorana morana shoman,” reads a Chakma proverb in the book’s introduction: “Being forcibly displaced from one’s land is akin to death.”Kaptai Badh: Bor-Porong, edited by Samari Chakma, collects the harrowing experiences of several inhabitants of the original town of Rangamati, which was entirely submerged during the construction of the Kaptai Dam between 1957-1962. The project led to a mass migration, known as “Bor-porong” or the Great Exodus in the Chakma language, and inundated over 50 thousand acres of land (40% of all arable land in the Chittagong Hill Tracts) and 100,000 people’s homes, property, and possessions. Kaptai Badh: Bor-Porong serves as an indispensable record of the region’s indigenous oral history, with personal accounts shedding light on how mega projects such as the Kaptai Dam not only forcibly displaced tens of thousands, forever severing many from their communities and forcing even more to migrate, but also failed to deliver on grand promises of “development for all”. Over 60 years following the dam’s construction, its effects continue to shape the sociopolitical realities and enduring struggles of indigenous populations in the region even today.