Warriors on the wall
Daniel Nelson
"The Chittagong Hill tracts is a rapists' heaven... These rapes are very political."
"The Bangladesh Government still treats [the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts] as the native 'other' who need to be controlled, policed, subjugated and denominated as second-class citizens."
The quotes are from small cards - a photo on one side, a biography on the other - that vistors can take as they walk round the circle of large portraits, burned by laser onto straw mats, each with a candle in front, at the Rivington Gallery.
The shrine, created by Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam (whose book, My Journbey As A Witness, has been described as "the most important photography book ever written by a photographer") is for a woman who campaigned on behalf of the people of the Hill Tracts people and is widely believed to have been abducted 20 years ago, at the age of 23, in the presence of a military officer, and subsequently killed.
Shahidul Alam: Kalpana's Warriors is a moving memorial, and helps draw attention to a long-running political sore. The rift derives from colonial administration, and ethnic and religious differences between the the country's Bengali Muslim majority and the mainly Buddhist tribes in Bangladesh's only hilly area.
Bengali settlers from the plains now form about half the population, a mass movement alluded to by Mark Sealy, the director of director of Autograph ABP (a charity that works internationally in photography and film, cultural identity, race, representation and human rights). He says the exhibition "commemorates the life of this fiery, courageous, outspoken young woman who dared to speak out against military occupation and the way land belonging to the indigenous people from this part of Bangladesh had been taken over and distributed to Bangali settlers."
Shahidul Islam says the laser printing is designed "to remind the viewer of the fires deliberately set by the authorities who had burnt the Pahari villages – something that Kalpana was protesting about in her last confrontation with the military."
A second room looks at the internal displacement of the Paharis and the arrival of the government-backed Bangali settlers. One of the captions to a photograph of a dam reservoir in this section reads like an epitaph to the victims of "development": "Construction work on the project, which was funded by the US, began in 1956 under the auspices of the Government of East Pakistan. As a result, 54,000 acres (220 square kilometres) of farmland in the Rangamti District were submerged, which was 40% of the total arable land of the area.
"Along with that, 29 square miles of Government-owned forest, and 234 square miles of other forestland, went under water. About 18,000 families - almost 100,000 people - were displaced.
"In addition, the King's Palace of the Chakmas was flooded, and is now under water.
"The hill people who lost their land were nmever adequately compensated and the electricity produced was not made available to them. The existence of a large area of slow-moving water has increased the incidence of malaria, and illegal logging in isolated spots around the perimeter of the lake has led to ssoil erosion and the gradual ssilting up of the lake."
A moving and important exhibition.
* Shahidul Alam: Kalpana's Warriors is at Rivington Place, EC2 until 18 June, free Info: 7749 1240/ http://www.rivingtonplace.org/
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