关键词：
Chittagong Hill Tracts
tribal histories and indigeneity
human rights
cosmopolitanism
gender
摘要：
This article examines the turbulent twentieth-century history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of East Bengal through the cosmopolitan life stories of Rani Benita Roy of the Buddhist Chakma Raj and her daughters, c. 1900-1972. These accounts address questions of women's education, religious conversion, marriage, migration and subsequent immigration against the broader canvas of colonialism, post-colonial nation-state building and tribal identity in South Asia. Originally, a remote hinterland of the colonial province of Bengal inhabited by 13 indigenous tribal communities (Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and animist);the CHT shares a geographic border with contemporary Myanmar (earlier Burma) and eastern India as well as linguistic, racial and ethnic ties with Southeast Asia. The peoples of the region have historically lived a relatively semi-autonomous existence under first Mughal and then later British imperialism. After India's Independence from Great Britain in 1947 and subsequent Partition on religious lines, the CHT became part of Muslim-majority East Pakistan and in 1971 fell into the new state of Bangladesh. In the aftermath, the peoples of the CHT suffered escalating violence and human rights violations, including forced conversion to Islam, destruction of Buddhist and Hindu temples, inundation of arable land with the building of dams, rape and massacre. This is an account of a political family caught between national borders, religious identities and imperial subjectivities in a post-colonial world of constantly shifting national borders. Through personal narratives, it reveals a history of interreligious, transregional and transnational exchange in contrast to the narrow and often divisive language of nationalism and nation-state building.
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