The Chakmas are a simple hardy, peace loving community professing Buddhism and inhabiting the inaccessible hilly areas in India’s north-east viz. the States of Tripura, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh and Arakan in Purma. Over the years and due to their cultural interaction with the people of other races, mainly Bengalees they have lost much of their original ethnic characteristics, and speak a dialect, Chakma dialect, which is almost the same as south-eastern Bengali, but there is much still which make them a distinctive cultural and ethnic entity. The present crisis of the Chakma community i.e. the ethnic threat which the Chakma inhabitants of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, their traditional homeland, are facing from the religiously prejudiced Bangladeshi rulers stem from the partition of Indian Subcontinent in 1947. The Chakmas much against their will were merged with Pakistan thought in their religion they were much closer to the Hindus than Muslims. Since then the successive rulers of Pakistan, and since 1972 of Bangladesh, have worked systematically for the obliteration of their separate ethnic identity which they have preserved all through their history. This has resulted in their being swamped over by the non-tribal Muslim Bengalees from the plains and their being reduced to minority status in their own homeland. Their saga of woes has stirred the conscience of the freedom-loving people the world over. The ethnographic literature hitherto has singularly lacked in a systematic and definitive study of this fascinating tribe and this great void has been now ably filled by S.P Talukdar through the present work. The book, fruit of the author’s years of dedicated and painstaking work, has documented for the first time different aspects of the life of the Chakmas to a great degree of authenticity.
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