Wandering the Hills of Bangladesh

07/28/13

I spent last weekend wandering the Chittagong Hill Tracts on a class field trip. As usual, my complete lack of knowledge about Bangladesh meant that I had no idea what the Chittagong Hill Tracts were or what to expect when I got there. The basics are that the Chittagong Hill Tracts are the only hilly region of an otherwise very flat country. They are also home to a huge indigenous, non-ethnically Bengali population made up of large tribal groups. Over half the population is Buddhist and the area has a long history of conflict with the Bangladeshi government (including a possibly politically-motivated kidnapping that happened less than three weeks before our trip).

Walking to a Tanchangya Village in the Hill Tracts. Yes, it is really this beautiful.

In our orientation for said trip, which happened less than two days before we left (oh, Bangladeshi understandings of time, how you continue to confuse even me, she who is perpetually late and slow in all things involving time…), we were given a list of minor concerns, which included safety after this kidnapping (we were not to go anywhere alone or after dark ever), the odds of our bus getting in a traffic accident on the way back (the road between Dhaka and Chittagong is apparently known for LOTS of traffic accidents), and the prevalence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the region (good thing I brought doxicyclene…). The night we were supposed to leave, then, I was ridiculously excited but also very nervous about what exactly this trip was going to entail.

Sunset in the Hill Tracts.

            All of the warnings turned out to be unnecessary in the end. What I should have been warned about was how pathetically ill-equipped my body is for overnight travelling. We boarded a train at 11 pm on Wednesday night and arrived in the city of Chittagong around 8 am Thursday morning. We had not managed to get sleeper cars, so we were in upright chairs all night long (and for some reason they left the lights on and a television blaring at full volume all night long as well). I woke up groggy and confused in order to be herded onto a van for the three hour drive up to the Hill Tracts. That first day, we drove out to Tanchangya Village, where they had been anxiously awaiting our arrival and had prepared a whole dance performance for us along with some tasty things to eat (rice cakes and homemade biscuits).

Look at these adorable girls who are about to dance for us! They were so curious and smiley and chatty, and I wish I could have understood more of their dialect of Bangla. One of them demanded a photo with her arm around my shoulder before I left.

I couldn’t help feeling a moment of postcolonial discomfort at how warm and welcoming these people were to what was basically a group of white tourists, and I am still ridiculously curious about why our visit was exciting to them. I know why it was exciting to me (they were kind, their lifestyle is very different from my own which is always interesting, and it was a good chance to exercise my language skills since they spoke a different and difficult to understand dialect of Bangla), but what could I possibly offer in return besides a curious eye and an openness to the experience? How does one act as a tourist without automatically becoming a voyeur? Is there another way to be in foreign places?

A home in the Tanchangya Village.

            The next day, we boarded small ferries on Kaptai Lake, the biggest man-made lake in Bangladesh (which apparently was partly funded by the US and displaced nearly 100 thousand people in order to build a hydro-electric plant…). Kaptai Lake felt endless and we spent the entire day relaxing on our boats as we passed island after island. At one point, we stopped and hiked to a nearby waterfall.

Waterfall on an island in Kaptai Lake.

On another island, we stopped for lunch at a tiny, hilltop restaurant run by a Christian, Chakma (the name of his tribe) man named Sujoy. I mention Sujoy, because his reaction to finding out I was (ethnically) Jewish was so startling: “It has been my dearest wish to meet a Jew. I have read the bible many times and I know Jesus was Jewish and I have always wondered what Jews would be like.”

Village on an island in Kaptai Lake.

Sujoy’s restaurant served the most delicious lunch of fried fish, savory greens, spicy bamboo, and some sort of mashed-up peaflower. When we left, he shook my hand, gave me a guava as a gift, and repeated his delight at having the chance to meet me. I think if Sujoy had been less kind, I might have just felt awkward at his excitement over my tenuous ethnic identity. But he was kind, and it was interesting to talk to him about his relationship to Christianity in a world in which it is such a tiny religious minority.

An outdoor restaurant at the top of a hill on a tiny island in a giant lake. Fun!

Climbing off the boats is harder than it looks!

           That night, we dined at a local Chakma restaurant at which we also sampled the locally made rice wine and beer. Bangladesh is more or less a dry country, so for many, this was the first drink of the trip. Some of the teachers also sampled the wine and beer and it turned into a silly evening of laughing at each other’s mild tipsiness. The wine and beer, by the way, were not particularly pleasant tasting, but the food was once again amazing, spicy with a lot of interesting flavors and textures, whereas most of the food I have had in Dhaka has been kind of uniformly mushy and only blandly spiced. I attempted to take a picture but this is food you have to taste with your mouth and not your eyes, I think. I have also gotten surprisingly adept at picking tiny bones out of fish using only my right hand, since eating with your left hand is considered rude--and eating with silverware somehow feels wrong when all the Bangladeshis are just digging in with their hand (plus it is WAY less fun).

This food cannot possibly look as good as it tasted.

            The final day of our trip, we headed back down to Chittagong, stopping along the way for a visit with some very special turtles. On our trip schedule it had said “do the usual thing with the turtles,” and I had spent a good hour amusing myself wondering what the “usual thing” might be. Turns out, that there is a man-made pond in which live these giant, wish-granting turtles. If you feed them and then rub their backs, it is said that they will grant you a wish. So that is the usual thing. Mystery cleared up. No idea how it started or why these particular turtles in this particular place, but they were super cute, creepy, and awesome at the same time. I am not complaining.

It's the magic turtles! But I'm not telling you what I wished for.

            Finally, it was time to get on an overnight bus back to Dhaka. I was starting to come down with a cold, so I popped some Nyquil and passed out on the most plush passenger bus I have ever seen. It had extendable, cushioned footrests as well as seats that leaned almost all the way back. There were only three seats in a row so there was plenty of space to stretch out. It would have been pretty idyllic except that I saw a cockroach crawl across the window shade by my head just as the drugs kicked in (and hence was too tired to do anything except observe it and then fall asleep…hopefully it decided to go somewhere else…). Ah, Bangladeshi wildlife. Goats, turtles, monkeys, lizards, cockroaches, spiders the size of your hand (don’t worry, those are in another part of Bangladesh). Every day is an adventure.

India is crawling with monkeys, but these are the first ones I have seen in Bangladesh! Monkeys, for those not in the know, are as ridiculously cute as they look from afar, but they are also foul-tempered, aggressive, and thieving. Do not mess with the monkeys! I accidentally got too close to one of the nursing mothers and received the most spiteful eyebrow raise and tooth baring that I have ever seen. I thought she was going to come after me...

Day-to-Day and De-Normalizing

07/19/13

            When I first decided to write down my thoughts and experiences this summer, I did so because I wanted to be more aware of how I process, of what stands out to me and how I observe it, of who and what matters as I am living my daily life. The goal was both professional and personal. As I get closer to starting the research and writing for my dissertation, I want to focus on writing no matter what, on recording even if I think there’s nothing particularly worth putting on paper in any given moment. At the same time, I remembered how hard it was for me to describe my experiences in South Asia to anyone once I had returned to the United States. It was like some strange dream world in which logic and feelings functioned differently, in which the contours of daily life could not be expressed in the words and emotions I had available to me as an American English speaker to express them. I had hoped that by recording things as they happened, I would perhaps be better able to explain them.

            But how do I explain all the things I take for granted, the things I don’t even realize are unusual or unexpected? Or maybe I did think at one point that they were, but because I did not focus on them in my earlier writings, I no longer remember how strange they were at first. Perhaps there are things that I take for granted with my cultural background that I would not if I were a native Bangladeshi. Aren’t those things also worth mentioning? Today’s entry is a number of stories told in pictures about the little things, the things I have forgotten to notice (which are also very big things). And maybe just by writing them I will see them differently once again.

These are jamdani weavers working on a jamdani sari. Jamdani is a weaving technique which uses a hand loom to create beautiful decorative patterns on cotton and silk. One sari, which can involve days, weeks, or even months of labor sells for anywhere between 700 and 7000 taka. A junior weaver might make 1600 take in a month. 80 taka, by the way, is about equivalent to 1 dollar right now. Somehow, this does not seem like a fair labor practice. I bought a jamdani-woven salwar kameez set because it was beautiful, but I am not sure how to feel about it. It is worth noting here that shopping is a HUGE part of socializing in Dhaka. There are hundreds of thousands of shops displaying all kinds of clothes, accessories, shoes, home goods, and more. One of my teachers told us that she owns 800 saris! And when you are coming from abroad and you can have an entire suit of clothes made from fabrics you hand select for less than $20, it is difficult not to get carried away. I have never figured out how to stop myself from going material-crazy when in South Asia.

This is a human-operated ferris wheel. I just thought it looked cool and ridiculously unsafe.

Hanging the laundry out to dry, like you do, after you've washed it in the river behind your house.

These are the ruins of Panam City. Panam City was once a trading center (under British rule) for fabrics. Now it is a protected ruin with a living village surrounding it.

In the village of Panam City, I ended up spending more time talking with a few village women than actually looking at the ruins. I could not understand everything they said, but what I think I got was that one of them had had 8 grandchildren, 6 of whom had died. Death feels closer here. It's not just the tropical diseases or the fact that one bad earthquake would level Dhaka, it's the other deaths, the ones that seem so preventable. We just went through a 4 day hartal, a work strike called by the radical Islamic group, Jamaat-e-Islami, after two of their leaders were convicted of war crimes they had committed during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. I assumed that a strike was a relatively peaceful means of protesting. But at least 9 people have been killed by bombs and riots in the 4 days of strikes, and this is apparently a low number for a hartal. One of my friend's language partners told him that Bangladeshis have seen a lot more death than most westerners and then related a story of seeing a woman across the street hanging herself by the window when he was 9 years old. Though he tried to run over and stop it, he was too late. People are killed in the traffic here every day (or run over by buses). Then there's diarrhea, dehydration, starvation. Rickshaw drivers frequently suffer early heart attacks by actually working themselves to death hauling passengers across the city. Death is everywhere in the US, too, and I don't mean to downplay that, but I think because I am a foreigner I am more aware of how little anyone seems to notice it here.

But at least these baby goats are ridiculously cute, right? They were born about a week ago in my neighborhood. I tried to go up and pet one, but they are already people shy, so I just took this picture from afar while they attempted to eat part of a construction site.

I have no idea what these men are doing with these bricks, but it has something to do with building things...

This is the central courtyard of Independent University Bangladesh, which is where I attend the Bangla Language Institute. It is a pretty fancy building with classrooms on four sides surrounding a central courtyard. There is a guard at the front gate at all times and guards and cleaning staff on every floor. There are three rabbits who run around the courtyard for unknown reasons, a three story library, a small restaurant/cafeteria which the students have shut down by calling for a strike of its products (they were too expensive and not tasty enough), and carom boards and table tennis on the first floor. The classrooms all have AC, though to pass from one to another you walk outside (the hallways are not walled in). When there is a hartal, it is deserted except for us, our teachers, and the guards and cleaning staff.

This is my classroom and one of my teachers, Nandini. There are only two of us in my class.

This is an empty lot on my walk home. Considering how much development is going on, I am always surprised that it exists.

This is the weird fancy house near my apartment building. It is almost directly across from the vacant lot. So on the one side, I see this ornate house with private cars and a guard house and on the other I see cows, goats, and sometimes random street kids hanging out. It is a strange contrast.

It is currently Ramadan and during Ramadan, the attendance at prayers increases exponentially. This is because you can earn God's mercy (or wrath) during Ramadan based on how you behave. This crowd is all about to participate in afternoon prayers somewhere on a road to New Market. The number of people who fast during Ramadan is also staggering. Most roadside tea stalls hang sheets up to block them from the street so that no one who is fasting has to see others eating and drinking. Even some rickshaw pullers fast. I have no idea how they drink no water and eat no food for almost 15 hours a day while biking passengers all over the city, but somehow they do.

This is New Market, where you can buy basically anything. It is huge and packed and overwhelming. It is also the place many go to find the best deals on certain items (some western clothes, plastic food containers, stationery) in Dhaka.

This is the traffic you have to get through to make it to New Market. Why does anyone go there besides stupid foreigners like me who do not know what they are getting into?

Public Buses, Markets, and the Dhaka Arts Center

07/09/13

I was originally mildly disappointed to be going to Dhaka instead of Kolkata for the summer. Kolkata, a city in India, is the other major location in which one might choose to study Bangla. It is known for its history of leftist intellectuals and continues to be seen as a vibrant artistic and cultural destination. Playwrights like Utpal Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore are associated with the city (and if you are a theater person and you don’t know who they are, you should find out, because they are both excellent), and I was also looking forward to visiting Jana Sanskriti, a group near Kolkata that practices Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” techniques. My knowledge of what Dhaka was and is known for was horribly inadequate (we’ll get to that, I promise), but what I had heard was that it was one of the most crowded and overpopulated cities in the world (and it was friendly and good for learning Bangla). To drive the point home, the students studying Bangla in Kolkata this summer through the other program I could have done are all humanities students. Here, there are two of us in a group of fourteen. And while I have already noted how diverse my group’s interests are, the majority of them are studying public health and development in one way or another.

            Which is all lead up to my admitting how very ignorant I was. I should have realized that a city as large and crowded as Dhaka has the kind of vibrant arts scene that big cities all over the world encourage. But I didn’t. Here is the day in which I realized how wrong I was:

This is Liz. Liz is my adventure buddy. In this photo, she is drinking coconut juice. Directly from a coconut. Like you do.

It was scorchingly hot when Liz and I left to meet my LP at the Shawra Railgate. We were going to take a public bus for the first time, which was both exciting and terrifying. When we got on the bus, it looked like an extremely run-down version of a Greyhound bus, with torn and faded seat covers and a half-shattered windshield.  There were six rows of seating that were only for women and the rest of the bus was full of men. We stood with my LP, clutching the seats to keep from falling as the bus jerked and weaved its way through traffic. Though the bus was hot, as long as we were moving, there was a breeze that made it tolerable. Luckily, it was also one of the buses that actually stopped, instead of slowing down slightly while you jump off (left foot first so you don’t fall under the wheels as you exit).

Maybe you can't tell, but this was the most crowded market ever.

When we stepped down at Chandni Chowk (a huge indoor/outdoor market for women’s clothing) I could not believe the size of the crowd. Once we stepped into the flow of people, we had no choice but to move along with them. It was less like walking and more like being a part of a river’s current. I am not a person who is prone to claustrophobia, but the first thing I found myself thinking was, “I would be completely screwed if there was a fire. As would everyone in this market.” Luckily, I was quickly distracted and overstimulated by the number of people, fabrics, accessories and ornaments surrounding me (this would come back to bite me later in the day when I realized how extremely dehydrated I had allowed myself to become). Eventually, we were able to fight our way out of the current of the main crowd and into a side eddy where we could actually stop to look at cloth.

This is how you shop for clothes here. Point at a fabric. Check it out. Get enough of one you like and take it to a tailor. Design the outfit with your tailor. He makes it. All for about $20/outfit. This is an overwhelming amount of fabrics to choose from. In case you didn't notice. 

There were hundreds of tiny shops piled floor to ceiling with fabrics in as many colors and prints as you can imagine. There were cottons and silks and linens and blends. There were merchants whose eyes lit up at the sight of foreigners who might pay them more and merchants who entirely ignored us. Anytime one of us saw a fabric we liked, we would stop, point and ask to see it unfolded from the stack. If it seemed worth it, we would then have a conversation about price with the shopkeeper. Once a price was agreed on, the fabric would be handed to us and we would be off to match it to fabric for pants or leggings and an orna/dupatta (basically a scarf you wear draped across your chest for modesty). If we were lucky, the fabric would come in a pre-matched three-piece set. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to make up your own fabric combinations. I, for instance, purchased a black fabric printed with tiny dogs, hearts, and arrows, to which I then added a hot pink and gold yoke (a yoke is a flowery, lacy chest piece that gets sewn onto the fabric) and matched with hot pink pants and a gauzy, hot pink scarf. In Bangladesh, any color goes with any other color; there is no such thing as tacky, and I absolutely love it.

Remember I told you about pani puri? This is a pani puri cart. Yum! 

A quick side-on Bangladeshi clothes shopping (AKA beginner’s fashion design): After you buy the fabric, you take it to a tailor and describe exactly how you want it to be cut for your salwar kameez suit: neckline shape, piping, sleeve length, decorations, top length, pant-type. For people who are new to working with a tailor, this many decisions can be overwhelming, but for me there’s something really enjoyable about being so hands-on in what my clothes will look like. It does, however, mean that getting a new salwar kameez made can take forever; people rarely buy readymade garments here (why would you when they are more expensive and less well-fitted to your unique shape?).

This is Bobby. Bobby is a screenprinter, and those are her prints.

From Chandni Chowk, we headed for Dhanmoondi, a young, artsy neighborhood full of galleries and restaurants. There, we visited an art gallery called Dhaka Art Center where the screenprints, etchings, and sketches of one artist, Biren Shome, were being displayed downstairs and an Oxfam poster contest for defeating world hunger was opening upstairs. The screenprints were stunning. Done mostly in black and white, they depicted women’s faces and upper bodies in a style that felt strikingly unique but still Bangladeshi. Non-western visual arts tend to be treated as either derivative of western masters or primitively native (which I find detestable), but it is also true in every artistic field that the influence of colonization on cultural practices cannot be ignored. The “West” was here and lingers still in the most random places. I thought Shome’s work had just the slightest touch of Picasso, but for me this didn’t detract from his originality in technique, style, and theme. While we were visiting the gallery, we got to meet some younger men and women who are aspiring artists. They were working on their own pieces in the back, and their generosity in sharing their techniques and their work with us was incredible. We may even go back to take a class with them in screenprinting! One of the women, Bobby, gifted me with one of her own screenprints (and her phone number so that we can hang out and talk about art again sometime).

Dhanmoondi is home to many other art galleries, which I hope I have time to explore over the course of this program. I’m still working on tapping into the theater scene, because I have no doubt that I am going to find a lot of quirky and inspiring people there.