Making of a capitalist frontier: tobacco cultivation and changing agrarian relations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) were mainly covered with forest and interspersed jhum—shifting cultivation—plots until the beginning of the British colonial period in 1760. Since then, policy interventions undertaken by the state regimes to govern and regulate the indigenous people and maximize the extraction of natural resources gradually transformed the region into a capitalist frontier. Consequently, the operation of large-scale tobacco companies in the CHT during the last two decades radically reconfigured indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land and the state. Analytically, in this article, we explore: Who has access to what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with it? Our ethnography reveals that agrarian changes via tobacco cultivation in the CHT included converting communal lands into private property, contract farming, land control polarization, and labor commodification. Despite emerging precarity, the indigenous people identified tobacco cultivation as a way to earn cash profits to build a life “free” from their inferior status—historically linked with their Pahari identity. Overall, our ethnographic findings problematizing the presumption that indigenous people evade “state spaces” to preserve their autonomy suggest that the CHT became a capitalist frontier embodying “zones of potential” and generating competing interests, actors, and imaginations.

Keywords:

• agrarian relations
• capitalist frontier
• Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT)
• tobacco cultivation
• zones of potential

Acknowledgments

Mohammad Tareq Hasan extends his gratitude to his gracious hosts in the CHT, particularly in Rangamati and Bandarban, who have generously shared their invaluable insights, enabling him to gain a deeper understanding of the evolving situation in the region. Furthermore, he would like to sincerely thank Professor Hasan A. Shafie for inspiring and motivating him to pursue his work in the CHT. Shaila Sharmeen acknowledges that she drafted some of the ideas presented here while accompanying undergraduate students from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Dhaka on a visit to Bandarban in 2016. Later, she received funding from the Grant for Advanced Research in Education (GARE), Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information & Statistics (BANBEIS)—Project ID: SS2016174 to conduct the research project titled “Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts of Tobacco Cultivation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) of Bangladesh: An Anthropological Study of the Exploitation, Resource Depletion, and the Role of State.” Her ideas about the impact of tobacco in the CHT were further concretized through discussions with the Co-Principal Investigator for the project, Professor Saifur Rashid. Last but not least, the authors thank the editors, Shanshan Lan and Susanne Klien, and anonymous reviewers for helping shape the article in its current form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These are two of the largest tobacco-growing plain-land districts in Bangladesh (see Akhter 2011).

2 The names used are all pseudonyms.

3 In 2013, we conducted fieldwork in Bandarban to explore the impacts of infrastructural integration of the CHT within the Bangladesh state.

4 Aynul Islam (2013, 6) states that in the CHT, three types of land ownership are commonly practiced by the paharis: common property—the land marked as ancestral rights for the paharis, customary nonrecorded land, and registered ownership with certifications from the administration. The division of land into these three types has led to many irregularities in the land tenure system of the CHT, such as the claiming of the same plot of land by multiple individuals, exchange, and ownership of land without required legal documents, counterfeit transactions, disputes over grazing, and corruption in the distribution of land by successive governments, among many more. Further, Islam (2013, 6) mentioned that approximately 79 percent of the paharis do not have legal papers for their land, resulting in a lack of certainty of rights to the concerned land (see also Barkat et al. 2009).