2 - The History of a Persistent Image

Summary

INTRODUCTION

One afternoon in February 1995, the Garo student Rosie told us the following anecdote:

“Today we had ethnology class about the different stages of human civilization. The teacher described how food habits of people developed stage by stage. At one moment she said that the ancient people ate frogs, snakes, and dogs. This was derived from the chapter on barbarism, savages, like this. All students were staring at me. I sat in the back of the classroom and they all turned around and stared at me. I was feeling so uneasy; madam noticed it too. I told her that the students are studying ethnology, but they are not broadminded.”

At the time of the interview, Rosie was a student of anthropology at Dhaka University. In this interview fragment, she referred to that morning's lecture, in which the teacher explained how food culture has developed from primitive to civilized in an evolutionary manner. When the teacher discussed the diet of the so-called ancient people, the students started staring at Rosie, associating her with those primitive people. The behaviour of Rosie's fellow students leads to the question of why an intelligent girl like her, who had made it all the way to Dhaka University and who dressed or behaved no differently from 28 her fellow students, was so easily included in the category of primitives. The answer is shockingly simple: they knew Rosie to be a Garo, and Garos are one of Bangladesh's many ‘tribes’, upojatis, adivasis, or Indigenous Peoples. To this very day, many Bangladeshis imagine these communities as inherently unsophisticated, simple, primitive people without a history.

The following fragment from the same interview also illustrates the primitive image of contemporary Garos:

“They [Bengalis] ask if we eat frogs or snakes. That is alright. But they ask more stupid questions about our dress. They can see that we wear the same clothes as they do, but they still ask us if Garo women cover the upper part of their body, and if they wear very short clothes.