the closed circuit of the colonial archive by bringing it into contact with living knowledge. I went  for a field visit to the villages in Rangamati with printed copies of the photographs, engaging with local communities, scholars, and institutions, and revisiting oral histories against the grain of the official visual record.

What emerged through this process was not a singular narrative but a layered history of resilience, unfolding across more than eight centuries of shifting rule. From the Arakan kingdom and the Mughal expansion in 1665 to the British colonial regime beginning in 1787, the Government of Pakistan after 1947, and the post-1971 state of Bangladesh, each era left its mark on the region. Between 1959 and 1963, the Kaptai Hydroelectric Dam project, funded by USAID, submerged vast areas of the valley and displaced nearly 100,000 people. Many were forced into long-term exile in northeast India, particularly in Arunachal Pradesh, where generations continue to live without formal recognition or the right to belong.

What I kept returning to was this: these people did not disappear because of war or famine. They were made expendable by the logic of development, by the nation-state's need to generate power for its own growth. The organizing ideas of nation, nationalism, and sovereignty, once framed as liberatory, had become instruments of erasure in the hands of dominant forces. In the postcolonial lands of both Bangladesh and India, these communities found themselves classified, quietly, as unsuitable, people whose presence did not fit the map that had been drawn for them.