Word: bengali
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...there was significant disagreement. Finally, one man spoke. "Some people call us Rohingya," he said cautiously. I realized they were afraid to be identified as Rohingya because the very word carried with it the likelihood of so much discrimination. The man's name was Muhammad - he gave me his Bengali name, not the Burmese one that Rohingya are also required to have - and he left Burma two years ago on a crowded wooden boat filled with wannabe migrants. Eventually, the vessel drifted to India's Andaman Islands, from which he and others were repatriated. Would he try his luck abroad...
...Regulating the Flow India's northeastern state of Assam shares only a short border with Bangladesh, but the sentiment there against Bangladeshi migration is more intense than anywhere else in India. Bengali-speaking Muslims, both Indian and Bangladeshi, were once brought in to work as seasonal labor, and they now account for more than 30% of the state's population. Their numbers have made them a significant political force and have generated a frustration that will sound familiar to any country dealing with a large influx of migrants from a poorer country. "They take all the jobs," says Shibshankar Chatterjee...
...Issuing temporary work permits is a nonstarter in Assam, where the growing population of Bengali-speaking Muslims - the euphemism for which is "demographic shift" - is seen as both a political and an economic threat to the ethnic Assamese majority, who are mostly Hindu. "There is a very substantial geographic belt in which the Assamese are rapidly becoming a minority," says V.R. Raghavan, an adviser at the Delhi Policy Group. "They want to retain their dominant position...
...central paradox soon becomes clear. Securing a border is an effort to draw a bright, clear line marking exactly where the state begins and ends. That was never an easy task in India, where the line meant to separate Hindu and Muslim villages nevertheless left millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims on both sides. Rather than settling the 60-year-old questions about who belongs to whom, fencing India's border has only resurrected them...
...both a beach town, and a temple town. The beach stretches wide and sandy along a rather temperamental section of the Bay of Bengal; discouraging me from entering beyond knee-high. Nonetheless, a quiet gap in which to settle with a book was tough to find amongst the Bengali holiday-makers, at least in this festival time. The temple, meanwhile, honors Lord Jagannath—an iteration of Vishnu whose form, along with his two brothers’, is pulled through the streets in a 45-foot-high chariot each July by thousands of devotees. The festival is also...