The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland by Willem van Schendel, Wolfgang Mey Aditya Kumar Dewan White Lotus Press, Bangkok, 2000 ISBN: 974-8434-98-2
A pictorial narrative of an unexplained land.
I have never been to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) and I first heard of it in the campus of Brandeis University during the fall of 1984. I had just arrived in the suburban Boston campus from Kathmandu, and befriended some Bengali students from Calcutta. Some weeks into the semester, one of them, Kaushik Ghosh, asked me if I wanted to accompany him to visit a senior student from Bangladesh who lived off-campus. The idea of going outside the campus and the additional possibility of acquiring non-cafeteria food for dinner was quite attractive. That is how I first met Prasanta Tripura and got to know a bit about his homeland—the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
The same evening I got to hear about the differences between the Bengali and the Chittagong hill person. Prasanta had asked Kaushik if he was a Bengali. After a yes, Kaushik, who knew Prasanta came from Bangladesh, had bounced back the same question. In replying, Prasanta had paused a bit and said, "Yes… but actually I am a Tripura from the Chittagong Hill Tracts." Many dinners later, and perhaps after trying to explain things to those of us who had not known homes outside of urban environments, he had said, "You guys from Kathmandu or Calcutta have more in common with people from Boston or New York than with me!"