Chittagong Hill Tracts: Hills, Lakes and Indigenous Cultures of Bangladesh

In the far south-east of Bangladesh, where the delta gives out and the ground rises in long forested ridges towards India and Myanmar, lie the Chittagong Hill Tracts: the three districts of Rangamati, Khagrachhari and Bandarban, covering about 13,295 square kilometres — roughly a tenth of the country. This is Bangladesh's only true hill region, and in almost every way its most distinct. According to the 2022 census, about 1.84 million people live here, divided almost evenly between the indigenous peoples of the hills — some 920,000 members of twelve different peoples, the largest of them the Chakma — and a Bengali population of about the same size. Three forces have shaped the region's modern story: Kaptai Lake, the vast artificial lake created in 1962; a twenty-year armed conflict that ended with the Peace Accord of 1997; and an argument over that accord which, nearly three decades on, is still not settled.

Land of Hills and Lakes

Everything in the Hill Tracts starts with the terrain. The hills run in long ridges from north to south — folded sedimentary ranges, steep-sided and forest-covered, separated by narrow valleys where the region's rivers run: the Karnaphuli, the Sangu, the Matamuhuri and the Kasalong. Rangamati, at about 6,116 square kilometres, is the largest of the three districts and one of the largest in Bangladesh; Bandarban, at about 4,479 square kilometres, holds the highest ground, including peaks such as Keokradong and Tazing Dong, whose exact heights — and ranking as the country's highest point — different surveys measure differently. Khagrachhari, the smallest at about 2,700 square kilometres, is a district of lower hills and broader valleys. There is no landscape elsewhere in Bangladesh remotely like it: in a country built by river silt, this is a corner of upland South and Southeast Asia, geologically and culturally continuous with the hills across the borders in Mizoram and Myanmar.

The region was governed apart from the plains long before Bangladesh existed. The British annexed it in 1860 and administered it as a separate district, dividing it into three chiefly circles — Chakma, Mong and Bohmong — whose chiefs, still recognised today, collected revenue and administered customary law. The Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation of 1900 set the area apart in law, and from 1935 it was classed as a "totally excluded area": outsiders needed permits to enter, and land could not freely pass to non-residents. In earlier centuries the region had been known as Karpas Mahal, "land of cotton", for the cotton grown on its slopes. The three present districts were created only in 1984, when the old single district was split.

Peoples and Cultures

The census of 2022 recorded twelve indigenous peoples in the three districts. The Chakma, numbering about 455,000 in the region, are by far the largest, concentrated in Rangamati and northern Khagrachhari; then come the Marma (about 210,000), strongest in Bandarban; the Tripura (about 133,000), mainly in Khagrachhari; and the Mro (about 52,000), Tanchangya (about 43,000), Bawm (about 12,000), Rakhine (about 11,000), Khyang (about 4,200), Khumi (about 3,300), Chak (about 2,700), Pangkhua (about 1,500) and Lushai (a few hundred). Together they are often called the Jumma peoples — from jhum, the shifting cultivation described below — though government documents in Bangladesh generally use the terms "ethnic minorities" or "small ethnic groups", and the choice of words is itself part of the region's political vocabulary. One technical study of the census, prepared by the Chakma circle chief Raja Devasish Roy and hosted by an agency of the United Nations system, argues that the census undercounted the indigenous population and puts its share nearer 54 per cent than the census's just-under-half.

Linguistically, the hills face two ways. Chakma and Tanchangya are Indo-Aryan languages, kin to Bengali, and Chakma has its own script; the rest — Marma, Kokborok, Mro, Bawm and their relatives — belong to the Tibeto-Burman family, kin to the languages of Myanmar and India's northeast. In religion the pattern is similar. The Chakma, Marma, Tanchangya and Rakhine are predominantly Theravada Buddhists, and their monasteries anchor village life; the Tripura are mainly Hindu; the Bawm, Lushai and Pangkhua are largely Christian; and the Mro traditionally follow their own Krama faith, though some are now Buddhist or Christian. Village society is still ordered in part through the traditional system of circle chiefs, headmen and karbaris (village chiefs) alongside the modern administration.

For most hill families, life has traditionally turned on jhum. A hillside plot is cleared in the dry season, the cut growth is dried and burned in a controlled fire, and with the first rains a whole basket of crops — hill rice, maize, millet, sesame, cotton, pumpkin, ginger, turmeric, chillies and vegetables — is dibbled into the ash-rich soil and harvested in turn through the year. The plot is then left fallow for the forest to reclaim. Banglapedia records that the resting period, traditionally seven to ten years or more, has shrunk to three or four years under population pressure and the loss of farmland to the Kaptai reservoir — too short, it notes, for the soil to recover. Many families now also keep permanent orchards, and the jhum cycle remains under strain.

The cultural high point of the year comes in mid-April, when the hills celebrate the new year in a cluster of festivals known together as Boishabi — a name stitched from the Tripura Boisuk, the Marma Sangrai and the Chakma Bizu. The Chakma Bizu lasts three days: Phul Bizu, when flowers are floated on the rivers; Mul Bizu, the day of feasting, when the mixed-vegetable dish pajon is cooked in every home; and Gojya Pojya, which falls on Pohela Boishakh, the Bengali new year. The Marma Sangrai is famous for its water festival, and the Tanchangya mark the same season as Bishu and the Mro as Changkran. It is the one week when the whole region, in a dozen languages, celebrates at once.

Kaptai: The Lake That Changed Everything

In 1962 the government of Pakistan completed an earth-fill dam across the Karnaphuli River at Kaptai, some 65 kilometres upstream from Chittagong, built with American assistance to generate hydroelectric power. The station it feeds, with a capacity of about 230 megawatts, remains Bangladesh's only major hydroelectric plant. Behind the dam spread Kaptai Lake — some 688 square kilometres of water winding between the hills, the largest artificial lake in the country and today the centrepiece of life in Rangamati, carrying boats, fisheries and tourists.

The lake was also a catastrophe for the people in its path. The rising water submerged about 54,000 acres of farmland — around 40 per cent of the cultivable land of the area — and displaced about 18,000 families, close to 100,000 people, roughly 70 per cent of them Chakma. The old town of Rangamati went under the water, and so did the palace of the Chakma raja. More than 40,000 Chakma crossed into India, many ending up in what is now Arunachal Pradesh. In Chakma memory the displacement is remembered as Bor Porong — the great exodus — and it is impossible to understand the politics that followed without it: the lake took the best valley farmland of the hills' largest people, and the compensation and resettlement of the time are remembered in the region as inadequate. Land — who holds it, who lost it, and who may settle on it — became the central question of the Hill Tracts.

Conflict and the 1997 Peace Accord

Bangladesh's independence in 1971 did not settle that question. The Chakma politician Manabendra Narayan Larma, elected from the hills, argued in the new parliament for constitutional recognition of the hill peoples' distinct identity and for autonomy for the region. The demands were refused. In February 1972 Larma founded the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS) as a united party of the hill peoples, and the PCJSS in time organised an armed wing, the Shanti Bahini. In 1977 the Shanti Bahini began attacking government forces, opening a guerrilla war that ran for twenty years. Larma himself was assassinated in 1983, in a split within his own movement; his brother Jyotirindra Bodhipriya Larma, known as Shantu Larma, carried the movement through to its end. During the conflict large numbers of hill families fled to refugee camps across the border in Tripura, and the hills were heavily militarised. Precise casualty figures for the conflict are contested and are not treated as settled by historians.

After years of negotiation, the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord was signed in Dhaka on 2 December 1997, between the Government of Bangladesh and the PCJSS. The Shanti Bahini formally surrendered its weapons and its members returned to civilian life under a general amnesty. The accord, which runs to 72 provisions, recognised the region as a tribal-inhabited area whose character was to be protected. It created a Chittagong Hill Tracts Regional Council — 22 members, two-thirds of them from the tribal communities, chaired by a Jumma chairman with the rank of a state minister — to coordinate the three districts, and provided for strengthened Hill District Councils to which government subjects would be transferred. It set up a Ministry of Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs, to be headed by a member of the tribal communities. It promised a survey of land and a Land Commission to settle the region's mass of land disputes, the rehabilitation of refugees returned from India and of families displaced inside the country, and the phased withdrawal of temporary military camps. Not everyone accepted it: some hill organisations, notably what became the United People's Democratic Front, rejected the accord as insufficient, and that division within hill politics has persisted.

The Hill Tracts Today

How much of the accord has been delivered is, nearly three decades later, a matter of open disagreement between its two signatories — and both keep score in numbers. In September 2026 the Minister for Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs told parliament that 65 of the accord's 72 provisions have been fully implemented, with work continuing on the rest. The PCJSS gives a very different account: it holds that only about 25 provisions have genuinely been implemented, and its 2025 annual report states that two-thirds of the accord, including its core provisions — the transfer of subjects to the regional and district councils, elections to those councils, and the settlement of land disputes — remain undone. The PCJSS has also objected to new government committees on hill affairs formed in 2026, saying they bypass the accord's own structures, and has called for a time-bound implementation roadmap. Land is where the argument bites hardest: the Land Commission charged with resolving disputes has struggled to function, and a meeting scheduled for October 2025 was postponed after protests by local Bengali groups, according to Prothom Alo's review of the accord's 28th anniversary. This article reports the two positions as their holders state them; the gap between them is itself the region's central political fact.

Alongside the politics, the Hill Tracts have become one of Bangladesh's best-known travel destinations. Boats cross Kaptai Lake from Rangamati to Shuvolong Falls; the town's 335-foot Hanging Bridge is its emblem. Sajek Valley, a high ridge in Rangamati district reached by road through Khagrachhari, fills with visitors at dawn when cloud pools below its villages of Ruilui and Konglak. In Bandarban, the viewpoints of Nilgiri and Nilachal look over endless ridges, trekkers climb to Boga Lake — a small, deep lake at about 1,246 feet whose origin local legend, attributed to the Khumi and their neighbours, ascribes to a dragon named Boga, and which geologists have variously explained as a rain-filled hollow, a dead volcanic crater or a landslide, without settling the question — and in Khagrachhari they walk the Alutila Cave, a natural tunnel through the hill. Access is not as simple as elsewhere in Bangladesh: foreign visitors need prior official permission, some areas are checked or periodically closed, and some foreign governments advise against all but essential travel to the region.

The hills also work. Turmeric, ginger and pineapple from the three districts supply markets across the country, and the newest change is the cashew: promoted by the agriculture department and the CHT Development Board, expanded under a government project begun in 2021, and now processed at small plants in Bandarban, cashew orchards are spreading across slopes that once grew only jhum crops — one sign of a hill economy in transition.

Conclusion

The Chittagong Hill Tracts occupy a tenth of Bangladesh's land and almost none of its flatness. They hold the country's only hills, its largest lake, a dozen peoples with their own languages, scripts and faiths, and a farming system as old as the communities themselves. They also hold the country's most carefully negotiated and most contested peace settlement. To describe the region honestly is to hold both truths at once: a landscape of extraordinary beauty and welcome, and a political question — about land, identity and a promise made in 1997 — that Bangladesh has not finished answering.