The Landless Kings

Who are you? Where does your name come from? Where has your family lived for most of their lives? Who are your ancestors? Where do you hail from? Where do you belong? These questions are all linked to one thing – land. Identity, race, culture, and even discrimination — they are all related to the land that calls you its own. The Rohingyas of Myanmar live their lives in a strange conundrum. The name of their tribe indicates the Arakan or the Rakhine state that they belong to, but they don’t live there. They live in camps, they live in the margins, they live along invisible lines drawn between their country and a few polite others. They live at the mercy of their killers. But, they live with grace. They live with a dignity that is almost kingly. They struggle, many of them never meet their family members for years, sometimes meeting them only in death, or not even that, but they persevere. This is their story that I attempt to tell. This is not about victims of genocide or racial discrimination. This is about survival. There is nothing beautiful about trying to save your own life from extinguishing, but the Rohingyas make it seem graceful, they make it seem less dirty, perhaps. This is an exploration of the quiet afternoons of the Santoli village, the last village to be struck by an ethnic cleansing so violent that it wiped out 300–400 people and caused several hundreds from the entire Rakhine state to vanish into thin air. This is a journey into the camps of Sittwe, and into all the families that try to live life as usual, remembering the loved ones they lost. This is a trip down Mae Sot’s leafy lanes — a place so expressive of Thailand’s beauty that one almost forgets that it houses thousands of ‘internally displaced people’ – IDP’s. Amongst these milling hordes of refugees, the Rohingyas try to make their own homes, even as statistics reduce them to a mere percentage. This is not the story of one country or one race, this is the story of land, and how it can live on its people. Regardless of whether the Rohingya are uprooted from Myanmar and forced to take root in Thailand, Bangladesh or even India, the Rohingyas live on.