Kalpana Chakma was a young ādivāsī leader and the General Secretary of the Hill Women's Federation, an organization that campaigns for the rights of the Jumma People of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (CHTs). She disappeared on June 12, 1996. Hence, June 12, 2016 will mark the twentieth anniversary of her forcible abduction and murder. The Bangladeshi State and its army may have turned Kalpana into a ghost, but her presence and voice have never faded. In this seminar, we will read some extracts from Kalpana Chakma’s Diary which today, more than ever, presents Kalpana’s voice as the haunting call for justice that resonates in every corner of the CHTs. Many Jumma people, following Kalpana’s courageous and resilient example, have risen in protest against displacement, sexual harassment, disenfranchisement, induced poverty and progressive annihilation of political and cultural rights, using literature and art to re-write history. Deploying memories to contradict hegemonic history, and voicing “silence” and marking “absence” to fight against politics of (in)visibility, Kalpana’s words have become the manifesto of the ongoing fight of the indigenous people and the Jumma women of Bangladesh.

Dr. Matta is a researcher in South Asian Studies at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali, Università di Roma „La Sapienza“, where she has been teaching “Modern Literatures of the Indian Subcontinent” for the last seven years. Her recent studies, which were part of her postdoctoral fellowship project at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, focused on indigenous literatures and cinemas in the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. She is continuing her research on literature and filmmaking as modes of retrieving a voice, fighting a visual hegemonic regime and providing alternative insights into the social and cultural history of “subaltern people” in India and Bangladesh (Adivasis, Dalits, women). Dr. Matta also works on issues of migration and diaspora, both in South Asia and Italy, and is a member of the Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM, Rome) and of NETPAC (The Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema).