Mro Erotic

The Mro build on ridge tops. Their villages sit high in the hills of Bandarban, in the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, houses of bamboo and thatch raised on posts and reached by a notched log leaned against the floor, with jhum fields cut and burned into the slopes below. The siting is deliberate and old. Height means wind, drainage, a defensible approach and a clear view of who is coming up the path, and the Mro have generally preferred all four to the easier ground in the valleys, which has always belonged to somebody stronger.

Their language sits oddly among its neighbors. Mru is Sino-Tibetan, but linguists place it with Hkongso in a small branch of its own rather than filing it under the Kuki-Chin languages spoken on every side of it. It went unwritten for as long as anyone can trace, and the Mro have a story for that: writing was given to them once, and a cow ate it. In the 1980s a Mro man named Menlay founded a new religion among his people, Krama, and supplied it with an alphabet, which makes this one of the few cases anywhere of a script and a faith arriving in the same lifetime from the same hand. Krama now sits alongside older household practice, with Buddhist and Christian minorities among them, and the alphabet is taught in Mro schools.

The ceremony outsiders hear about first is the cattle sacrifice, made to discharge a vow: the animal tied to a carved post, flute played through the night, the village dancing until morning, the meat divided when it is over. What has shaped Mro life more, though, is land. The hill tracts became a separate district under the British in 1860 and were later governed under a regulation meant to keep outsiders from buying in, a protection that thinned steadily after 1947. Then came the Kaptai dam, decades of insurgency, and the 1997 accord that ended the fighting without settling much. In 2020 Mro villagers around Chimbuk marched against a luxury hotel planned on ground they graze and bury in, which is the same argument as always, in newer clothes.