Rohingya People And the Meaning of Belonging
By Dr Tom Corcoran 1,400 Words
Published by ETHNOMAD February 2026
Mention the Rohingya, and the conversation almost always begins with displacement, persecution, or genocide. These terms describe the present with brutal accuracy. They do not explain the people. Long before the camps, the borders, and the documents denied or destroyed, the Rohingya were part of a much older human story woven into the coastal world of the Bay of Bengal.
Today, the Rohingya are scattered across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and beyond. They are a people of movement, not by choice, but by necessity. Yet wherever they have gone, they have carried language, belief, craft, and memory with them. History did not begin with their exile.
A Coast Shaped by Trade, Faith, and Movement
The western littoral of present-day Myanmar has historically been a frontier, where peoples, religions, and political authority overlapped rather than settled into fixed boundaries. Long before the emergence of modern states, Arakan, now Rakhine State, sat at the intersection of land and sea routes linking South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the wider Indian Ocean world. Indo Aryan groups arrived in the region as early as the seventh century BCE. By the eleventh century CE, the Pagan Kingdom had emerged in the Irrawaddy basin, consolidating what would become the cultural core of Burmese civilisation and establishing Theravada Buddhism as its dominant religious framework.
Arakan followed a different rhythm. Shielded by mountains and facing the sea, it developed into a cosmopolitan coastal kingdom. Founded in 1430, the Kingdom of Arakan reached its height under rulers who controlled maritime trade routes stretching from Bengal to Southeast Asia. Its capital, Mrauk U, was a city of stone temples, mosques, palaces, and waterways, home to an estimated 160,000 people and spanning more than fifty square kilometres. It was a place where Buddhist kings employed Muslim courtiers, minted coins bearing Persian inscriptions, and governed a population shaped by centuries of migration and exchange.
It is within this setting that the Rohingya identity took form. There is no single origin story, and attempts to impose one often reveal more about politics than history. Some scholars trace Rohingya ancestry to early Muslim traders, sailors, and administrators from Bengal, Persia, Arabia, and Central Asia who settled along the Arakan coast over the course of many centuries. Others emphasise later waves of Bengali-speaking migrants during the British colonial period. Both narratives contain elements of truth. What is beyond dispute is that Muslim communities were established in Arakan long before Burmese independence in 1948, and that generations were born, lived, fished, farmed, and buried their dead there.
A fisherman repairs nets along the coast near Cox’s Bazar on the Bay of Bengal. For generations, Rohingya communities along the Arakan and Bengal coasts lived from seasonal fishing, moving with the fish and weather rather than fixed boundaries. Boats served as workplaces and, at times, as homes, with the coastline itself understood as a shared living space shaped by tides, monsoon cycles, and customary knowledge of the sea.
Colonial Classifications and the Politics of Belonging
British rule altered the demographic and administrative landscape of Arakan. Colonial authorities encouraged labour migration to support rice cultivation and plantation economies, drawing both Muslim and Hindu workers from Bengal. At the same time, they began cataloguing people, languages, and identities in ways that hardened previously fluid social boundaries. Post-independence migration across the Bay of Bengal also occurred, as it did throughout South Asia, reflecting long-standing patterns of mobility in a porous coastal region.
One of the earliest written references to the Rohingya appears in 1799, when Francis Buchanan documented the languages of the Burma Empire and recorded a group he called the “Rooinga.” The notation was brief, but it matters. It confirms that the Rohingya identity existed as a recognised ethnocultural category more than a century before the modern nation-state emerged.
In contemporary Myanmar, belonging is governed by the idea of autochthony, the belief that legitimacy derives from being first. This framework has been used to deny the Rohingya citizenship, movement, education, and legal recognition, regardless of how many generations have lived within the country’s borders. History is not a purity test. It is a record of movement, settlement, and continuity. Framing belonging through rigid origin myths obscures a more uncomfortable truth. Myanmar itself is one of the most linguistically, culturally, and biologically diverse regions on Earth. Official classifications still rely on a colonial-era system listing 135 ethnic groups and 111 languages, figures that researchers acknowledge are incomplete.
Not all Muslims in Myanmar identify as Rohingya, and not all Rohingya define themselves solely through religion. Identity here is layered, situational, and deeply shaped by place.
Language as Archive
The Rohingya language is not merely a means of communication. It is a living record of presence. In the absence of recognised archives, land titles, or state histories that acknowledge them, language carries what paper refuses to hold.
Related to Chittagonian but not reducible to it, Rohingya has evolved into a distinct linguistic form over centuries of contact along the Arakan coast. Its structure bears the imprint of Rakhine and Burmese, while its vocabulary reflects older layers of Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, as well as deep South Asian roots in Sanskrit and Pali. This is not linguistic borrowing by chance. It is the residue of long residence in a crossroads world shaped by trade, belief, and movement.
Dialect variation maps geography with precision. Speech in Maungdaw and Buthidaung differs markedly from that of Sittwe and Mrauk U, where Rakhine influence is stronger. These differences are not signs of fragmentation. They are markers of settlement, interaction, and continuity across place.
In exile, the Rohingya continue to adapt, absorbing new terms from host societies while retaining their internal grammar and cadence. What persists is not nostalgia, but structure. In this sense, language functions as an archive and testimony, preserving social memory where written records have been denied, destroyed, or politicised out of existence.
For societies shaped more by voice than by text, history is carried differently. Knowledge moves through recitation, prayer, song, craft practice, and everyday instruction rather than formal inscription. Among the Rohingya, memory is embedded in rhythm and repetition, in the telling and retelling of stories, in domestic ritual, and in the teaching of skills from one generation to the next. This oral orientation has long been misread as the absence of history. In reality, it reflects a system of transmission designed to survive mobility, marginalisation, and rupture. What cannot be confiscated or burned continues to travel with the people themselves.
Faith, Power, and the Misuse of Heritage
Religious heritage often sits at the boundary between the visible and the unseen. It shapes ethics, identity, and belonging, but it also lends itself easily to political mobilisation. When belief becomes a marker of legitimacy rather than meaning, it is rarely faith itself that drives violence, but the power exercised through it.
Among the Rohingya, Islam has long been practised in a Sufi inflected form of Sunni belief. This tradition emphasises inward transformation, humility, and restraint. Concepts such as "fana," the dissolution of the ego, and "baqa," abiding in the divine, centre spiritual discipline over public display. In practice, these ideas share affinities with Buddhist traditions of non-attachment and awakening that have shaped the region's wider cultural landscape.
This philosophical proximity has offered no protection. Across history, religious difference has repeatedly been activated as a political tool, particularly during periods of social stress or perceived threat. Buddhism itself underwent material and institutional consolidation during such moments, expressed through the construction of monumental sites and sacred landscapes from Gandhara through Southeast Asia. Along the Silk Roads, encounters between Islam and Buddhism were shaped less by theological disagreement than by shifting patterns of trade, authority, and territorial control.
In South Asia, systems of hierarchy such as caste, baradari, and other status groupings long predate modern religious boundaries. These structures organised access to land, labour, and legitimacy, and they proved adaptable to new political orders. In contemporary Myanmar, the Rohingya have been positioned at the margins of this hierarchy, defined as outsiders regardless of generations of residence. Exclusion has been justified not through doctrine, but through inherited frameworks of belonging that render some lives peripheral and others central.
"A Rohingya man pauses inside a refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Designed for containment rather than community, large-scale camps tend to flatten daily life, compressing language, religious practice, and cultural expression into uniform routines. In these spaces, identity is often reduced to legal status, while the quieter work of cultural survival is carried out privately, through memory, habit, and belief."
Women, Memory, and What Endures
Civilisations are often remembered by what survives in stone. What decays is forgotten. Archaeology calls this differential preservation. Much of what women create, textiles, body art, ritual knowledge, and domestic technologies, leaves little physical trace. Yet it is precisely these practices that sustain culture across generations.
Inside Myanmar, little of the Rohingya women’s heritage has been formally documented. In exile, that heritage is being reclaimed. In Ireland, Rohingya women have begun recording recipes, composing poetry, making films, teaching dance, and publicly displaying symbols long suppressed at home. For the first time, some raise a flag that represents them.
One of the most visible markers of Rohingya women’s identity is thanaka, a pale yellow paste made from ground bark or roots of the wood apple tree. Used for centuries across Myanmar, thanaka functions as sunscreen, insect repellent, and cosmetic. Archaeological finds of grinding stones date back a thousand years, and literary references appear as early as the fourteenth century. Today, thanaka has become a symbol of continuity, particularly in refugee camps and diaspora communities.
Textiles tell a similar story. Rohingya dress varies by age and marital status, from the zagara worn by unmarried girls to the emeshty of married women. Displacement has altered access to materials and privacy. In crowded camps, traditional practices such as purdah are strained by the absence of space. Clothing becomes both expression and constraint.
Henna remains a living art. Applied for weddings, healing, and everyday adornment, it is learned in childhood and practised communally. Men also participate, dyeing hair and beards in shades of orange and red. These practices persist not because they are preserved in museums, but because they are lived.
Thanaka paste is prepared by grinding bark from the wood apple tree against a flat stone, a practice shared across Myanmar and carried into exile by Rohingya women and girls. Used for sun protection, skin care, and everyday adornment, the ritual links body, plant knowledge, and memory through touch and repetition. Thanaka is widely regarded as part of Myanmar’s living cultural heritage and has been proposed for recognition as Intangible Cultural Heritage, reflecting traditions sustained not through monuments, but through daily practice.
Beyond the Narrative of Loss
The Rohingya story is often told as a tragedy. That is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. Beyond the camps and statistics lies a people whose history predates the borders that now confine them. Their culture survives not through monuments, but through language spoken at home, stories repeated across generations, recipes cooked in exile, prayers whispered, hands stained with henna, faces marked with thanaka.
Heritage here is not static. It adapts, fractures, and reforms. It travels. In the absence of land, it becomes portable. In the absence of recognition, it is carried in voice, memory, and practice rather than stone or paper.
The Rohingya are not only a people displaced by history. They are a people who continue to speak it, teach it, and carry it forward.
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