The claim, repeatedly advanced by successive Myanmar governments, that the Rohingyas are “Bengali migrants from Chittagong” who entered during British colonial rule is a politically motivated fabrication.
Historical evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that the Rohingyas are indigenous to Arakan (present-day Rakhine State), with cultural, religious and demographic roots in the region that predate British annexation in 1826 by several centuries.
Prior to the Burmese conquest in 1784, Arakan was an independent kingdom. Contemporary chronicles describe it as a prosperous coastal state with close ties to Bengal.
Between the 15th and 17th centuries, Muslim rulers appointed by the Bengal Sultans governed Arakan for nearly two hundred years. At least 18 Muslim monarchs, styled as ‘Shahs’ or ‘Khans’, reigned during this period, promoting Islamic learning, constructing mosques and patronising a syncretic culture that allowed Buddhist and Muslim traditions to coexist.
The emergence of Arakanese Muslim communities, later known as the Rohingyas, was the product of centuries of interaction: Arab traders, Persian scholars, Central Asian migrants and Bengali settlers married into local populations, forming a distinct identity deeply rooted in Arakanese society.
The Burmese invasion of Arakan in 1784 by King Bodawpaya was not merely a political conquest but a deliberate attempt at demographic and cultural transformation that left a permanent scar on the region.
With an invading force of some 30,000 troops, Bodawpaya unleashed a campaign that combined military occupation with systematic depopulation.
Contemporary accounts and later historical studies record that over 20,000 Arakanese Muslims, ancestors of today’s Rohingyas, were captured and forcibly marched to central Burma.
Many were enslaved, conscripted as labourers or soldiers, and deliberately dispersed to weaken their communal strength and erase their identity in Arakan.
Villages were burnt wholesale, with residents trapped inside their homes and killed by fire. Others were trampled to death by elephants, a traditional Burmese method of mass execution designed to instil fear.
Women were subjected to widespread sexual violence, while Islamic institutions – mosques, madrasas, libraries and cemeteries – were systematically destroyed to eradicate the symbols of Muslim heritage in Arakan.
Such acts were not incidental byproducts of war but were calculated measures intended to break the continuity of Rohingya presence in the region.
Historical estimates suggest that as many as 2,00,000 fled their homeland during and after the conquest, crossing the Naf River into Chittagong. Entire families abandoned their possessions and sought refuge in Bengal’s coastal plains, carrying little more than the memory of their lost villages.
The direction of movement disproves the later claim by Burmese authorities that Rohingyas are “immigrants” from Chittagong. In fact, the historical record shows the exact opposite: it was the Rohingyas who were violently expelled from Arakan into Bengal, not Bengalis moving into Burma.
For the next four decades, between 1784 and the British conquest in 1824, Arakan remained under oppressive Burmese rule. The depopulation of Muslim communities created a demographic void in the northern part of the region.
By erasing mosques and madrasas, Bodawpaya attempted to wipe out Islamic legacies that had flourished for centuries under the patronage of Arakanese and Bengal rulers. Survivors who hid in forests or mountains lived precariously, cut off from their cultural institutions.
The trauma of enslavement, massacre and exile not only transformed the demographic landscape of Arakan but also planted the seeds of the long-term Rohingya refugee crisis that continues to this day.
Thus, the invasion of 1784 stands as a watershed moment: the first systematic attempt by Burmese rulers to dismantle the Rohingya presence in Arakan.
It marked the beginning of a policy of exclusion and ethnic erasure that successive regimes – monarchical, colonial and military – later had continued in varying forms.
The mass flight of people into Chittagong was the opening chapter in a tragic cycle of forced displacement that has repeated itself in 1942, 1978, 1991-92 and 2017.
When Britain annexed Arakan following the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26), colonial labour policies facilitated some movement between Bengal and Burma.
However, this took place atop an already established Muslim population with centuries-old roots. The conflation of these colonial-era migrants with the indigenous Rohingya community provided the basis for the narrative later advanced by Myanmar’s military rulers.
In 1962, General Ne Win infamously declared, “Burma is for the Burmans… Rohingyas are Indian Bengalis from Chittagong,” thereby institutionalising a myth that denied the Rohingyas their historical belonging.
Scholars have noted the logical fallacies in this claim. If longstanding settlement were grounds for exclusion, European-descended populations in the United States, Canada and Australia would be considered illegitimate.
Yet in those countries, indigenous peoples are recognised as original inhabitants, and immigrant-descended populations are accepted as citizens. The Rohingyas’ centuries-long presence in Arakan likewise affirms their status as an indigenous group of Myanmar.
The denial of this history has enabled repeated waves of persecution. In 1942, during the Second World War, Burmese nationalists collaborating with the Japanese orchestrated massacres that forced more than 80,000 Rohingyas into Chittagong.
Subsequent state-led campaigns – Operation Nagamine in 1978, the “Clean and Beautiful Nation” campaign of 1991-92, and the 2017 “clearance operations” – each involved mass killings, sexual violence and village burnings. The result was the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas into Bangladesh.
In 2017 alone, over 7,50,000 crossed the border, creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The United Nations described these events as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
The Rohingyas are not migrants from Bangladesh but the original Muslim inhabitants of Arakan, with documented presence extending back at least six centuries.
Their repeated persecution and expulsion illustrate Myanmar’s long-term policy of demographic engineering in Rakhine State. So, recognition of their indigenous status is essential to ending cycles of violence and addressing one of the most protracted refugee crises of the modern world.
The writer is a retired Brigadier General, ex-military diplomat and author
