This article was originally published on HaRDstories.
When 24-year-old Maung Thein Myint and his family fled their home in Rakhine state, Myanmar, eight years ago there was no time to grab their belongings. The military had already burned down a neighbouring village and Maung Thein Myint’s was next. Under gunfire, he ran with only the clothes he was wearing. After days of hiding in wet paddy fields, he eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Today, he, like many others from the persecuted Rohingya community, has little to represent his old life.
“We were unable to bring anything. We had to leave the home with worn clothes,” he told HaRDstories.
Whilst the loss of such belongings hits hard on a personal level, it also damages the Rohingya community as a whole. A lack of archives and artefacts, photos, and documents that tell the story of this community’s history feeds into the Myanmar military’s narrative that this is a people that never belonged, say experts. Several initiatives are, however, trying to change that by offering a platform for what little remains.
“Documenting and exhibiting our Rohingya culture is extremely important for us, especially considering the ongoing displacement, marginalisation, and risk of cultural erasure faced by the Rohingya community,” said Maung Thein Myint. “Through exhibitions, the international community can be aware about the Rohingya culture and our richest history.”
The Rohingya people are a Muslim ethnic minority group predominantly linked to Rakhine in Myanmar. The country, which acknowledges the existence of 135 other indigenous groups, denies the existence of the Rohingya. Instead, over the decades – regardless of whether the military or a democratically elected government has been at the helm – the community has been subject to violence, discrimination and the destruction of their culture.
“I was denied access to higher education from the Sittwe University because I was a Rohingya,” said Maung Thein Myint. “I always faced discrimination wherever I went… I grew up in a cage where I didn’t have a chance to feel life as a human being.”
As a result, many have chosen over the years to leave Myanmar. Others, pursued by the military’s violent regime, didn’t have a choice if they wanted to survive. Today, over one million Rohingya live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Another 81,000 are in camps along the Thai border and many more have found their way to Malaysia, Indonesia and India.
The power of archiving
It’s this humanitarian plight that has led the name Rohingya to become synonymous with suffering, said American-Canadian documentary photographer Greg Constantine. For almost 20 years, he has been documenting the persecution that this community faces with various exhibitions.
“The visual representation that most people in the world have today of the Rohingya community is the victim, the persecuted, the desperate, the hopeless, the refugee,” said Constantine, who also authored ‘Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya.’ “All those things to one extent are true because that’s been inflicted upon them, but that doesn’t define who they are as a people.”
It’s this belief that drove him, in 2020, to start exploring the culture and history of the Rohingya, rather than focussing on their suffering alone, and launch an effort to create a collective archive. With the support of Rohingya community members such as Habi Zullah, the Rohingya archival team leader inside Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, Constantine reached out to Rohingya across ten-plus countries, asking them to share what visual materials – letters, documents, photos, and artifacts – they had been able to salvage.
“Alongside community-collected materials, Greg and I also worked to locate historical records including old journals, censuses, and newspapers from both public and private archives, enriching the depth and credibility of the archive,” explained Zullah.
The idea, Constantine explained, was to generate an archive that would show the Rohingya something different about themselves as well as those outside of the community.
“The Rohingya are not just static entities, waiting for something to happen with their life,” said David Palazón, a visual artist who co-created Rohingyatographer, a collective of Rohingya photographers and artists, in 2021. “They are human beings, they move and think and do stuff and survive.
The result of Constantine, Zullah and others’ efforts is Ek Khaale – translated from Burmese as Once Upon A Time – a collaborative, visual documentary and archival project that this month was showcased in an exhibition in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Organised into nine chapters, the project contains century-old family portraits and graduation certificates, land tax records and diaries centred around the themes of ancestral recognition, war efforts and the recognition of rights, among others. The project has already been awarded the 2025 International Visual Sociology Association Award for Progressive Advocacy and Visual Research. Next month it will move to Dhaka, Bangladesh.
“One of the things that has fuelled the legacy of violence towards this community has been this manufactured historical narrative that the Burmese authorities have spread all these years that this is a community that has never belonged to Burma, that they’re a group of interlopers from Bangladesh that came over in colonial times that have not contributed anything to this particular country,” said Constantine. He added that this isn’t true. These archival materials “prove our centuries-deep roots in Arakan [Rakhine], shattering the regime’s lies,” said Zullah.
For example, there’s a photograph of the Rangoon University student class of 1967 to 1971, depicting 20-plus young Rohingya men studying the likes of mathematics, botany, and law. “That photograph shatters so many different narratives,” said Constantine, who has worked on other Rohingya photo projects such as his 2021 exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide.
The family photos in particular “serve as a huge bridge between all these differences that have been created related to the Rohingya community and everybody else,” he explained. It “injects this level of humanity into the Rohingya community that I think has been absent for so many years.”
The Myanmar military has long painted the idea of the Rohingya as illegal immigrants hailing from Bangladesh. And in host countries, media coverage of the refugee crisis also leaves a narrow view as to the community, said Palazón. “The media over inflates the victimisation. In the case of Rohingya, it’s like a cycle. There is a need for money, so we need to show how the Rohingya suffer, therefore the money comes in,” he explained.
Mizanur Rahman, a Bangladeshi researcher at the Centre for Peace Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, said he knew nothing of the Rohingya people beyond their plight in his country until he conducted research on the cultural expression of stateless Rohingyas.
“This collection not only safeguards our past but also stands as a resistance to historical erasure, rebuilding the truth of our existence and rightful place in Myanmar’s history,” said Zullah.
Taza Mulluk was born in 1941. In 1961, he became a government employee at Burma Communication Service (BCS). He then became a postman. Courtesy of Ek Khaale.
Educating a lost generation
Efforts like Ek Khaale also provide means for future generations to learn where they come from, said Maung Thein Myint, even if they are living in exile. “Cultural documentation can also support international efforts for justice, including legal claims to the Rohingya identity, land, and reparations,” he added.
This was the idea behind the creation of the Rohingya Historical Archive in 2021 by the Rohingya Project. It launched a digital platform in which to pool any documents relating to Rohingya ancestry for researchers and legal professionals to use in their pursuit of justice.
Additionally there is the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre, a permanent exhibition inside Cox’s Bazar. Launched by the International Organization for Migration in 2019 as part of a mental health and psychosocial programme, it aims to preserve Rohingya cultural heritage by giving camp residents the materials and space needed to engage in the traditional arts of pottery, embroidery, and music while also collating the likes of recipes, songs, heirlooms, and other artifacts.
“This was not just about collecting but self-representation, what skills these people have and how these skills can be used to tell stories, like embroidery, batik, carving, or basketry,” said Palazón, the former RCMC curator. “We translated memories into physical objects.”
Today, donors and other external visitors to the camps can step into the museum and learn about the Rohingya whilst camp residents themselves, especially children who may not have been born in Myanmar, have a space in which to “reconnect with their cultural roots.” RCMC also tours smaller exhibitions globally and digitally in order to expand its reach.
There is a big effort to ensure children learn the Rohingya language through oral storytelling, folk songs, and informal education, said Maung Thein Myint. “Community groups and youth volunteers organise cultural events, music, and poetry recitations to engage the younger generation. Through cooking, religious observance, and even digital media, the Rohingya are keeping our rich heritage alive and passing it on to the next generation,” he shared.
Whilst good-intentioned, Palazón is unsure whether RCMC is as effective as it could be. Restrictions on refugees to work in Bangladesh means that the centre, he believes, lacks management with artists unable to receive payment for the works they have submitted. In the end, it was perhaps created more with donors in mind than the Rohingya themselves, Palazón said.
When done correctly, however, and with input and leadership of the community themselves, curating a collective archive can have a healing element to it. When Constantine asked those in the refugee camps both in Thailand and Bangladesh to share any materials they had saved, it validated their instinct to save them.
“It’s like a reclamation, in a sense, of who this community is, what their history is, and their active place in Burma’s history,” Constantine said. “Old materials from the past, the way that they can be activated in the present day to say something really important and make a contribution to a much larger discussion that’s happening right now in 2025 is pretty incredible. That’s where I think the power of archives is really magical in that sense.”
Rebecca L. Root is a multimedia journalist based in Bangkok but reporting globally. She covers humanitarian aid, human rights, global health, development and climate, among other things.