September 8, 2025
DHAKA – It began with a question, the kind of question that arrives quietly, almost like a sigh. Greg Constantine, an American photojournalist and documentarian who has spent nearly two decades chronicling the plight of the Rohingya, sat inside a bamboo hut in Cox’s Bazar, leaning towards the elderly men who were holding plastic bags filled with their pasts—brittle documents, photographs yellowed into sepia, certificates folded and refolded until the creases seemed older than the paper itself. He asked them, almost casually: Why have you never shown these to anyone else?
The answer was short, devastating, a reply that could have been whispered by ghosts: Because no one asked.
That single phrase carried the weight of exile. It explained the decades of invisibility, the silences in the archive, the way the world had walked past without pausing to look. Journalists had come, yes, lawyers too, researchers with clipboards, UN officials with acronyms and deadlines. But their questions were always about the destruction: When did the soldiers come? How many houses were burnt? How many were killed? Never: What did you carry? What survived of your life? And so the archives—the land deeds, the family portraits, the yellowing certificates of births and schools and marriages—remained unasked for, unacknowledged, unshown.
Greg Constantine. PHOTO: CONTRIBUTED BY GREG CONSTANTINE/THE DAILY STAR
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: the world’s largest refugee camp, where nearly a million Rohingyas endure lives reduced to rations, patrols, and waiting. Bamboo shelters collapse in monsoons, fires return like curses. Stateless and unnamed, they grow up without citizenship, without futures.
Their condition is not just displacement but archival deletion. Myanmar denies their very belonging. Bangladesh hosts but refuses integration. The world offers aid, but not recognition. The Rohingya are spoken of as a burden, as a crisis, as a statistic. Rarely as people. Rarely as history.
It is this long silence that the exhibition Ek Khaale: Once Upon a Time sought to confront. Curated by Greg Constantine and organised by BRAC University’s Centre for Peace and Justice, the ten-day show ran from 18 to 28 August 2025 at the Merul Badda campus in Dhaka. Through photographs, dialogues, and archival fragments, it became less an art exhibition than a reclamation of memory—an attempt to reassemble the scattered lives of a people into a visible, dignified whole.
For decades, the Rohingya were photographed into victimhood. Constantine himself acknowledges that his own lens, alongside those of his peers, helped produce this visual identity: the endless march across rivers, the mothers clutching infants, the skeletal shelters on the bare hillsides. Necessary, yes, but reductive. Necessary, yes, but imprisoning.
And so he asked himself: what happens when photographs define a community, not as they are, but only as they suffer? What if the very act of documentation turns into a cage?
From that crisis came the decision to stop producing images of the present and instead to search for images of the past. Family albums, wedding photographs, handwritten letters, property deeds—the private, the domestic, the overlooked. These would not erase the story of persecution but would complicate it, broaden it, and humanise it.
This is where diaspora studies become a compass. Stuart Hall reminds us: identity is not essence, but positioning. The Rohingya archive repositions. It insists that the community be seen not only as stateless victims but as agents with deep pasts, thick roots, and futures denied but not extinguished.
Constantine turned from photographer into archivist, a metamorphosis rare in the world of photojournalism. He trained young Rohingya in Bangladesh, in the refugee camps, and inside Myanmar—in Buthidaung, in Sittwe, in Yangon—to ask questions, to listen carefully, to photograph documents, to build trust.
The method was radical in its patience. “No deadlines,” he told them, “no expectations.” And so materials began to appear, quietly, like shy animals emerging from a forest. An old man would bring out a single deed, carefully unfolded on the floor. Conversation would follow, trust would build, and then—almost ceremonially—the man would disappear into his hut and return with a plastic bag filled with papers, papers carried over rivers, smuggled across mountains, hidden under floorboards.
What surfaced was more than personal memorabilia. It was world history. A war service certificate from 1945, issued by the British government to a Rohingya man named Abdul Salam. A passport from 1949. Diaries, letters, certificates of education. Oral traditions long dismissed as myth now bore documentary proof: the Rohingya had served in the British “V Force”, intelligence agents working behind Japanese lines in Arakan during World War II.
Constantine, researching simultaneously in the British Library, stumbled upon military memoirs describing the very same man. In the dusty pages of a 1945 book, an illustration captioned “Abdul Salam, Arakanese headman from Buthidaung.” The coincidence was uncanny, as if the archive itself had been waiting for recognition.
Later, he found the descendants of the British officer who had commanded Rohingya fighters. In their attic lay suitcases filled with photographs, letters, and diaries—among them, the only known photograph of a Rohingya guerrilla unit in 1943, standing with their British commander holding the British flag. History, dismissed, denied, suddenly glared back from paper and ink.
Archival research, as Achille Mbembe reminds us, is always about power: who gets remembered, who gets erased. Here, the Rohingya archive re-entered world history, not as victims but as participants.
From these fragments emerged a cartography of diaspora. Rohingya memories surfaced in California, in Karachi, in Indiana, in Dublin. A man who studied engineering in the US co-invented an EEG brainwave machine at UCLA. A student sent to Berkeley in 1954 became a nuclear physicist. Families studied at Sindh Muslim Science College, at universities in the UK, in Malaysia, in Saudi Arabia.
These are stories that rupture the singular narrative of victimhood. They show a community deeply entangled with modernity, with science, with intellectual production. They show Rohingya as contributors, as inventors, as cosmopolitans.
Ek Khaale is not just a Rohingya project; it is a project of diasporic memory itself. It reminds us that refugees are not only displaced people but displaced archives—scattered, fragmented, yet connected.
One of the most striking curatorial gestures of the exhibition is the decision to distinguish between documents and family photographs. The images of deeds, certificates, and albums are displayed level to the ground, echoing the way they were first laid out when Rohingya families revealed them to Constantine and his team. The floor becomes both archive and altar: the surface where histories were unfolded, examined, and photographed. In contrast, the family photographs are arranged on the wall in dense collages, much like the way ancestral portraits are typically displayed on the walls of vintage cafés or old family-run restaurants, filling every inch of space with layered memory. Seen up close, each photograph tells a singular story; from a distance, the collage becomes the story of a community. This dual display preserves the intimacy of private lives while amplifying their collective presence, aligning perfectly with the essence of an archival photography exhibition.
The exhibition is not a neutral display but an act of reclamation. It curates against erasure. It insists that the Rohingya not be remembered only for their expulsion, but also for their persistence.
Archival research restores subjectivity. It turns refugees from shadows into witnesses. It challenges the state’s erasure. It affirms dignity. In the words of Ek Khaale: “The documents do not merely survive; they insist.”