In 2014 the American film-maker and writer Bremen Donovan travelled to Bangladesh to photograph the work of Namati and its partner, the Council on Minorities. We work with the Urdu-speaking minority who struggle to secure citizenship.
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Namati and its partner Council on Minorities have opened paralegal offices in five camps across Bangladesh.
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Nahid Parvin, 20, is a paralegal working for the Urdu-speaking community in Dhaka.
Parvin has basic law and mediation training. She works as a grassroots advocate, helping people apply for identity documents. Parvin suffered discrimination growing up: ‘Teachers would say, “Oh, you’re from the camps, you killed our forefathers in ‘71.” I didn’t say anything,’ she says. ‘But I cried all the time’
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Mymensingh camp, Dhaka. Urdu speakers have suffered discrimination and extreme poverty since the country’s war of liberation. Despite a law introduced in 2008 that guarantees citizenship for Bihari refugees, they face serious obstacles to obtaining citizenship documents such as passports and birth certificates.
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Many Biharis are increasingly able to pass as mainstream Bangladeshis. This gives them access to housing and services such as education – and a better chance of acquiring citizenship documents. But for Urdu speakers, ‘passing’ in order to get the basic rights granted by law means abandoning their culture.
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Night time in Geneva Camp Dhaka. Many ancestors of the Urdu-speaking minority came from Bihar, India, during the partition in 1947. The camps’ residents are referred to as Bihari, which is a loaded term in Bangladesh. Some trace their ancestry back not to Bihar, but to other regions in India and present-day Pakistan