The lie of undocumented settlement and its permutations: Garo land rights and racial capitalism in Madhupur

In the mid-1980s, the state summarily cancelled the property rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Madhupur, Bangladesh, that hitherto were thoroughly embedded in the national legal-administrative architecture. The removal of capital from formal circuits of exchange is irrational in economic terms. This is a case where neoliberalism has been constrained by the state’s defense of a racialized hierarchy embedded in majoritarian understandings of the nation. Further exploration of how racial capitalism works by excluding certain ethnic groups from capital is likely to shed new light on processes of dispossession, particularly in regions where ethnic complexity, biological diversity and “old land wars” intersect.