Lars Cornelissen sits down with two-time ISRF Fellow Greg Constantine to talk about his recent research on the untold history of the Rohingya.
Lars Cornelissen and Greg Constantine
Feature image by Greg Constantine.
Lars Cornelissen
Can we start with you explaining your current research and your current fellowship and how it relates to your previous work?
Greg Constantine
My trajectory with the ISRF has been interesting. I’ve been a photographer for 20 years and I dedicate my work to long-term projects. And one has been documenting the persecution of the Rohingya community in Burma. There are many other projects – immigration detention, statelessness – but the Rohingya community has remained a constant through 17 years.
The Rohingya community has been subjected to different waves of violence and a genocide that has been ongoing for a long time – although the world only recognised this genocide as such in 2017. Prior to 2017, I’d spent most of my time, around 20 trips, trying to dissect and document the persecution this community had faced.
When 2017 happened and it was recognised by people all over the world as a genocide, it wasn’t breaking news for me – it was the culmination of years of documenting systematic, structural, strategic persecution by the Burmese authorities.
Where the Rohingya live in Burma has been a black hole that very few people have been permitted to get to. So most of my work over the years has focused on people that have left that area. But the violence of 2017 pushed over 600,000 Rohingya out all of Burma and into a space where you could actually access them and hear from them.
For me, the big question in 2017 was: “What were they bringing with them?”
That’s where my relationship with ISRF and these fellowships started. There is all this evidence related to the structural violence, but none of us had been able to see it. So, in 2017, I identified this opportunity to document the process of what had happened to them over the past 20 or 30 years, through what people had brought with them out of Burma, into Bangladesh.
And in 2018, that led to my Independent Scholar Fellowship with the ISRF. With that fellowship, I was thinking about how I could capture the stories and the things that they had brought with them – but also how the genocidal process is happening to them as refugees in another country. Because the death, the persecution, the isolation, the segregation continue.
During 2017, there were several well-documented mass killings by the Burmese authorities: Chut Pyin, Maung Nu, Tula Toli. With the fellowship, I documented the aftermath of almost all of them. I recorded the stories of people who had survived all of them; a collective voice of those that had different experiences but shared an experience of trauma and violence.
As a photographer, the visual is my medium. But my photographer peers and I never had access to where all that death happened. We couldn’t get there. So how do you visually translate that loss, that trauma and its scale?
My answer was to tell the stories of those who had lost someone in that violence. So there were all these different techniques I used that pushed me as a visual storyteller into a space I’d not been in before.
Putting together the exhibition, I realised that it’s about the survival and life of this community. But it’s also about its destruction. I believe genocide is a process. It’s not something that just happens spontaneously. It’s something that is planned and takes time. For the Rohingya, it was decades in the making.
I wanted to explore the backstory – the things that set the stage for that destruction. The denial of rights, the segregation, the arbitrary denial of citizenship, the economic desperation, the denial of education and birth certificates.
LC
And you’ve tried to understand this through the concept of slow genocide, visually documenting the decades of changing citizenship documents and passports and other official state documents?
GC
Yes. And to do that, you need access to those hard materials. So in 2017, the Burmese authorities essentially pushed people out with that hard evidence. And if you looked hard enough, you could piece together a process going back decades. That’s what I tried to do.
The work from the Independent Scholar Fellowship and my work from previous 14 years became a major exhibition in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, which continues until the end of 2025.
Putting together the exhibition, I realised that it’s about the survival and life of this community. But it’s also about its destruction. I believe genocide is a process. It’s not something that just happens spontaneously. It’s something that is planned and takes time. For the Rohingya, it was decades in the making.
I wanted to explore the backstory – the things that set the stage for that destruction. The denial of rights, the segregation, the arbitrary denial of citizenship, the economic desperation, the denial of education and birth certificates.
LC
And you’ve tried to understand this through the concept of slow genocide, visually documenting the decades of changing citizenship documents and passports and other official state documents?
GC
Yes. And to do that, you need access to those hard materials. So in 2017, the Burmese authorities essentially pushed people out with that hard evidence. And if you looked hard enough, you could piece together a process going back decades. That’s what I tried to do.
LC
Is that why these communities held on to documents from 40-50 years ago, and why they had these objects with them? Was it as a means of documenting it and reconciling themselves with what had happened?
GC
Absolutely. I think it’s amazing that people would hold on to things like that. But when you talk with Rohingya, you realise they are aware of how invaluable those things are. They realise that the minute their grandparents’ original ID card from the 1950s is gone they have no hard proof to show their connection.
That’s the answer I got from almost all the Rohingya who shared with me some of these family things they had carried with them in 2017 and previous displacements.
It’s been an incredible process to be able to see how, in some ways, it’s taken a genocide to push this community into a place where people can finally see for themselves the process of exclusion and erasure.
LC
Could you describe your new project and how it builds on previous work in Bangladesh?
GC
After the Independent Scholar Fellowship, and putting together the exhibition, there was one particular element of that exhibition that I thought was absolutely crucial. And that was a historical section, a visualization of what this community was like before everything started to go bad.
The Burmese government has always claimed this community was never indigenous to Burma. That they’re interlopers from India and later, Bangladesh. That they’ve never contributed anything. And this has been used to support the strategic, structural violence against them. It’s also how other people in Burma have come to understand and accept this violence.
So I thought: “Okay, well, what would happen if I tried to work with people in the community to see what actually still exists? What part of their history is still there? And what would happen if I tried to work with the community to almost act as a magnet to bring it all together?”
LC
So you’ve started to draw on the networks that you’ve got all over the world to try and trace these different fragmented groups of people and the materials they still have?
GC
I feel, and what people I know in the community also feel, is that they cannot be defined by this violence that has been perpetrated against them, because there’s an entire history that precedes that.
So what would happen if I started working with people in the Rohingya community to find five pieces of this visual history in Pakistan, and 20 pieces of this jigsaw puzzle in Bangladesh, and 40 pieces inside of Burma, and in the US and the UK, Europe, Malaysia?
And what would happen if I then tried to put them together to create a whole different portrait of this community that’s based on history and challenges the portrait that people today have of this community? That was basically the starting point for my ISRF Early Career Fellowship.
Burma is now in the aftermath of the 2021 coup. All communities across Burma are now experiencing a level of violence that the Rohingya have been experiencing for decades. Everyone now has one common enemy: the military. There’s this moment of shared solidarity – and the Rohingya community fits, I think, within that shared solidarity.
So why not use this project to make people rethink what they’ve been told by the government, and see the contributions and the sense of belonging and the placement of the Rohingya community in Burma?
LC
That’s great, Greg. You’ve just said that a lot of the impetus comes from the community, so how does that play out?
GC
I wouldn’t be able to do this work myself. It needs collaboration with the community. They’re the gatekeepers to this work. I can initiate the contact and describe what I envision and the motivation, but they’re the caretakers of this visual representation that I believe is out there.
I’ve done this by utilizing different connections I have with Rohingya around the world. I’ve told them about the project and said: “This is what I want to do, can you help me?” In some places, it’s going great; in other places, I’ve kind of hit walls.
But the closer I stay to Burma, the better. So I’ve been working with four young Rohingya in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. And several still living inside Burma who have worked secretly approaching families. I’ve given them guidance and set up a system that’s secure, and I’ve let them do their thing, and monitored how things are going.
And over the last 2 years, slowly, Rohingya in these places have been contributing visual materials to the project.
I’m amazed by these pieces of visual evidence, these pieces that make up this jigsaw puzzle. And these materials have also amazed the Rohingya who I’ve worked with, because they’re younger, in their 20s or early 30s, and – I hate to say this – are of a generation of genocide. They’ve never seen an alternative visual history that challenges that.
It’s incredible to see all these materials start to coalesce into a portrait that is very different than what most people – them included – think of this community. These jigsaw pieces might be old black and white family photographs, old documents, anything you can imagine. And they show the contributions this community has made – and their sense of belonging.
One photograph might tell a story, but when you place it with one hundred other photographs, it creates a portrait of a community that was once very much part of Burmese society; not only economically, but politically and professionally.
All these things embed a community into being a part of a greater society.
LC
Are you collecting mostly visuals, photographs in particular? Or are you also interested in diaries, oral histories, narratives and textual materials?
GC
All those. The curation of those materials has been an huge task. This is something that has never been done with this community before, and something the community has never done by itself before.
One of the many exciting parts of this project is that this visual representation of who they are as a community; who they were at a particular point in time, is not being driven by and created from the outsider’s point of view. It’s not my camera taking pictures of them; it’s them actively participating in creating a greater portrait that shows who this community was. That is unique.
Anytime you read something related to the Rohingya, news reports or whatever, the first paragraph usually contains a sentence that says, “One of the most persecuted communities in the world”. And yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t define who this community is.
I’ve been fortunate that people trust me enough, because of the work that I’ve done over the years. Being in London for so much time, I’ve also had access to archives – materials that I’d never otherwise have access to, and a lot of Rohingya wouldn’t have access to either.
In the archives, I try to find things that represent the active voice of the Rohingya community. So much comes from the colonialist perspective, but it’s exciting to uncover things that aren’t so much the colonialist voice, but the Rohingya voice that is being reported by the colonial authorities.
To find old telegrams and old cables of Rohingya talking, reporting what Rohingya are saying, in the 1940s, right around independence, is super exciting. It tells a lot about who this community believe they were and where they passionately felt their position in Burmese society was at that crucial time in their history.
For me, it’s also, “How can you take something that is from the past and activate it in the present?” It’s like all these materials have been sleeping for decades. Let’s use this project as an opportunity to take that family photograph, and let it awaken and speak in a way that it hasn’t been able to in a long time – if at all.
LC
You’ve previously told me about finding this incredible archival source in somebody’s attic in England. Can you say more about that?
GC
There’s two great anecdotes to talk about in terms of fieldwork: one from within the Rohingya community; and one external, the one you just mentioned.
Over the past year, all these materials have been trickling in: photographs, documents. And I’ve been seeing all these things in isolation: one picture, isolated by itself; another picture, isolated by itself. And each one tells an important story.
But when I went to Bangladesh and met with the different people who have contributed these things, they began to show me portfolios of materials. Not one photograph, but four, and three ID documents and four pieces of paper. So that one photograph told a story. But this portfolio of things held a conversation that talked all about Rohingya history, generational things.
That was significant for me, not just creatively, but also archivally. I could say, “Okay, well, what if I put all these disjointed, isolated documents together and start creating collages of materials that then tell a deeper story and include that with the audio – the oral testimony – of the people who have contributed it? What do they think is important about these documents and these photographs of two generations of their family? Why is it significant to the Rohingya community? Why is it significant to them?”.
That propelled this project into a whole different space.
I think a lot of communities are suspicious of people within their own communities for any number of different reasons. What worked to the benefit of this project is that being a trusted outsider opened up a space where people started sharing more documents with me than they would with some of the Rohingya themselves.
They’d show me the pictures they’d already submitted. But then they’d pull out a bag of extra materials to share. And then, a skeptical, older Rohingya man might fully understand the power of the project and get on his phone, calling old men all around the camps to come over, because there was somebody here, who was really interested, genuinely, in seeing and learning about these historic materials they’d miraculously preserved and carried with them during the genocide, from Burma into Bangladesh, and had kept secretly.
That was invaluable.
When I started the project, my ambition was to get pictures from anybody related to the Rohingya and Arakan – the area where the Rohingya are from and live.
I was going to be in the UK, so because the British were actively involved during World War Two in this area of Burma, fighting the Japanese, I thought it would be miraculous if I found a family in the UK who had an ancestor who fought for the British in Arakan during the war. Especially if they had a photograph from that time.
So last year, one of the Rohingya I had been working with, who was working inside Burma, submitted a portfolio of documents of one particular man from the 1940s. This man’s name was Abdul Salam.
The portfolio included an original Burmese passport, issued in 1949, and a couple other things. One was a copy of a war service certificate issued to him, on June 14, 1945, by the British government, acknowledging his contribution to the British war effort against the Japanese.
I’d never seen a document like this before.
It’s known that the Rohingya community helped the British during World War Two, but very little was documented. But here, all of a sudden, was this war service certificate.
Then, at the British Library, I found some books about ‘V force’. ‘V force’ was set up by the British military to fight along the India-Burma border against the Japanese in World War Two and used locals across enemy lines to help filter intelligence back to the British. And in part of Arakan, these locals were Rohingya.
One book was called “Burmese Outpost” by Anthony Irwin. And there was a chapter about the Muslim community of North Arakan, which would be the Rohingya community.
The book specifically mentions two Rohingya men: one named Waji Ullah, and the other Abdul Salam. Could this be the same Abdul Salam we had the war certificate of? Yes, it could.
This took me down a rabbit hole as I tried to find the relatives of the author, Anthony Irwin, who fought for the British in ‘V force’. And that led to online records that took me to the last town he possibly lived in, where I knocked on doors, asking anybody if they knew of Anthony Irwin. Which led to nothing.
So I returned to my online research and was able to connect with Anthony Irwin’s grandson. I told him about this project and he said, “Oh, well, you have to talk with my dad”, who would be Anthony Irwin’s son, “and my auntie”, who would be Anthony Irwin’s daughter from another marriage. And that led to conversations with both, one of whom invited me to their house.
Figure 1: Anthony Irwin’s suitcases, containing old documents, photographs, and notebooks. Image by Greg Constantine.
In the dining room of this home were two suitcases filled with old letters, papers and photo albums of two generations of people from that family who had served in the British military, including Anthony Irwin. Most remarkable, however, was a thin photo album – with ‘Arakan, 1943’ written on its spine.
Inside was a black and white print of her father, standing underneath the Union Jack, with a group of young Rohingya men all serving with ‘V force’. And on the back of that photograph was handwritten something like, ‘Author with Muslims from Arakan, partisans at guerilla HQ’.
This, I believe, is the first picture that visually places men from the Rohingya community in service of the British during their fight against the Japanese in World War Two.
This is one of the reasons why you do this work – you never know where these discoveries are going to come from. But there’s an instinct, a kind of intuition, to not give up. Sometimes, it leads to a dead end. Sometimes, it leads you to a very historically significant part of this community and its history.
This time, it also led to even more rabbit holes. I also found in the family archive a series of communications Anthony Irwin had with the BBC about a radio programme he did in 1945 about the ‘V force’ and these indigenous communities, including the Rohingya community.
The BBC no longer had the recording, but I found a transcript of it in a copy of The Listener magazine from April 5, 1945. And that was significant. But what was even more significant was that there were three pictures.
One was a photograph of several Rohingya with rifles being trained by the British behind enemy lines. Unfortunately, Abdul Salam was not mentioned in the radio broadcast. But, I did find another mention of him in the June 14th 1945 issue of ‘The Burma Gazette’, the official correspondence of the British military.
In this copy, were two pieces of paper. On one of those pieces of paper, on the same exact day as the one on the war service certificate of Abdul Salam, is a section that says, “War Service Certificates”, and there’s about nine people mentioned, including Abdul Salam from Buthidaung.
Which triangulated all these things. It also made me realize that, on that day, Abdul Salam was one of several Rohingya from that area of North Arakan who received war service certificates.
LC
This is an incredible anecdote, Greg.
How would you then feed these sorts of findings back to the community? Do you go back to the family members of Abdul Salam and say, “That picture you sent me, alongside the war certificate, have led me on this incredible path. Here’s what I found. What do you make of it?”.
GC
I’ll end up doing that with many people who have contributed materials to this project. I’ll show them how they fit within the larger picture of things and explain to them the contribution that one thing makes to the greater representation of the community. It might even fill a gap in the community’s historical timeline.
It’s really important to do that. I’ll do the same with the UK family; to show them what that contribution has made to the greater picture.
LC
Can you tell me a little bit more about the website, Ek Khaale, that has come out of this project? How did you arrive at the idea to curate a website? And what are your hopes and ambitions for it?
GC
In September of 2023, I found myself in a very interesting space with this project and with this work because there’s a creative component, and an intellectual component.
Regarding the creative component: when do you stop creating? Three years into this project, I felt like I could just keep going and learning and discovering and finding and having people share more and more materials with me. It could go on for another two years. So I was confronted with this important question, when does that part of this process have to be paused?
Over the past three years, this amazing team of young Rohingya and others who have contributed to this project and I have amassed together a significant block of raw materials that didn’t exist before. Last September, it was clear to me that it was time to start chiseling away at that block of raw materials, critically look through and analyse these materials, deconstruct all of the materials and start to create a narrative that’s accessible for people, that tells a story.
This brings up questions about the power and the role of an archive. One of many gifts an archive provides is that it awakens the past and places it in the present. And in so many ways, what people see in an archive has the ability to re-establish a history that has been forgotten or correct and re-align a history that has been falsified and accepted by the majority as being true.
What Rohingya did in the 1950s, 60s, 70s or 80s might have been decades ago, but these visual moments have a place in a trajectory of a historical timeline that are linked together, build upon each other and when sewn together, they bring us to now. For people in Myanmar, a significant part of the Rohingya community’s historical timeline has been, for the most part, questioned, denied or just erased.
All of the materials in the project Ek Khaale synthesize together, collectively in a process that is a restoration, is a rewinding of the visual representation of the Rohingya most people have of this community, including those who live in Myanmar, people who live around the world and also people within the Rohingya community itself.
So, I spent months testing out various design strategies that could allow these materials to have a voice in the present, allow them to speak. A story began to develop where the materials we found and the voices of Rohingya within them could be curated in a way that presented the ‘active’ voice and role of the Rohingya at key moments in Burma’s history. Yet, in doing this, it also permits these materials to have an active voice in the present at this important moment in Burma’s history right now.
How can you take old journals, books, diaries, bureaucratic communications and newspapers and make them come alive and have a voice? It took months to figure this out.
The website www.ekkhaale.org is really a digital book. That is how I designed it. Nine chapters, each chapter focusing on a specific part of the Rohingya story and each sharing and showing micro-histories composed of different themes. In many ways, I let the materials drive the story and the decisions for how the final chapters were edited and curated. Some of the chapters are quite dense with archival materials because the materials demanded it, which also meant these chapters needed more text to provide context. While for other chapters the visual materials are so strong, they speak for themselves.
On a number of chapters, I consulted with several Rohingya and others who know this story and who I trust, almost as editorial advisors.
To maximize on engagement and sustain and build interest in the project, I decided to serialize the release of the project website. The first chapter was released in the middle of June and every week or so, I would release a new chapter, publicizing it to mailing lists and so Rohingya groups around the world could share it within their networks as well. It was definitely the right decision.
Now the project is in an exciting phase: public and strategic engagement. Presentations of the project have already been held in Bangkok and at the 4th International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies in Chiang Mai. Several more presentations and exhibitions are being organized for the end of the year and early 2025. Use of the materials from Ek Khaale are being used by groups within the Rohingya community too, which for me is incredibly exciting.
I’ve been documenting the Rohingya for 18 years now. While I believe my older working documenting the persecution of the Rohingya is crucial in bearing witness, holding Burmese regimes to account for the atrocities they have committed and leaving behind sometime that contributes to a historical record, I feel the project Ek Khaale is the kind of work that can contribute something of infinite value. I want to explore as many creative and intellectual pathways and collaborations to see this happens.
We are grateful to Mila Ortega Smith and Matt Warren for their support with transcription and editing.
