A bilingual ode to the hills: On the launch of Adivasi Premikar Mukh: The Portrait of an Adivasi Beloved

Adivasi Premikar Mukh: The Portrait of an Adivasi Beloved (Oitijjhya, 2026), a bilingual poetry collection by journalist, poet, and fiction writer Ehasan Mahamud, is set to be launched today, Monday, May 18, at the Kabi Shamsur Rahman Seminar Room of Bangla Academy, Dhaka. The event is organised by Oitijjhya Publications and begins at 4:00 PM.

Dipen Dewan, Minister for the Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs Ministry, will attend as chief guest, while Ali Newaz Mahmud Khaiyam, State Minister for the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, will attend as special guest. The discussion panel will include Professor Mohammad Azam, Director General of Bangla Academy; researcher and educator Kudrat-e-Huda; writer and researcher Pavel Partha; and rights activist Myentthein Promila.

Originally published in 2017, the collection was written between 2015 and 2016 during Mahamud’s time in Chittagong, where he worked at Bangladesh Television. His weekly travels to the Chittagong Hill Tracts while researching a novel brought him into close contact with the indigenous communities of the region, and the poems emerged from that period of immersion. The new edition features an English translation by Alamgir Mohammad, Assistant Professor of English at Bangladesh Army International University of Science and Technology, Comilla.

The collection centres on the figure of an Adivasi woman as both romantic subject and political symbol, mapping the history of the Hill Tracts through intimate verse. The poems engage with the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord, the legacy of the Kaptai Dam, and the long struggle of the Jumma people, while drawing on the rhythms of Baisabi, Jhum cultivation, and the cultural memory of the hills. In his translator’s note, Alamgir Mohammad describes the work as “a profound act of witnessing the socio-political and existential realities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.”