A Lost Population? East India Company and Arakanese ‘Refugees’ in Chittagong By Anandaroop Sen * Introduction The article will look at a few settlement projects designed by the East India Company in Chittagong in the late eighteenth century. The population to be settled was described in contemporary revenue records as Arakanese ‘refugees’. By focusing on these settlement plans the article will bring to light certain practices of governances at the margins of the Bengal agrarian world in the Company era. It will argue that the logic of these settlements and consequently the population was a peculiar mix of military and economic combinations of viewing space predicated on ideas of usefulness and peculiarities of ‘refugee’ labour and a form of personal governance specially tailored from them. Taking Gunnel Cederlöf’s call to write agrarian histories beyond cultivated fields, the article probes these muted conversations that seldom find place in conventional agrarian histories. At the same time this is a particular historical rendition of the meanings associated with term ‘refugee’. In short the article tries to bring the notion of displaced, dispossessed and the productive within the same analytic field. Post 1784, with the Ava (Kon-Baung dynasty) Kingdom 1 expanding into Arakan, a flood of ‘refugees’ 2 moved into Chittagong. This immigration continued through the last years of the eighteenth century with varying intensities reaching its zenith between the years of 1797 to 1800. An estimated thirty to forty thousand people streamed into Chittagong in these three years. 3 This essay recounts a story of this population. It is also a poignant reminder of the displacement and violence that constitute the contemporary reality of the region. The recently highlighted perils and devastations of the Rohingya Muslim refugees, fleeing from Buddhist attacks, are remarkably similar to this story from a time more than a * Doctoral candidate in Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. This is a part of his Ph.D dissertation. Refugee Watch, 46, December 2015.