Mru love poem

Love poem translated into Mru (other names and dialects: Mro, Murung, Mrung, Maru, Taung Mru, Tamsa, Dowpreng, Anok, Dak, Sungma, Mrusa, Niopheng, Doumrong, Niopreng, Launghu, Pongmi, Mrucha).

Mro is the Tibeto-Burman language of about 60,000 Mros, who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh (75%, mainly in the Bandarban district), and in Myanmar (25%).

In Bangladesh, the Mrus who have been lucky enough to be literate (there is no school in all the villages), are bilingual with Bengali, the national language.

The Mro language is classified as endangered, and today, they are probably less than 60, to know the Mro script of their language. This alphabet has been created by Menley Mro in 1982 for the Khrama religion (Krama).

The Mrus (Mros, Murongs, Murangs) who call themselves Mro-Cha (human being), in the past, lived in the hills of Arakan.

Driven out by the Khumis, they moved to the Chittagong Hills between the 17th and 18th centuries. Since then they live quite isolated, in villages scattered in these mountains.

They are surrounded by other tribal groups, since 13 different groups of indigenous peoples live in the Chittagong Hills; Among them are the Mrus.

These hills that have been a refuge, have also left them apart from Bangladeshi society. When Bangladesh was created in the early 1970s, the government did not grant them the same status as the Bengalis, and the flooding of their land to build a dam forced them to leave their land, or even flee to Burma, against a backdrop of civil war.

Discrimination, poverty and illiteracy, still present, remain problems to be solved.

If the reduction of ethnic tensions as well as the improvement of communications is a start of change, despite everything in Bangladesh, indigenous peoples and everything that concerns them, are still considered inferior.

Even if the Constitution of Bangladesh prohibits discrimination, the Mrus who have been discriminated for a long time, are still discriminated.

They live in clans (phratries), exogamous (find their wives in another clan), and worship the god Torai. Their houses are simple, made of wood and thatched roofs.

They earn their living from hunting, livestock breeding, jhum cultivation (slash-and-burn farming), and wood cutting which is an important resource in the mountains.