The Long Road From Nalikhali
By Dr Tom Corcoran
Published by ETHNOMAD
After failing English in her final school examination, a young Garo woman must leave her village in search of work. Doshumi’s journey reveals how language, poverty and geography are narrowing the futures of Indigenous children in northern Bangladesh.
Doshumi completed her final year of high school in 2026. She passed every subject except English.
For a young woman in Nalikhali, a small Garo village near Bangladesh’s northern border with India, this was not a minor academic setback. A single failed subject has prevented her from completing the qualification she needs to continue into higher education. She can sit the examination again, but another attempt requires time, tuition and money. Her family cannot afford for her to remain at home indefinitely, waiting for another result. She must now look for work.
Nothing about this appears extraordinary on an examination sheet. There is a name, a list of subjects and a failed grade. Behind that grade lies a much larger story about language, geography, poverty and what happens when an Indigenous child enters an education system that recognises little of the world from which she comes.
Doshumi did not fail because she lacks ambition. She desperately wants to continue her education and study something that could lead to meaningful work. She failed a language that was poorly taught in a rural school, rarely spoken in her daily life and yet made compulsory for her future. Her experience is personal, but it is not unusual.
Doshumi is the younger sister of Sushila, who regularly works at the Garo Experience in Nalikhali. Sushila cleans the guest rooms and prepares traditional Garo food, much of it cooked over an open fire. Her knowledge does not come from a cookbook or a training course. It has been acquired through years of watching, remembering and working beside other women.
She knows how to judge the fire, prepare ingredients and reproduce flavours that belong to Garo homes rather than restaurant kitchens. This is knowledge carried in the hand and the memory. It connects food to family, land and the generations of women through whom these practices have survived. No formal qualification recognises it.
The education system has no way of measuring what Doshumi and Sushila already know. It does not examine their knowledge of the surrounding land, the obligations between families or the place of women within Garo inheritance. It cannot measure the memory held in a language, a recipe or a cultivated field. What it can measure is English, and English is one of the subjects through which a student’s future is decided.
The issue is not whether Doshumi should learn it. English would give her access to university, employment and a wider world of information. She wants that opportunity. The problem is that the language was made essential to her future without ever being adequately present in her education.
Doshumi, dressed in pink, and her sister Sushila prepare to dance at a Garo welcome celebration in northern Bangladesh. Wearing traditional woven dress, feathered headdresses and ceremonial ornaments, the sisters represent a younger generation carrying Garo culture forward through movement, music and community celebration.
A Garo child in northern Bangladesh may begin life speaking or hearing A·chik at home. On entering school, the child moves into a system dominated by Bangla. English is introduced later as a compulsory subject and eventually becomes important for university admission and professional employment.
Each language occupies a different place in the child’s life. A·chik carries family, identity and belonging. Bangla is the language of the state, the classroom and most public institutions. English, although seldom spoken in the village, increasingly controls access to higher education and better-paid work.
Moving between these languages should be an education in itself. In practice, it often becomes a series of obstacles. The language of home has little institutional authority. The classroom language may differ from the child’s first language. The language upon which future opportunity depends may be taught by someone who has never been properly trained to speak it.
English teaching in rural Bangladesh often depends upon copying, translation and memorisation. Students learn model paragraphs and rehearse answers that might appear in the examination. They may be able to reproduce a prepared passage without fully understanding how the language works. Conversation is limited because many teachers lack confidence in spoken English themselves.
In better-resourced schools, weaknesses in classroom teaching can be compensated for through private tuition, books, internet access and educated family members. In a village such as Nalikhali, those additional advantages are far less available. By the time students sit the final examination, they are being measured against the same paper as young people whose preparation has been entirely different.
The examination may be standardised, but the education preceding it is not. Bangladesh has made real progress in expanding access to education, particularly for girls. National figures, however, tell us little about the conditions facing small Indigenous communities living at the geographical and political margins of the country.
Research cited by the World Bank has found that Bangladeshi children from outside the Bengali majority are approximately half as likely to complete primary school. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics recorded a dropout rate of 59 per cent in 2016, compared with 19.2 per cent nationally.
The Garo villages of Sherpur are not part of the Hill Tracts. Their history, geography and relationship with the state are different, and figures from one Indigenous region should not be presented as a direct measure of another. They do, however, expose a broader pattern. Indigenous children are more likely to attend remote schools, study in an unfamiliar language and lack access to trained teachers and private tuition.
Sherpur District recorded a literacy rate of 63.7 percent in Bangladesh’s 2022 census, compared with 74.8 percent nationally. Even this tells us little about the experience of Garo students. Educational results are not consistently separated by Indigenous community, sex, household income and examination subject. A Garo girl who fails English is absorbed into a district statistic, and when she leaves school to begin working, the circumstances that led her there disappear with her. What remains on the official record is an individual failure, stripped of the years of poor teaching and limited opportunity that preceded it.
