Here in the Inland Empire, theres a good size community of a people called Chakma. They are a Mongoloid people from the mountains of Eastern Indian and Bangladesh. Ive seen a good number of them. Some are very Sino looking (I thought one of them was Japanese/Korean, because she was damn pale and had no eyelids ), some look straight Indian, and some look like your typical Southeast Asian.

Wikipedia states that these people once spoke a Tibeto-Burman language but now speak Chakma, an Indo Aryan language. There are 2 types of Chakma's here in the area. The ones from India and the ones from Bangladesh. The ones from India speak Hindi as a second language and the ones from of Bangladesh of course speak Bengali as a second language. Just wanted to let others know that they exist and they are here in the melting pot of So Cali.

The Korean looking Chakma chick told me that her family won an immigration lottery to the U.S. and the INS had to check their background TWICE because they did not believe that the Sino(Chinesey) looking family were from Bangladesh as they had claimed to be. Go figure.

Their location on the Indian map circled in red.

The Chakma are not the only so-called "Mongoloid" looking people in Bangladesh, but there are also plenty of other ethnic communities there who have similar features, though the Chakma are probably the largest among them. Unlike the Chakma though (who speak an Indic language closely related to Bengali), some of those other ethnic groups actually speak Tibeto-Burman languages. In total, they account for at least 2% of Bangladesh's population.

It's not uncommon to even find some Bengalis with so-called "Mongoloid" features though... a few Bengalis I know have told me that white people sometimes mistaken them for Filipinos, strangely enough. I suspect their appearance might be due to some admixture with the ethnic minorities in Bangladesh.

Please post pictures of these Chakma people , thanks.

The couple below are actually Mog and speak an archaic dialect of Burmese ( known as Rakhaing in Myanmar )

From the pictures, I think they look "Mongoloid"


^
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I'm Thai
This lady looks like one of my aunt ^^

Wow. Thanks for the pics.

Wow they look Bengali

No they don't. Well, some of them do, but a lot of them don't.


Is it just me, or does that guy wearing the longyi look like a brown version of the Japanese actor/filmmaker Takeshi Kitano?

I see alot of them now in socal... shopping at the asian markets. They keep it real too, go out with there sarongs and flip flips, buyin fish with there food stamps.

depends on what you mean by a Bengali look . They look Burmese to me but gain looking Burmese is quite subjective .





Kitano is quite brown anyway. I've noticed quite alot that some japanese phenotypes are quite similar to some myanmar phenotypes . ( different combinations of genes but similar results I guess )






sarong and flip flops lol

To me they do Well everyone except for the woman in the sari shop.

Bengali or Bangladeshi ?

That's probably because Japan, Burma and Bangladesh are all fishmonger cultures. That's probably why you get similar phenotypes with some Chakma too (and in rarer cases, even among some Bengalis).


Like I said, some of them do and some of them don't. The stereotypical looks for a Bengali and a Chakma are generally different (i.e. "Caucasoid" and "Mongoloid" in outdated racial terms), but there is obviously going to be overlap between the two, due to living among each other for so many generations. Like I said, I do know a few Bengalis who get mistaken for "Filipinos" by some white people.


I think she meant Bengali, the ethnicity. Bangladeshi is just a nationality (which includes the Chakma and all the other ethnic miniorities in the country).

Thats cool i have not met Desi person who look like that in person yet

Both Bengali and Chakma people are natives of their own lands period

^Which means...?

Your look alike aunt is from Bangladesh. In one of the photos, I have noticed a Bengali newspaper. Moreover, the village houses are similar to the houses the native Bangalis live in. The original habitat of these people is in the greater Chittagong Hill Tracts in south-east of the country near Burma.

Chittagong Hill Tracts, the main area of Chakmas, was supposed to go to India during the partition. Due to his own reasons, Lord Mountbatten handed it over to East Pakistan (modern-day Bangladesh).

When you have similar cultures hugging border areas, there is cultural, social nd hereditary sharing of habits.
It is more evident when one country's borders changes due to environmental or politics but they still share value with the main group. Pushtun/Northern India/Afghanistan/North Pakistan, Burma/China/Thailand iwth Lao people, or Chakma (East Pakistan, Eastern India i.e. today West Bangladesh)!