Bangladesh is home to numerous communities, each with its own history, customs and ways of understanding the world. Despite this diversity, many people know little about their everyday lives, contemporary concerns or cultural contributions. Their traditions are admired from a distance, but their voices are not always heard with the same attention.

For cultural activist Tuku Talukder and designer Tenzing Chakma, preservation does not mean keeping culture trapped in the past. It means creating the conditions for it to remain visible, respected and relevant. Their reflections reveal a culture negotiating tourism, social media, changing lifestyles, disappearing languages and commercial fashion, while continuing to assert its place within contemporary Bangladesh.

Indigenous cultures often receive public attention during festivals such as Biju or around the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, observed on 9 August. For the rest of the year, however, their languages, foods, social practices, ecological knowledge and contemporary experiences rarely receive the same visibility.

Talukder believes this gap is partly the result of insufficient institutional support.

“There is a lack of government patronage and positive promotion,” she shares. “If there were active efforts to nurture these communities and their traditions, people would certainly know more.”

She argues that indigenous culture is too often reduced to songs, dances, and colourful performances. Although these are important forms of cultural expression, they represent only part of a much wider reality. Community structures, relationships with nature, traditional knowledge, food habits, languages and values are equally significant.

Representation becomes shallow when people are invited to perform but are not given space to explain their identities, concerns and aspirations in their own words.

“Promotion should not happen only on Indigenous Day or during festivals like Biju,” Talukder clarifies. “It needs to be year-round and inspirational.”

Talukder remembers how her local dishes were once treated negatively by outsiders. Foods associated with indigenous communities were sometimes mocked because their ingredients, smells, or preparation methods were unfamiliar.

Today, visitors to the Hill Tracts are more willing to try such dishes. Young indigenous creators also use social media to talk about foods they may once have felt embarrassed to mention publicly.

“So, what if people talk?” Talukder asks. “They talk because they don’t know.”

This shift matters because cultural loss does not always begin with the disappearance of an object or practice. Sometimes it begins when people are made to feel ashamed of their own language, clothing, food or customs.