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Rakhine, Marma and Mog Are Of the Same Arakanese Heritage
- globalarakannetwork
- Nov 27
- 2 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Opinion
Global Arakan Network November 27, 2025
Not quite long ago, the respected Arakan historian Kyaw Minn Htin made a simple but powerful discovery: the Rakhine, the Marma of Bandarban, and the Mogh of Tripura are not separate nations—they are one ethnic family. Same blood, same language, same literature, same songs, same customs. Only the names changed with time and distance.
When the mighty Mrauk-U kings ruled, they sent trusted kin westward to govern the hills of today’s Chittagong and Tripura. Those administrators became the Marma and the Mogh. After the Burmese conquest in 1785, waves of Rakhine fled across the Naf River to escape slaughter and forced assimilation. Cut off from the motherland, they kept the old ways alive in exile—building houses on stilts the same way, arranging villages the same way, and still praying every day to the Mahamuni Buddha, the holiest image of Arakan.
Walk into a Marma village in the Chittagong Hill Tracts or a Mogh village in Tripura today and you will feel you never left home. The woven bamboo walls, the village headman’s court under the banyan tree, the wedding songs, the harvest dances—everything is identical to rural Rakhine life. Even the dialect is so close that a grandmother from Sittwe can gossip all afternoon with a grandmother from Bandarban without missing a word.
In 2022, ULA Chairman Twan Mrat Naing told Asia Times the same truth: “We are one people separated only by borders drawn by others.” Scholars and political leaders on all three sides agree.
Today, more than ninety percent of Arakan soil is free again under the Arakan Army and the new Arakan government. The gates of the ancestral land are open. To every Marma and Mogh family who still lights incense for Mahamuni, who still sings the old river songs, who still feels homesick for a place they have never seen—this is your moment.
Come home. The rice fields need your hands. The pagodas need your voices. The rivers remember your names.
Your brothers and sisters in Rakhine are waiting with open arms. This is not just a return—it is a reunion of one family that history tried to tear apart. Together we can rebuild the Arakan our ancestors dreamed of: strong, proud, and whole again.
