Bikash K Bhattacharya

Mongabay Environmental News •

Majuli's shrinking wetlands and their fight for survival

Legend has it that in a village on the island of Majuli in Assam, whenever someone needed something, they would go to a nearby beel (wetland) and pray to the water god (devata) and their wish would be fulfilled. Even today, the wetland is known as Bhakati beel, meaning ‘the beel of devotion.’

“Symbolically, this legend shows the significance of wetlands in the life of the people of Majuli,” says Gobin Kumar Khound, a writer and local environmental activist in the island. “Beels are the arteries
Bluedot Living •

Protecting a Newly Identified Species in Myanmar

Thirty-five-year-old geologist Tin Ko Min was born in the foothills of Mount Popa, an extinct volcano in Myanmar, and still makes his home there. “Geological wonders [have] fascinated me since I was in school,” he says. After graduating with a degree in Geology, Tin Ko Min worked as a guide for students visiting Mount Popa. “Each time I hiked the mountain,” he says, “I felt that the mountain held many mysteries.”

The central Dry Zone of Myanmar is one of the most climate-sensitive regions in th
The Third Pole •

Cases in Bhutan illustrate the increasing rise of scrub typhus

In October 2022, a 24-year-old patient arrived at Gedu Hospital in Bhutan’s Chukha district. She had been experiencing fever, body ache, cough and shortness of breath for 10 days.

Doctors in the primary health centre initially treated her for the ‘viral fever’ – an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of viral infections and treated symptomatically – but her condition did not improve.

“On examination, we found an eschar [dead tissue] on the left chest of the patient. It had turned into
Indiaspend •

In Assam’s Majuli, Climate Crisis Threatens Indigenous Craft Of Boat-Making

Majuli, Assam: When Prasanna Bora, a 44-year-old boat-maker from Salmora in Assam’s Majuli island, was in his teens, nearly every family in his village had someone who built boats. But now, he is one of a few remaining professional boat-makers.


“It is difficult to procure the timber required for making boats these days,” Bora told IndiaSpend. “Every year we lose land and forest to erosion. The government therefore does not allow us to fell trees anymore, as deforestation is believed to speed up erosion...
Peace Insight •

Indigenous Stories for Peace in Myanmar's Kachin State

Myanmar has been in the throes of civil war ever since the country’s independence from the British Empire in 1948. And the Kachin conflict is one of the longest running conflicts in the country. In rural Kachin state, a large number of children grow up in IDP camps, fleeing war zones, with limited access to the formal education system.

Since the democratic opening of Myanmar in early 2010s there were high hopes for the development of a decentralised and inclusive education system.
Earth Island Journal •

Preserving the Abodes of Tibetan Buddhist Deities

Due to her association with Lhamo La-tso lake, followers of Tibetan Buddhism consider Palden Lhamo to be the goddess of the sacred lake and believe that she resides in a number of other lakes scattered in the Himalayan region.

Every year, Phuntsok Wangchuk, a monk in Ganden Namgyal Lhatse monastery, spends three months visiting these lakes, which are tucked amid snow-clad mountains a few miles from his monastery. The 39-year-old lama isn’t seeking visions or seclusion. Rather, he’s there to gui
LGBTQ Nation •

Burmese trans women find freedom & dignity as spirit mediums

With her wavy hair tied to a top knot, Linn Linn huddles on a carpet, her eyes closed and hands supplicating in prayer. A group of followers, middle-aged men and women, kneel around her in reverence, seeking blessings. Soon afterwards she dons a purple gaung baung (turban) and dances to a series of nat (spirit) music, starting with slow beats that gradually speed up. The moment ends with her entering a trance-like state.

Here in Amarapura – the former royal capital of Myanmar and now a dusty to...
Bluedot Living •

Marrying Science and Tradition to Promote Environmentalism in Northeast India

A short, sturdily built man walks past a bush and then suddenly stops near a rhododendron tree in full bloom with purple flowers. The group of roughly a dozen school children following him gather around. The man pulls out a photobook from his shoulder bag and describes to the children exactly which variety of rhododendron it is. And then he starts to sing a folk song about the rhododendron flower.

After, the group resumes their hike in the subalpine forest until early afternoon.

This is a rout
Mongabay Environmental News •

Venomous snakebites, an occupational hazard for women tea workers

Pahi Bhumij shudders to recall that day, and says she is grateful to have escaped death.

On May 5, as part of her routine, Bhumij went to work in a tea garden adjacent to her village in Assam’s Sivasagar district. The 16-year-old had been employed as a temporary tea plucker. In the afternoon, as she was picking tea leaves, she felt a tinge of pain in her ankle, and noticed a monocled cobra (Naja kaouthia) sliding through the grass underneath the tea plants. Bhumij had been bitten by the snake.
NiCHE •

Constellation Spirit, Vicious Vermin, and Icon of Environmental Guilt: Affective Entanglements of the Thylacine in Tasmania and India

This piece by Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya is the eleventh post in the Emotional Ecologies series edited by Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt. In this series, contributors were asked to reflect on what role emotion plays in connecting humans to their environment and more-than-human beings.

A Dreamtime Story of Mutual Care: the Corinna, Gods, and Humans

A Dreamtime story from the Nuenonne First Nation of Bruny Island off the Southeast Coast of Tasmania (lutruwita) narrates how one day a young
ASEF culture360 •

Poets as Keepers of Buddhist Tradition: The Zare Culture of Myanmar, Thailand and Yunnan

As part of culture360's ongoing Call for articles 2023, Bikash K. Bhattacharya writes about a unique poetic tradition in the Theravada Shan communities of upper Myanmar, northern Thailand and the Yunnan province of China, that serves as a primary means of transmitting the Buddhism teachings.

Known as the ‘doctrine of the elders’, Theravada Buddhism is the oldest form of Buddhism that is believed by its followers to have remained closest to the original teachings of the Buddha. In Theravada Buddhist...
Borderless •

Uehara by Kamaleswar Barua

A story based on the end of a world war II soldier by Kamaleswar Barua in Assamese, translated by Bikash K. Bhattacharya

This is a translation of the narrative “Uehara” from Kamaleswar Barua’s Ei Ran Ei Jivan [1], a collection of narratives published in Assamese in 1968 based on “true events and characters” the author had encountered while serving as a military engineer in the British Indian Army in the Second World War.

Kamaleswar Barua is a relatively lesser-known figure in Assamese literatu
The Third Pole •

Oil palm pioneers doubt crop will take off in Himalayan foothills

As he talks about his 200-hectare oil palm plantation, Dature Miuli becomes visibly emotional. A passionate farmer and agro-entrepreneur in mountainous Arunachal Pradesh, the 59-year-old has tried planting every new crop from rambutan to rubber. Ten years ago rubber was touted by the local government as the next big cash crop; today the focus has moved to palm oil.

Miuli was one of the first to adopt oil palm back in 2017, in response to the government pushing its cultivation by local farmers.
NatureInFocus •

The Wild Water Buffalo Population In Assam Is Under Threat | Nature inFocus

• Assam’s wild water buffalo population, that was once abundant, saw a dramatic decline, primarily because of colonial hunting for over 150 years.
• Listed as ‘endangered’ in the IUCN Red List since 1986, the wild water buffalo population in Assam faces threats such as habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation due to natural and anthropogenic factors.
• Conservationists and herders say that it is habitat loss, and not the cultural practice of interbreeding with the domestic buffaloes, that ha
South Asia Journal •

India: The idea of wasteland and two media narratives of citizenship in Assam

I want to make a few observations regarding two widely circulated media articles that invoke ‘wasteland’, a colonial category for land, in speaking about state-sponsored notions of citizenship in Assam, a frontier state in northeast India. The category ‘wasteland’—and its variants “dead,” “idle,” “vacant,” “fallow,” “unutilized” land—facilitated state seizures of public commons for colonial capitalist exploitation in British India and Malay, Dutch East Indies, and imperial central Vietnam. Schol
RAIOT •

Expectations of Modernity : Extractive Economy of Assam

Recently, three incidents have rocked Assam: a coal mining concession in a part of Dehing-Patkai Elephant Reserve, an oil blowout in Baghjaan, and the extra-judicial killing of an Assamese youth in Jorhat by security forces and police. While the state narrative regarding Jayanta Bora, the deceased youth, seems to connect him with the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) without any conclusive proof, multiple local media outlets have reported a different version of his death. This version state
Mongabay Environmental News •

Death on the Brahmaputra: The rhino, the rangers, and the usual suspects

ASSAM, India — On Feb. 5, 2018, rangers at Orang National Park in the northeast Indian state of Assam received multiple phone calls from villagers reporting sightings of a stray rhino.

Dawdling and lounging on one of the numerous islands in the Brahmaputra River, the rhino had traveled about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the safety of the park, which harbors 102 greater one-horned rhinoceroses (Rhinoceros unicornis).

It isn’t uncommon for rhinos to stray out of the protected habitats in Assam.
The Indian Express •

‘No road, no electricity, no hospital’: life in Bemari Basti, Assam’s former leprosy colony

The entrance to the village of Rajabari Christian Gaon, a former leprosy colony in Assam. Source: Prakash Bhuyan.

When they first heard of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), they thought it was yet another aasoni or government scheme that would have no bearing on their lives, as had been the case with all other aasonis ever since they remember.

Living on a patch of land close to the Tiru Hills Reserve Forest along the embattled Assam-Nagaland border, the 15-odd families of Rajabari Chris
Mongabay Environmental News •

For India’s imperiled apes, thinking locally matters

A typical morning in the village of Phlangwanbroi starts with a melodious yet primitive-sounding song: drifting over from the nearby community forest, a series of whoops, hoots and tones rise in a crescendo.

Perched atop a rain-soaked plateau in the Indian state of Meghalaya, Phlangwanbroi is a Khasi tribal village. The Khasis are a hill-dwelling indigenous minority numbering about 1.2 million within India. Located in the country’s remote mountainous northeast, most Khasis in rural Meghalaya co
Mongabay Environmental News •

Timor-Leste: With sacrifice and ceremony, tribe sets eco rules

On the morning of Aug. 20, 2012, about 150 men, women and children gathered in the village of Biacou, in northern Timor-Leste. They assembled at a sacred spot called Oho-no-rai to take part in a ceremony inaugurating the village’s tara bandu, a customary law of the island nation’s indigenous tribes, collectively called Maubere, that governs how people interact with their local environment. A dozen men clad in traditional sarongs and feathered headdresses stood around a wooden pole to which a goa
Mongabay Environmental News •

Timor-Leste: Maubere tribes revive customary law to protect the ocean

BIACOU, Timor-Leste — In October of 2012, 43-year-old Buru-Bara and four of his fellow villagers went to fish in the turquoise waters that break gently on the northern coast of Timor-Leste. They had a good catch that day, and on their way back home they sat down under an old tamarind tree, where they kindled a fire to grill some fish and started drinking palm wine.

“A few hours later, while leaving the place, we forgot to stamp out the fire,” Buru-Bara told Mongabay. “The fire soon spread to th
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