Bikash K Bhattacharya

Aeon •

The Indigenous faith that reveres its own alphabet as sacred | Aeon Essays

In July 2019, I visited Siang Sawn, a small village in Chin State, western Myanmar. Sparsely populated, mountainous and underdeveloped, Chin State is one of the least accessible regions in Myanmar. In the monsoon, roads across Chin State – mostly dirt lanes – turn into pools of sludgy mud, extremely toiling to traverse. Stunning mountains shrouded in clouds dominate the horizon.
On a rain-soaked monsoon afternoon, I was in Siang Sawn to learn about Laipianism, a local religion practised in Chin...
CNN •

How climate change in the Himalayas is changing the role of women

West Kameng, India — Dressed in a black sweatshirt and pink chugba – a traditional long gown – Tashi Lhamo, 53, cuts a striking figure. Sitting in her kitchen, smoke from the firewood billowing in her face, she tells CNN: “Now that’s all I do most of the time: cooking.”
Twenty years prior, Lhamo’s daily routine was very different. She spent her days tending to her yaks in the pastures atop the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh, the easternmost state of India. As she remembers the names of her favor...
Mongabay Environmental News •

The feral elephants of the Andaman Islands

Located about a thousand miles east of India’s mainland in the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman archipelago consists of several hundred lush islands known for breathtaking white beaches and unique biodiversity. Part of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, the Andaman Islands harbour a total of around 9,130 animal species straddling both terrestrial habitats and marine waters. Of these, 1,032 species are endemic to these islands.

Historically, the forests of the Andaman Islands have also been home to...
Dialogue Earth •

Climate change adds to water woes in the Andaman Islands

As clouds gathered on the horizon one morning in late May, the residents of Kadamtala in India’s Andaman Islands were elated. “That was the first signs of rain in months,” says Arati Karmakar, a villager. Kadamtala lies 77 kilometres north of the Andaman capital, Port Blair. “It heralded the end of the dry season and the start of a long-awaited respite,” he adds.


The dry season in the Andaman archipelago, located in the northeast Indian Ocean, spans from January to May and has been associated...
SAAG •

Tawang's Blessing Pills

Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India.

Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hu
Narrative Initiative •

A Battle Against Forgetting: Archiving Oral Heritage as Resistance in Myanmar

In the beginning Ja Seng Roi wasn’t convinced that stories could be so powerful. In one of her first field research trips, she recalls, a 85-year-old storyteller told her, “Every word has its own story. And every story has a world behind it.”

And those words stuck with her.

The more she spoke to Jaiwas, the traditional storytellers of the Kachin ethnic minority community in northern Myanmar, the more she realized the meaning of her interlocutor’s words and the power that stories hold.

Ja Seng
The Revealer •

Reviving Burmese Nat Shrines to Protect Myanmar’s Mount Popa National Park — The Revealer

On the morning of December 26, 2023, a willowy transgender woman huddled on a carpet in front of a wooden structure resembling a house, the size of a telephone booth, placed at the bottom of a giant fig tree in a village bordering Mount Popa National Park in central Myanmar. Her wavy hair was tied in a top knot, her eyes closed and hands supplicating in prayer. A group of people knelt around her in reverence, all draped in traditional Burmese attire. Not long afterwards she donned a purple gaung
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

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