Outlook India: Anthropologist B. K. Roy Burman Undertakes Death Fast in Assam
Roy launches fast unto death against violence in Assam
[Sunday, November 20, 2005 05:56:00 pmPTI]
DIPHU (ASSAM): Noted anthropologist B K Roy Burman on Sunday launched a fast unto death in Assam’s strife-torn Karbi Anglong district where 14 houses of Dimasa tribals were torched on Saturday.
Roy Burman, who is on a peace mission to the ethnic violence-affected district, had visited Lower Mohan Dijirwa three days ago and held peace meetings with both Karbi and Dimasa tribes.
Burman told reporters that Saturday’s incident had “hurt his feelings” and he had decided to launch the fast unto death to protest against the continuing violence.
Meanwhile, the situation in the area was tense but under control with no untoward incident reported on Sunday.
Ethnic feuds erupted in Karbi Anglong on September 26 between Karbis and Dimasa tribals which have so far claimed more than 90 lives.
I’ve been doing a little Googling… Over the past couple months, violence between Karbi and Dimasa tribals has escalated in India’s Northeast. Dozens of people have been murdered, many of them with machetes. The conflict appears to be between two ethnic rebel groups which both stand in opposition to the Indian government. The Assam state government moved slowly in responding to the violence, and political opportunists in the BJP (the Hindu-nationalist former ruling party) are of course blaming Congress (the ruling party). The official Website of the Karbi Anglong District has a page on Karbi history and culture. I haven’t collected URLs, but everything in the above paragraph is available from multiple sources and can be found by Googling ‘karbi’ or ‘dimasa’ at news.google.com.
I’ve been able to find relatively little about or by Professor Roy Burman. He’s written or co-written a great number of ethnographic studies of scheduled castes and tribes (Kerim Friedman of the anthropology blog Keywords has written about scheduled tribes here), including a piece on the Dimasa in 1971 and the Karbi (referred to in his paper as the Mikir) in 1972.
Google is such a tease: From his involvement in the Quit India Movement in the 1930s to a protest against the World Bank two weeks ago in Guwahati, Professor Roy Burman appears to have lived an activist’s life, but the details are hard to fill in from a distance: I’ve found no reference to his activities in the 1940s, or ’50s, and very little about his doings in the 1980s or ’90s. I’ve only been able to find a couple pieces written by Roy Burman himself, the most interesting of which is Frozen Ice and a Silent Spring — a sometimes rambling, but driven and spirited account of discussions on an international level of human rights and indigenous issues. None of the professor’s research appears to be available on-line. (Though, if you’ve got Rs. 75,000 to blow, you can get a copy of the twenty-three-volume Encyclopaedia of Indian Tribes and Castes which he edited.) Much of this work may be available to professional anthropologists and students who have access to university libraries.
Professor Roy Burman’s fast unto death isn’t a unique event in Indian history — M. K. Gandhi threatened to allow himself to starve on multiple occasions on order to persuade communally divided areas to cease violence in times of strife. None of the Websites referencing Roy Burman that I’ve found thus far have indicated that he might be an avatar of Viṣṇu — Roy Burman doesn’t appear to have the same sort of social clout as Gandhi-ji. Here’s hoping that his efforts are as successful as his predecessors, anyhow, before it’s too late.
I’ll try to follow this story, but if anyone else finds any info, please let me know through a comment or a trackback.