Living Among The Bawm

[Zia Hasan]

I caught this while taking a morning walk, near Thekiyang Khua, a Bawm settlement, about 15 miles from the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. People had just started going about their morning chores as I was setting up my camera on a tripod. It is amazing how life has not changed much the last 40 years since National Geographic magazine published an article by Claus Deiter Brauns on the Mru (a related tribe) back in 1973. Thekiyang in only a day’s walk from Ruma Bazzar, the nearest urban center, yet life seems to have settled in diabolic time warp. The locals still have midwives that often work overtime, and women still die at childbirth; the nearest hospital being about two days hard journey away from this particular area. Most houses are still traditionally built, being similar to a Mru house, the livestock (chicken, pigs and cattle) live in enclosures underneath the sparsely spaced bamboo strips that make up the floor and live on the scrapes of food that are often dropped purposefully by the inhabitants.

I have been living with them on and off since December 2007, doing an ethnographic study for a book. The locals derive much of their calories from the rice they produce from the seasonal slash and burn agriculture, often complimenting their diet with hunted animals and gathered herbs from the surrounding woodlands. Like the Mru, the Bawms choose to live on top of hills, staying clear of valleys infested with anopheles mosquitoes that carry plasmodium falciparum and vivax . The women carry out most of the household chores, including fetching water from the streams and gathering firewood. Winter (December to February) is devoted to gathering firewood and female members of the household spend from a week up to a fortnight cutting down trees with daos (a large hewing knife), axes and double handled wood saws. I have accompanied both the women and men as they went about their work often joining them in their backbreaking labor complete with Paipers and Cais (small and medium sized baskets made from thin bamboo strips and cane with straps made from bark strips) and daos. The Bawms are not skilled in metallurgy and are dependent on Bengali blacksmiths for their tools and implements. Life is pretty laid back and people rarely do anything else other than the usual.