You can’t trust me
Because I have somehow grown this beard.
Somehow slipped into a lungi
I am tired, tired of introducing myself
To you.
I bear all your insults and still shout,
Mother! I am yours!
—(Excerpt from Rehna Sultana’s poem My Mother)
Sometimes it takes a new language to tell a story differently. Unbound by grammatical moorings or even a formal script to call its own, Miya poetry has emerged as a rallying point for a large section of Assamese Muslims, who migrated in waves to Assam from impoverished pockets of Bengal and present-day Bangladesh from the late 19th century. Translated from Urdu, ‘Miya’ means ‘gentleman’. But in Assam, with its history of ethnic strife, the import is anything but. In a land where the longstanding feud between the natives and those considered outsiders—both Hindus and Muslim—has bubbled ferociously over decades, claiming lives both occasionally and in abandon, ‘Miya’ in popular parlance is a caustic jibe against immigrant Muslims settled in Assam.
On the flipside, Miya poetry, the first few verses of which were crafted in the 1980s by poets Khabir Ahmed and Dr Hafiz Ahmed, is an equally acidic counter-reaction which now seeks to assert the Bengali Muslim space in Assam through verse. After decades of suffering ethnic jibes, which impute that Bengali Muslims are “encroachers”, or a race which “produces criminals” or whose women “give birth like cattle”, Miya poetry also represents a collective anguish of a discriminated population. Miya poets of the 1980s, the Ahmeds, tapped the Assamese language to articulate the victimisation of Miya Muslims against the backdrop of Assam’s violent anti-foreigner agitation which was prevalent at the time.
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More than three decades later, as the spectre of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) looms large over the state, casting doubts about the citizenship credentials of hundreds of thousands of people, especially the immigrant Bengali community, Miya poets appear to have stepped up their game too. Their collective decision to use their own dialect to write verse has riled the mainstream Assamese intelligentsia and the ruling political class.
Miyas emigrated to Assam from the 1800s onwards, largely from Sylhet, Mymensingh, Tangail, Barisal, Dhaka, Mirpur, Rangpur, among other impoverished regions of present-day Bangladesh. Their migration occurred in waves, perhaps fuelled by vagaries determined by the unpredictable fury of the Brahmaputra river and threats of ethnic violence. While Miya poets appear to be striving to bundle their collective agony under one linguistic identity, the spoken dialect of the Miya community has changed and altered, seemingly with every bend of the Brahmaputra. Their primary written script was Bangla, but with the need to assimilate with the local population and to assert their own place in their new home, Miya poetry has found a resounding voice in the Assamese language. The surge among Miya Muslims to immerse themselves into the Assamese identity, and refer to the Assamese language as their mother tongue in order to avoid ethnic conflict, is also reflected in official data. In twenty years, between the censuses of 1931 and 1951, the percentage of Assamese speakers in the state’s population rose by a whopping 26 percentage points.
Dr. Hafiz Ahmed, a teacher from Assam’s Kamrup district and founder president of Char-Sapori Sahitya Parishad, a literary body, has been credited with rekindling popular interest in Miya poetry. He has a prognosis for what ails the dialect. There are just too many variations, he says, with no grammatical scaffolding for the language on which to grow. “This is not a distinct dialect spoken by all the people from the Miya community. It is full of words from Assamese, Bangla and Bodo. The dialect is different from place to place. To become a language, it needs to have a grammar, a dictionary and (it needs to be) accepted by people,” Ahmed says. In 2016, he wrote the first verse of the new generation Miya poetry in English. His poem, Write down I am Miya, drew sharp criticism with critics accusing him of trying to portray the Assamese community as “xenophobic”. An excerpt from his poem reads:
Write down
I am a Miya,
A citizen of a democratic, secular, Republic
Without any rights
My mother a D voter,
Though her parents are Indian.
Miya poets have also documented the scars and bruises heaped on their community by distilling their anguish in verse, like the poem below by Kazi Neel, which recalls the chilling Nellie massacre in central Assam in 1983. An estimated 1,800 Bengali Muslims were killed in the massacre; one of the many bloody purges in the state’s violent anti-foreigner movement.
That land is mine I am not of that land
The land where limb after limb is chopped
and sent afloat the river
Where in 83,
the executioners dance a shameless.
Grisly dance of celebration
—(Translated by Shalim M. Hussain from the original, Hei Desh Amar)
The portrayal of community angst in early Miya poetry has caused heartburn in Assamese society, which for historical reasons, has remained suspicious of the ‘other’. But Neel’s poetry, written in a dialect commonly used in Bengali Muslim homes with the help of the Assamese script, has started a new trend, even inspiring many young poets to use the same dialect.
Translation of poems written in English into the Miya dialect is also a practice, which has not gone well in a state that has fought linguistic movements since the nineteenth century when the British colonial province of Assam was formed. One of the reasons for the discomfort in the Assamese intelligentsia appears to be a supercilious doubt over whether the dialect in the first place could be used in matters related to literary expression and developed as a language. The other reason is the sheer audacity of Miya poets to integrate their dialect in the Assamese language.
