“When a language begins to die, or is made to die, a way of looking at the world begins to fade away.
“Every language or dialect is the community’s unique way of looking at the world and it is very precious," says Shalim, whose first collection of poems, Betel Nut City, was awarded the RL Poetry Award (Editor’s Choice) 2017. In a literary revival of the oral tradition, many of them also write in the dialects spoken at home and support each other by translating the poems into multiple languages. Miya means gentleman in Urdu, but its sustained use as an ethnic slur to suggest that a Miya person is an outsider or an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh has motivated poets from the community to reclaim the term with renewed pride. Leading writers and intellectuals like Hiren Gohain fuelled the debate by writing articles that question the legitimacy of the Miya poetry movement.Īs a result, Shalim, Azad, our common friends and I found ourselves with lots of time to try to connect the dots between poetry, protest and the expression of our fluid multicultural identities-though Azad likes to clarify that he is not really a poet, he has written just one poem and now gets counted as a Miya poet. The online release of the video triggered a backlash in Assam, leading to Guwahati-based television channels organizing prime-time debates to raise questions about the validity of the feelings expressed in Miya poetry. In June, I was part of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat media team that produced a video titled I Am Miya-Reclaiming Identity Through Protest Poetry. Natural calamities aren’t the only threat facing the people of the char-chapori areas, about 10% of Assam’s population according to a survey conducted by the Directorate of Char Areas Development Assam-they also live in dread of finding their names excluded from the National Register of Citizens that is being finalized. Both are multilingual, fluent in Assamese, Bengali, English and Hindi as well as the dialects of the areas they were born in. Both Shalim and Azad are PhD scholars, deeply invested in preserving and reviving the sociocultural and politically fragile status of their community of Bengal-origin Assamese Muslims-a people referred to as Miyas in Assam.
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