A Tribe without a Lineage

Or how Miyah poets took back the term – on their own terms  

Shalim Hussain

Miyah poetry started with ‘Write down “I am a Miyah”’ by Hafiz Ahmed, which was first published on Facebook on 27 April 2016, untitled. It was written in English and modelled on Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Identity Card’ published in 1964. The first stanza of ‘Identity Card’ is as follows:

Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?

The first stanza of Hafiz Ahmed’s poem was:

Write down
I am a Miyah
My serial number in the NRC is 200543
I have two children
Another is coming
Next summer.
Will you hate him
As you hate me?

My response to Ahmed’s poem (titled ‘Nana I have Written’) was published on Facebook the very same night. Over the next few days, responses in the form of poems started coming in, mostly from young poets belonging to the char-chapori Muslim community of Assam. The chars (sandbars) and chaporis (riverbanks) of the river Brahmaputra are a peculiar ecosystem characterised by severe annual flooding and erosions, making the lives of people settled there very tenuous. In Lower Assam, also the lower riparian region of the Brahmaputra Valley, the char-chaporis are largely populated by Bengal-origin Muslim peasants who settled here through multiple waves of migration dating back to the British colonial period, when they were brought to Assam in large number by the colonial administration to boost rice production in the state. The commonly agreed upon, politically correct term that the community uses for itself is the ‘char-chapori’ Muslim people, or the Bhatiya (downstream, as opposed to the Ujani or upstream) people. The first term is used to denote the geographical location where a majority percentage of the community continues to reside, and the second term is used to distinguish the community from other categories of Muslims – the Ujanis (who also call themselves ‘deshis’), the Goriyas, Sylhetis etc. Other names used for the community are pamua (settler), charua (of the chars) and na-Asomiya (new Assamese). These terms were associated with the location, their status in the economic life of a region beginning to identify itself, and as an attempt to assimilate them within the larger Assamese identity. A negative term associated with the community is the word ‘Miyah’ – which when used on the street when referring to this community came loaded with negative connotations of uncouthness and otherness.

Miyah poetry tried to reclaim this word which in its original meaning is a term of endearment. One reason for doing this was that the other words did not properly define the community. A large chunk of the population had moved on from the chars to kayem (stable) villages, were not involved in pan-cultivation in as large numbers as before, and the term na-Asomiya was at least seven decades old. The other problem identified by the Miyah poets was that for all its negative connotations, ‘Miyah’ was indeed the most commonly used term for this community.

The poems were initially being circulated solely through social media, though in the years that followed, Miyah poetry would be heavily anthologised. It was all fun and games until May Day 2016 when the first article on these poems was published. The author of the article, Dr Mohammad Reyaz, then a journalist with the news portal TwoCircles.net, used the phrase ‘Miyah poetry’ while referring to these poems, and in a sense, that’s how the Miyah poetry movement kicked off. The movement would be a crucial introduction – both internally, to the Miyah community itself, and externally, to the outside world – to issues such as migration, citizenship, and the life of the Muslim peasantry in Assam. But all that would happen much later.

I started translating as many Miyah poems as I could. By 2019, I had translated 30 Miyah poets and had more or less drawn the line, because the body of Miyah poetry had swelled to more than 200 poems. More than half this number was contributed by Kazi Sharowar Hussain who, writing under the name Kazi Neel, was publishing at the rate of a poem a day. It’s not that he was simply prolific; Kazi was, and continues to be, a poet of great sensitivity and power, probably one of the finest Assamese poets of the generation born after the 1980s, the most tumultuous decade in the modern history of Assam. In any case, one can only speculate how many Miyah poems exist today; primarily because Miyah poetry continues to be circulated mostly on social media sites, and also because self-identification as Miyah is the basis of Miyah poetry, but I will come to that in a little while.

It’s pertinent that we try to understand why Miyah poetry started in the first place. What were our initial goals and reservations, and how close have we come towards achieving the former and dealing with the latter? In the last six years, the definition of ‘Miyah poetry’ has changed slightly, but the essentials remain the same – the poems deal with the assertion of Miyah identity. Every poet at a certain point makes an assertion – ‘I am Haru Miyah, this is my story’, or ‘Write down “I am a Miyah”’, or some such variation. The poets are from the Bengal-origin Assamese Muslim community, which in Assamese street slang is called Miyah.

The tragedy of the partition of India and multiple partitions of Bengal is brutally stamped on the body of the Miyah. The community is agrarian and has historically lived in the char-chaporis of the Brahmaputra. They moved frequently because of the changing geography of the river which erodes its banks, submerges some of its chars and creates new ones. As agricultural labourers, they also moved for livelihood, from one landlord to another. When the British took over what is now Assam, they moved large masses of Muslim peasants from Bengal to accelerate rice cultivation in the area. However, through all these movements the community continued to live by the river Brahmaputra. Colonial cartography interfered by creating and recreating the entities Assam and Bengal. Then came the partition of India in 1947. The lands from which the Miyah community came to Assam became East Pakistan and later Bangladesh. A community which was sometimes called Bhatiya because they lived downstream of the river became ‘suspected illegal immigrants’ despite having lived in the same place for generations simply because their ‘place of origin’ was now a different country.

In recent decades, when there have been attempts to imagine a historical Assam, this community is once again excluded because their ‘place of origin’ is Bengal. Somewhere along the line, the word ‘Miyah’ began to be used to label this community, as is the case for Muslims in India. However, in Assam, ‘Miyah’ does not refer to all Muslims, but only to this community specifically. Somewhere along the line, the word ‘Miyah’ began to accumulate pejorative connotations. It is against this background that Miyah poetry gains its complexity, and why the following lines by Heena al-Haya gain so much poignancy:

After my death I will live on
In those who know how to fight for a heritage,
In those who have homes but no country.

I will live on as the struggle of a tribe without a lineage.

So how does Miyah poetry use the word ‘Miyah’? First, unlike what was called ‘char-chapori poetry’, a 1980s poetry movement which shared almost all the properties of Miyah poetry, the latter owns the word ‘Miyah’ instead of denying it and/or inventing newer (read: politer) names for the community the poets belong to. Sometimes, the tone can be confrontational. The sentiment behind the use of this word in Miyah poetry is ‘Alright, we are Miyah. So what?’

As Khabir Ahmed’s ‘I beg to state that’, published in 1985, puts it:

I beg to state that
I am a settler, a hated Miyah
Whatever be the case, my name is
Ismail Sheikh, Ramzan Ali or Majid Miyah
Subject: I am an Assamese Asomiya

I have many things to say
Stories older than Assam’s folktales
Stories older than the blood
Flowing through your veins

In contrast, my own poem (‘Nana I have written’) responds to Hafiz Ahmed’s ‘Write down’ with:

Nana, I have written attested countersigned
And been verified by a public notary
That I am a Miyah
Now see me rise 
From flood waters
Float over landslides
March through sand and marsh and snakes 
Break the earth’s will
Draw trenches with spades
Crawl through fields of rice and diarrhea and sugarcane 
And a 10% literacy rate 

Recent commentators have found in Miyah poetry the beginning of an identity movement trying to imagine a great Miyah past and a Miyah rewriting of history. That’s as far from the truth as possible. Miyah poetry can sound like an assertion of collective pride but what underlines it, and this is what makes recent commentators queasy, is a deep sense of irony. After all, what pride can a disadvantaged, poor community have?

When Mohammed Reyaz published his essay on Miyah poetry[1], one of the effects it had was that the word ‘Miyah’ became a convenient term for the community, and the poets didn’t have a problem accepting it largely because the word – without its negative connotations – had also been historically used as a self-signifier by the community. Reaching a consensus on what our poems should be called or what themes we were supposed to write about was impossible because most Miyah poetry was not an organised movement. It was not necessary either, simply because the poets were writing in their own individual styles largely about their own lived experiences.

This is why it is difficult to make a generalised argument about Miyah poetry. Commentators have called it a movement, trolls have called it a divisive, counter-productive phenomenon, and even wellwishers have questioned if we were trying to undo a historic process. The historic process we are sometimes accused of undoing was the unwritten social contract the char-chapori Muslim community had made in the middle of the last century, when we decided to return to Assamese as our language in official documents.

A little clarity is required on this point. First, we still do, and will continue to claim Assamese as our language. There is absolutely no doubt about it. Assam is our homeland, our birthplace; most of us know of no other reality. Assamese is our language as much as it is the language of other communities who claim it as their own. We have done well by it and have tried to give back to it as well as we can. However, the reality is that we speak our own dialects in our private space – among friends, with family members, and so on. There is no contradiction here and this is how it will continue to be until – with the growth and spread of education – standard Assamese will probably become our first language. For all the students from the char-chaporis, Assamese is the first language we learn at school since the medium of instruction in an overwhelmingly large number of schools in the char-chaporis is Assamese (barring a few English-medium schools that have come up in the last two decades).

Coming back to Miyah poetry, most of the poems are written in standard Assamese. Those which are written in the local dialects are translated into Assamese and English for better circulation. Miyah poetry, as mentioned earlier, has no gatekeepers simply because we are trying to break down barriers and not create obstacles. One of the barriers we have tried to break down is linguistic. Some of the Miyah poems have even been written in English and Hindi. The main idea is to get our voices out there. Any language which allows us that freedom is welcome. The translations of Miyah poems into English have been published in blogs and journals, both in the electronic medium and in print.

If one were to analyse the idiom of the Miyah poems rather than the language in which they are written, one would find that it’s a fresh local idiom. The tone is consciously commonplace – the language of the home and the street. There is no intellectual posturing but a refreshing directness – none of the postmodern deferral of meaning. Yet, in its challenge to what is usually considered standard Assamese or standard English, the poems retain the essence of postmodernism. The few poems I have quoted here are a mere sampling of the numerous Miyah poems that have come out over the last two years. It is difficult to get a sense of what the single unifying thematic of Miyah poetry actually is. That will probably take some time and a few anthologies to assess. However, the claim the Miyah poets are making over the language is simple – ‘Give us a place’. And this is a reflection of what is happening in the fields of education, health, politics, policy, and so on.

‘Give us a place’, the char-chapori community requests/demands. Give us a place in the land which is also our own, the government we have helped elect, the language that we too love and adore, the ethos which we too want to participate in. This demand/request has gained some resonance. If we were to look at the world outside of language and literature, we would find that there is some acceptance of the char-chapori community within the greater Assamese community. Inside the world of language and literature, there is a surprising amount of acceptance. As the poet Siraj Khan says in his poem ‘Amar Polayo Sikhse Shororer Gali’ (‘My Son has Learned to Cuss Like the City’), the language of humanity is the same the world over.

The most interesting work in the field of acceptance of languages and cultures is the work of lexicographers who are seldom given their due. Take, for example, the most widely used Assamese dictionary, the Hemkosh, which includes a large number of words used in the char-chapori community under the lexical head ‘Char-Chapori’. Going through the Hemkosh and finding these words gives one a feeling of overwhelming joy. Humanity is safe as long as we decide to speak to each other, sometimes by using the ‘other’ language. To reiterate, Miyah poetry tries to expand the Assamese language and ethos – to make it more inclusive and welcoming.