“We the Sons of Bitches Are Doing Fine”: The Dissent of Miya Poetry
Miya Muslims in Assam are using the power of the pen to contest their demonization as “killable” bodies.
This article is part of Jamhoor’s special issue Borders & Border-making in South Asia.
A still image from Nodir Kul Nai, a short film directed by Parasher Baruah, on the Char Chaporis of Assam — a community of Miya Muslim immigrants facing systematic ostracisation at the hands of local community and authorities alike. Image: The Firstpost
On 9th July 2019, Raiot magazine, a webzine from Meghalaya (a Northeastern state of India), published an essay translated from Axomiya praising Miya poetry.
The article congratulated Miya poets for creating a new literary movement, one that, for the first time, expresses the daily struggles of Miya Muslims. The following day, a journalist from Assam filed a case at the Panbazar Police station in Guwahati for a poem “Write down I am Miya”. Around 10 Miya poets were booked under the Indian Penal Code and Telecommunications Act, with the charge that their poetry was defaming the Assamese people as “xenophobic” and hampering the process of the National Register of Citizens.
According to Shalim M. Hussain, a translator and Miya Poet, “Write down I am Miya” started a chain of Miya poetry on social media. The poem caused a political uproar as it re-appropriated and reclaimed, not only the slur “Miya”, but also these people’s liminal history and identity. In Urdu, the word Miya means a gentleman, but became an insult implying that a Miya was an outsider, an infiltrator, and an illegal immigrant coming from Bangladesh.
In an article called “Assam Against itself”, 26 year-old Miya poet Kazi Neel exclaimed:
There’s no proper terminology to define people who live in char chapori areas….You abuse us using the term Miya, but that in itself is our identity
In the early 20th century under the colonial administration, Miya Muslims, who are also known as char chopari, arrived in Assam from colonial East Bengal (present day Bangladesh) in order to work on the region’s paddy fields and contribute to its agricultural production. The word “char chopari” also geographically situates the Miya Muslims, since it literally translates as riverine islands, where Miyas settled after arriving in Assam.
I had stumbled upon Neel’s poem, “We the Sons of Bitches” (copied below), at a peculiar time. I was working on an academic paper trying to trace the trajectories of intersectional politics, and the ideological diffusion between the Black and Dalit literary movements. At the same time, I was overwhelmed with anxiety listening to news off state-sponsored massacres in Delhi against the anti-CAA protestors. In this context, Miya poetry provided me with a sense of intellectual comfort.
We make tiktok, memes, dalgona coffee and chicken dry fry.
We sons of bitches are doing fine.We write rain-poems, sing songs, paint pictures and hold online Bihu; curse the useless prime minister at eight in the evening and fuck at midnight and high noon.
We sons of bastards are doing fine.We wait in line at liquor stores, drunkenly establish communism, and pimp out to capitalism first thing in the morning.
We worthless bastards are doing fine.Millions of bodies come home. There’s blood on the highway, blood on train wheels, blood on pieces of bread. We sons of pigs eat watermelon and bleed tears on our screens.
We sons of bitches are doing fine.We invite stars to Leftist events — they decide if the starving should or should not eat meat.
We priceless parasites are doing fine.Nothing will happen to us. If the world goes to hell, nothing will happen to us.
We will keep writing poems and workers walking hundreds of miles will be our profile pictures. Find me a bigger opportunistic leech.
We sons of bitches are doing fine.We read novels in silence, read poetry. When this plague ends who but we will write heartwarming literature.
We sons of hypocrites are doing fine.We see humanity wallowing in mud and nothing happens to us. Nothing will happen to us.
We scumbags will keep doing fine.We will keep rolling in meat and wine.
In this chaos we will keep posting bleeding heart ballads.
We sons of bitches are doing fine.
“When slurs are re-appropriated effectively, it sets the stage for an empowering tool for a larger community. ”
How Miya poetry transformed and reclaimed a stigmatized identity was powerful. When slurs are re-appropriated effectively, it sets the stage for an empowering tool for a larger community. Countering the hijacked history and exclusionary popular discourse of the state, Miya poets, like Dalit and Black ones, have also learnt the Orwellian tricks of the trade. The doublespeak in Neel’s poetry is skillfully ironic.
Miya poetry is a genre of resistance poetry. Source: Daak
The pioneer of Miya poetry is Maulana Bande Ali, who wrote “A Charuwa's Proposition” in 1939. Ali never used the word Miya in his work, but he was the first to account for the oppression of Muslims living in the char chopari (riverine islands). With the emergence of the chauvinistic Assam agitation of 1979-1985, the literary movement gained momentum. Anti-foreigner sentiment was initially directed to “non-Assamese” but soon turned against the Miya Muslims hailing from Bengal. In the wake of the Nellie massacre in 1983, where more than 2000 Bengali-origin Muslims were killed, the first wave of Miya protest poetry rose with Khabir Ahmed’s “I Beg to State That”, written in 1985. The poem put forward a critical question: “Why should a majority describe and give the nomenclature of a minority group?”
Hafiz Ahmed, who belongs to the first generation of Miya poets, is the author of “Write down I am Miya”. Written in 2016, he seems to be inspired by the 1964 poem “Identity Card” by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Shalim M. Hussain, who translated Ahmed’s work, is the second generation of Miya poets, the winner of the (Ræd Leaf) RL poetry award for his first poetry collection, Betel Nut. In my quest to trace the diffusion of ideas, I discovered Miya poet Abul Kalam Azad’s blog, where he describes his encounter with Shalim and how they built their bond through poetry. Together, they translated Bob Dylan’s song “Blowing in the Wind” and Gil Scott Heron’s “Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ into the Miya dialect, as well as a Bengali song on water, sanitation and hygiene which they later used for a development campaign in char chopari areas. Azad states that the Negritude and Black Arts movements, as well as the queer, feminist and Dalit literary movements, have been an inspiration for Miya poets. Thus, Miya poetry often creates solidarity between different oppressed and exploited groups, charting a revolutionary rhythm across cultures, space and time.
Hafiz Ahmed addressing a meeting of Char Chapori Sahitya Parishad in Dhubri, Assam. Image: The Wire.
“By ahistoricizing and dehumanizing the Miya community through the use of technologies of terror like the citizenship laws, the Indian state obscures and invisibilizes them...”
By ahistoricizing and dehumanizing the Miya community through the use of technologies of terror like the citizenship laws, the Indian state obscures and invisibilizes them, denying them a voice and an agency. However, Miya poets thwart these efforts, reclaiming their sense of justice and sending out a message loud and clear, “we have a voice, and we will be heard”.
Miya poetry also typically centers on relationality: between humans, non-humans, and the environment around them It incorporates metaphysical dialogues, drawing from the rhythm of folk songs and native dialects. The poetry evokes Miya peoples’ relationship with the earth, soil and especially water bodies.. We see this relationship with nature expressed in the poem, “Digging a Grave” by Kazi Neel:
Before this land is sold out, before this air is exhausted,
before these rivers get poisoned,
I wish to be devastated at least once in a tumultuous battle.
Land, Exclusion and Protest Poetry
Nature often initially inspires poets, but it also then becomes an occasion to explore and understand one’s identity, individual or collective. This exploration erupts from the experiences of systematic oppression and marginalization, the feelings of loneliness, the denial of dignity and the experiences of violence. Coercive dispossessions, quests for identity and connection with nature are portrayed through dialogue. This dialogue helps to create an intimate relationship, making the individual a part of the same universe, giving them a sense of belonging and, in a way, maintaining the mind, body and spirit as an integrated unit.
Rehana Sultana’s poem, “My Mother” profoundly communicates this intimate relationship that Miyas have with nature, and especially with their land. Here, Mother is a metaphor for the land of Assam from which Miyas are being excluded. Echoing loudly the idea of belonging, the word Mother is the ultimate personification of unconditional love, nurture and land. Enunciating the anguish of homelessness, Sultana’s words, “as a cursed Miya”, describes spiritual and existential suffering caused by a life denied, displacement and dislocations
Rehana Sultana, a Gauhati University research scholar, was harassed over an online Facebook post and targeted for working on the ground to help people collect documents during the update of the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Image: The Hindu
Poetry’s role in voicing opposition to oppression can be seen in anti-colonial and national independence movements across the global South, included in places like Kashmir, Palestine, Mozambique, Algeria and Tunisia. Poetry is also playing a role in India in the fight against Hindutva ideology.
Azad, writing about the trials and tribulations of composing Miya poetry, argues that:
For the first time in the history of our community, we had started telling our own stories and reclaiming the Miya identity to fight against our harassers who were dehumanising us with the same word. They accused us of portraying the whole Assamese society as xenophobic. The fact is we have just analysed our conditions. Forget generalising the Assamese society as ‘xenophobic’, no Miya poet has ever used the term ‘xenophobic’ nor any of its variants. The guilt complex of our accusers is so profound that they don’t have the patience to examine why we wrote the poems.
The BJP government has ruled Assam since 2016 with the slogan and the promise of an “infiltrator/invader” free state. Their divisive politics has not only deepened the tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities, it has also generated animosity within the diverse Muslim communities themselves. Those who trace their ancestry from the Ahom and Koch kingdoms refuse to be associated with Bengali-speaking Miya Muslims, and are demanding a separate National Register of Citizens. The BJP, who have explicitly called the Miya Muslims “communal” and “fundamentalist”, claim that the latter are “distorting” Assamese culture and language, and have even requested the rival Congress party to not give Miya Muslims party tickets. The government’s deliberate exclusion of Miya Muslims has enabled the further demonization of the community.
A woman and her son look out from the Tezpur detention camp. Although her family has valid citizenship, she was left out due to a documentation error. Image: Shaheen Abdulla
“The government, which commits gross violence against the Miya minorities, is grounding itself on the performance of “loyalty” and “citizenship”.”
The Assamese government’s accusation that Miya poetry is “xenophobic” towards the Assamese is a classic example of a right-wing populist discourse, where marginalized minorities demanding better treatment become the ones labelled as racist. The government, which commits gross violence against the Miya minorities, is grounding itself on the performance of “loyalty” and “citizenship”. In other words, it is asking marginalized Miya Muslims to prove their loyalty and assimilation to Assamese culture and citizenship, and views those who write or promote Miya poetry in Miya dialect as disloyal.
In this context, Miya poetry becomes a form of protest poetry, one which enables Miyas to reassert their identity amid efforts to efface it. Their poetry is also contributing to a literary revolution. Indeed, conflicts can be conjuncture for literary revolutions, as pointed out by Jean Paul Sartre, who viewed the post-war literary bloom in France as a “product of the interaction of the humanism of the past with the revolt and despair of the present”. In the same way, Miya poetry is contributing to a literary and indeed ideological revolution, as it asserts Miya identity and wrestles narrative control away from India’s majoritarianisms.
Masha Hassan is graduate student from the University of Bologna who is interested in understanding the processes of ahistoricisation and exclusion of liminal and fuzzy identities at the borderlands.