The Caravan – August 2019

perspectives

22 THE CARAVAN

/ samr at

Write

Write down I am a Miya

My serial number in NRC is 20,543

I have two children

Another is coming next summer

Will you hate him as you hate me?

These lines by Hafiz Ahmed, a Mus-
lim poet of Bengali heritage from As-
sam, could potentially land him in jail.
Ahmed is part of a literary movement
called “Miya poetry”—Muslims of Ben-
gali origin are referred to as “Miyas”
in Assam—that, among other things,
highlights the discrimination the com-
munity faces in the state. On 11 July,
a first-information report was filed
against Ahmed, along with nine other
Miya poets, who were charged with
criminal conspiracy and spreading so-
cial disharmony under various sections
of the Indian Penal Code.
According to the local Assamese
journalist who filed the report, the po-
ems tried to defame the Assamese peo-
ple as xenophobic, at a time when the
National Register of Citizens was being
updated in the state.
The poets went into hiding. Several
of them put out statements declaring
their loyalty to Assamese, a language
in which a few of them are pursuing or
have obtained doctorates.
Even before the FIR, Miya poetry
had already come under the scanner,
when one of the most prominent “left-
ist” intellectuals of Assam, Hiren Go-
hain, wrote an article in an Assamese
daily excoriating the Miya poets for
using their own “artificial” East Ben-
gal dialects, rather than Assamese, in
their poems. The Miya poets in their
statements clarified that most of their
poems were in the socially and official-
ly sanctioned language, Assamese, and
not in any contraband dialect.
How does a state come to perceive
poetry as a crime? How do powerful
members of civil society get to dictate

in what language poetry is to be writ-

ten? Why are poets having to distance

themselves from the dialects of their

ancestors?

Assamese sub-nationalism privi-

leges the language-based Assamese

identity as “indigenous,” and has long

cast Bengalis in the region as “outsid-

ers,” even though there is scant evi-

dence of any sharp division between

the two linguistic identities until

well into the nineteenth century. The

Bengali and Assamese languages and

cultures share many similarities, and

the scripts differ by only one letter.

Surnames such as Dutta, Chakraborty,

Bhattacharjee, Choudhury, Goswami,

Talukdar, Gupta, Bhuyan and so on are

common among caste Hindus in both

communities, as are surnames such as

Ahmed and Ali among Muslims. It is

difficult even for Assamese and Ben-

galis to tell each other apart, because

pretty much every Bengali who has

grown up in Assam’s Brahmaputra

valley speaks, reads and writes As-

samese.

Nonetheless, this assimilation has

done little to ease the anxieties of As-

sam’s sub-nationalists, who in past de-

cades have mobilised “indigenous” peo-

ple by citing a threat to identities and

languages from Bengali immigrants,

allegedly pouring in from Bangladesh

in the millions. This fear of the Bengali

outsider has dominated Assam politics

since at least 1979, and paid political

dividends for several Assamese sub-na-

tionalist leaders over the years.

The insecurity across northeastern

India about Bengalis as a community

long precedes even the creation of Ban-

gladesh, in 1971. It started first when

the Bengali language was imposed on

Assam during British colonial rule, be-

tween 1831 and 1873. Despite little evi-

dence, many Assamese sub-nationalists

believe, to this day, that this imposition

was the handiwork of Bengali clerks

rather than the British rulers them-

selves.

TheBritishwonAssamfromtheBur-

mese in 1826. The territories held by

the Ahom and Manipuri kings had been

overrun and devastated by Burmese

forces in 1821. After their victory, the

British appended Assam to the Bengal

Presidency.

At the time, a debate on the gov-

ernment’s language policy was raging

across British India. In 1838, the ju-

dicial and revenue department of the

Company Raj ordered that, in Bengal,

the local vernacular was to replace Per-

sian, the previous language of admin-

istration in lower courts and revenue

offices. Since Assam was now a part of

the Bengal Presidency, the language of

the province’s bureaucracy and judicia-

ry came to be Bengali.

Meanwhile, American Baptist mis-

sionaries made their way into Assam in

the 1830s and set up the first printing

press in northeastern India at Sibsagar

in Upper Assam. They translated the

Bible into the Sibsagar dialect of As-

samese, which went on to become the

standard Assamese. This was a decisive

turn in the region’s cultural history,

given the ancient centre of Assam was

Kamrup, which had its own dialects.

The missionaries also published the

first grammar and dictionary of the

Assamese language, and the first As-

samese newspaper, and led protests

against Bengali.

The British administration remained

unmoved by the protests, until, in 1874,

for mainly administrative reasons, a

new province was constituted separate

from the Bengal Presidency. The new

province comprised districts that were

originally in the Ahom and Koch king-

doms; the three largely Bengali-speak-

ing districts of Sylhet, Cachar and

In the Crosshairs

How poetry became a crime in Assam

/ Communities

opposite page: Grieving women and their

children in Assam’s Rangaloo village, where

many residents were massacred and had

their homes put to the torch, in 1983. Assam

saw large-scale violence against the Bengali

community from 1979 to 1985, during the

Assam Agitation.