Tag: Miyah Poetry

  • The Price of Goodwill

    One of the things that I read while writing the last post on “Miyah poetry” is this article by Dr. Hiren Gohain. Dr. Gohain is one of the stalwarts of the Assamese intelligentsia and while one has to pay attention to his views (he is far too important in that context), a few things that he mentioned deserves a more discussion in its own space. Furthermore, given the stature he holds in that arena, it is important to discuss this article in this context.

    Let me paraphrase his article before getting any further. The most important points that he makes are:

    1. He has done a lot for Muslim villages and, hence, the trust that they bestow upon him is not a fluke.
    2. In Assam, things were becoming “normal” after a long phase of ethnic violence.
    3. The “sane and wise” Muslim leaders asked for dialogue and understanding at the time and supported the Assam Accord.
    4. The newer educated class is playing into the hands of Hindutva by writing a “powerful narrative” of Muslim victimhood and that these poets do not really want a reconciliation between the indigenous people of Assam and the descendants of immigrant Muslims”.
    5. They are writing for a different (read: Un-Assamese) audience and ignore an Assamese audience at their own peril.

    There are many things that must be taken into account. However, a few lines and phrases need to be pointed out before I go any further. For instance, the phrase he uses while talking about what is at stake is a haunting line:

    It is unfortunate that an episode like ‘Miyah poetry’ should be allowed to cloud this goodwill that came at such a huge price.

    There is an assumption that Dr. Gohain begins the article with which is a historical timeline – one he uses to contrast with the “abstract rights” that these poets seem to be writing about. The timeline – to mention/remind briefly – is this : Assam Agitation which led to ethnic violence was quelled by the sanity and wisdom of Muslim leaders who did not answer violence with violence and that has slowly become led to a “normal” peaceful phase in the years that followed. I think there is another element in that history that has to be pointed out as well. In the post-Assam Agitation era, most of the ethnic minorities that carried out acts of violence were – in some way or another – pacified by state appeasement. Whether it was Advani coming to Bodoland and giving Hagrama Mohilary the keys to the kingdom or otherwise, the point to be made here is that what Dr. Gohain is calling the “normal” has come after quite a few leaders of those communities were given territorial governance powers.

    The result of which – and one must point this out – has been a slow but subtle change in the demography of many cities in Assam. Bongaigaon – for instance – has seen a large influx of urban migrants because there is always a lot of development work that demands cheap labour in both Bongaigaon district and Chirang district. This very often brought in the cheap labour of Muslims from the char area (Dhubri and Goalpara) to both Bongaigaon and Chirang. Of course, as Dr. Gohain mentions, the post-1991 Liberalization of the economy also saw upward mobility of a lot of people and many of them were Muslim in Lower Assam. However, this has to be seen alongside the rise of “Territorial Councils” of Assam that the state negotiated and then the benefits of the economy opening up in India.

    This also saw – and I saw this in Bongaigaon for a long time – a resentment towards the Muslim community. What Dr. Gohain calls “some resentment among a few of them [Muslims] against the insinuations, snide remarks and mistreatment at the hands of Assamese chauvinists at workplaces or elsewhere” is a gross understatement given the daily microaggressions against urban migrants in Lower Assam; an example would be this story of a score of Hindi-speaking people in Assam from 2012 and one only needs to take a cursory glance at the number of Bengali-speaking Muslims who have been also killed in similar fashion.

    Therefore, what Dr. Gohain is calling a narrative of victimhood orchestrated by someone behind the scenes is – in effect – the result of the gradual “normalizing” of ethno-nationalism in Assam. The kind of which, one can only assume, has boiled over to the point that the disenfranchising of many from that community is not a problem at all.

    Instead, what Dr. Gohain tells us, is that the “indigenous” Assamese, whose “national existence” survives on language, “believe, rightly too, that they have never had a real chance to put their house in order”. There is a dangerous conflation here that needs to be pointed out: the “indigenous” Assamese is a homogenization of a population whose language politics is simply too complex to be thought of as something that is contrary to Bengali. In fact, the lower one goes in Assam, the more the language bridges the gap between “Axomiya” and “Bengali”. On the other hand, I would really like to know who would put the house in order and how.

    The last point in his article is a haunting one. In concluding his article, he writes of the “indigenous” Assamese, the sense of “goodwill” that Muslim and Assamese share and how “Miyah poetry” ignores Assamese at its own peril. In writing the difference between the two communities, Dr. Gohain himself is creating vague communities which are seemingly at odds. The “other” created in his own article portrays the Assamese Muslim as someone who must be tolerated, not accepted, as Assamese. On three occasions in this article, he very clearly uses the distinctions between Assamese (irrespective of how he defines the term) and the Assamese Muslims; as though the distinction itself does not hint at daily microaggression. The use of the word “goodwill” hints at the “peril” that he picks up later. Like, a host, he charges his Muslim guests of Bengali origin “goodwill” to accept the occasional snide remark and not dare use the language (s)he uses at home to create poetry. The peril – he says – is that of Hindutva. The fear, perhaps, is that Hindutva will do better what Assamese ethno-nationalism has not been able to do so well over the last decades. We live in troubled times indeed.

  • Thoughts on the threats against “Miyah Poetry”

    A poem is a riddle enough. Should the riddle be in a language that is not recognized as a language of poetry at all, it is a riddle that opens up to another question: what is the language of poetry? In any context that is a difficult question to answer. And if you are from Assam, chances are you are the “wrong” kind of Assamese person writing in the “wrong” kind of language. You are probably not speaking the “right” kind of Assamese because your accent is too Southern and your “xo” is a “s/sh” sound; you are not dressing the way an “Assamese” person would – after all, if you are wearing those mekhela things like a tribal, you are obviously not a “pure” Axomiya person; you probably belong to the wrong religion, and most of all, you are probably one of those uncouth kids who are definitely not capable of cultural thought – a phenomenon most Assamese people call “sinta-sorsa”.

    Once I moved to Delhi, this was something that became a running gag. If I met an Assamese person, it’d be something of a quick categorization ritual in minutes: Lower Assam Rajbongshi, does not speak good Axomiya and is definitely more Bengali than Assamese. Much of it one has to take in stride because there is not much one can do anyway. But it remained something rather sour and I am certain most people who move from that part of the world have this in common. While the rest of India imagines Assam to be the liminal space where the lines of Indianness can be drawn, Assam imagines Lower Assam to be the imaginary boundary where Assam is no longer Assam. It is – as most people will tell you in a university campus over tea – a place where the Assamese language goes to be ruined.

    Given this context, the recent FIR report against poets who are writing “Miyah Poetry” can be explained both as a case of ethno-identity conflict and, as is often the case, the fear of a counter of canon that is connected to the ethno-identity issue. People who have been following the term “Miyah Poetry” will recall that this is a movement of identification with one of the most under-represented and vilified communities of the region. The claim made by so many Assamese intellectuals (including Hiren Gohain), that these poets are supposed to write in “Assamese” to register the reality that they have had to face for being vilified and harassed in Assam, is not only an insult to the craft of poetry but – more importantly – to the right of a community or a person to express themselves in the language they deem fit. This is a point that has been made several times by poets like Kazi Sharowar Hussain anyway.

    Of course, for many people, this began as an intellectual exercise. For weeks, one kept coming across an intellectual back and forth between poets like Shalim Hussain and academic Dr. Dilip Borah. Of course, over time, this intellectual back and forth became larger in scope. But I have a feeling that this is obviously a symptom of a larger problem that has plagued the state and the country for a long time. The issue of legitimization of a discourse has always been one that is fraught with communal and caste violence.

    Certain people have been using the term “integration” in this particular case, e.g., that in order to integrate themselves in that culture, these poets ought to be writing in Assamese. I find the use of a term like “integration” something that comes up only in a hyper-ethno-nationalist context; that the minority should “integrate” in order to become more like the majority. Issues of erasure aside, this is an imposition that almost all minority communities become less of themselves and more of the majority – conform, in order words. Let us be honest about it – people who are Lower Assam Muslims are widely derided as “Miyah” and most intellectuals who are writing about the weaponization of the term are far too distanced from the context to actually have a say on the matter. If people who belong to a minority community decide to turn around that term, the license to use it or debate it should also locate the voice of whoever has an opinion. Another myth also needs to be dealt with:

    Saying that something like this is a threat to the Assamese language is a veiled attempt at shutting down a (literary) position that uncovers the brutal political and linguistic imposition of a certain kind of Assamese as a literary and cultural language. The fear that a different kind of language would dominate Assamese as a language of culture is a red herring. The right question to be asking is: who determines the (literary) value of a poem or its language, for that matter, and why do they have the right to make that evaluation in the first place?

    Had the matter remained an intellectual conflict, this post would not have been written. But the truth is, we are living in the shadow of the NRC in Assam and things don’t stay on social media. Ten poets have been booked for “spreading communal disharmony”. They have been harassed, bullied and threatened online. Their private lives have been ridiculed on my own social media feed over the last few days. And the people who were part of the “intellectual” debate have gone silent. If they thought of their fellow poets as equals, one would assume, at least one of them would have created a hullabaloo with the same fervor with which they debated the very idea of “Miyah poetry”. The sad truth is, for people who come from a certain geography, their private life cannot have the shelter of “privacy” because the very fact that they exist is something that the majoritarian position has a problem with. The intellectuals who debated against the term “Miyah poetry” have the cushioning of a dominant narrative to shield them from a legal challenge while the poets who stand on the ground talking about and representing a “minor” position cannot afford such a privilege. The irony of a community living under threats of being disenfranchised being booked for “communal disharmony” is perhaps a grim reminder of the Assam and India we live in. In the middle of this outcry, more than 200 Assamese academics and writers have issued a statement in support of “Miyah poetry” and one has to be hopeful that more outlets will pick up the story in the coming weeks.

    The question of the poem comes back to the riddle. If the reader finds the riddle too complex, the riddle does not stop existing. The threats made against the riddler here is between not being acknowledged by the majority or being brutally silenced by a regime that strives on stoking fear of the minority. The poem and the poets have to be protected against this regime of silencing at all costs.

    As a mark of solidarity, please spread/share the statements going around in support of the poets either on Facebook notes or the one on Scroll.in.