Hussain, who says earlier he mainly wrote about love and death, responded next with his poem called Nana I Have Written, asserting his identity as a “Miya” for the first time. His poem received hundreds of likes, comments and shares, and triggered a series of spontaneous poetic responses. The movement began with Hafiz Ahmed, an academic, social activist and poet in his 50s, who published Write Down I Am A Miya on Facebook in late April. It began earlier this year, shortly after the April 4 and 11 state assembly elections, in which illegal immigration was a prominent campaign issue. When the results were announced on May 19, an unprecedented victory was claimed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His poem is considered the first true assertion of Miyaness and sparked a trend of protest poetry within his community.īut this new wave of Miya poetry has had a wider reach, with social media spreading the work beyond a small literary elite. It was written in the aftermath of the Nellie Massacre of 1983, in which more than 2,000 Bengali-origin Muslims were killed in just six hours. In 1985, Khabir Ahmed wrote I Beg To State That, which included lines such as “I am a settler, a hated Miya”. Although Ali did not use the word Miya, his poem is considered the first example of someone within the community asserting their identity. The roots of this new genre lie in a 1939 poem titled A Charuwa’s Proposition by Maulana Bande Ali. READ MORE: In 2015, more than 200,000 displaced by floods Miya poetry This emerging form of expression is known as Miya poetry. Now, Hussain and others are using poetry as a tool of resistance, confrontation and empowerment. Some are using their skills for social activism in collectives such as the Muslim Youth Forum Against Communalism, Terrorism, and Sedition ( MY-FACTS) and Jhai Foundation, which works for the rights and socially uplifting of Muslims in the state. More than a decade since, Hussain and others from his community have found a way to take the derogatory term Miya and subvert it.ĭespite the low levels of literacy prevalent in the community – the most recent government survey in 2003 found that the average literacy rate on the chars was 19 percent, compared with the state average of 54 percent – a growing number of younger people from Hussain’s community are pursing higher education in English and working in academia, NGOs, medicine and law. “I realised there was a divide between us and other Assamese.” These kind of informal evictions happen often, but it was the first time I saw one,” he says. “The Assamese students at Cotton College participated very actively in forcefully evicting them. “In 2005, the annual floods displaced many people from the chars and they started settling in temporary shelters on the pavements of Guwahati,” he recalls, sitting cross-legged on a thin mattress in his sparsely furnished two-room flat in Delhi’s Muslim-majority residential area of Zakir Nagar, close to Jamia Millia Islamia University, where he is pursuing a PhD in English literature. But at the prestigious Cotton College in the state capital of Guwahati, where his relatively well-to-do parents had sent him for higher education, he quickly learned how many in Assam see his community. Growing up on one of Assam’s more than 2,000 chars, or river islands, where 85 percent of the population consists of Muslims of Bengali origin, Hussain felt safe. The prejudice against Muslims of Bengali origin, a community which remains largely impoverished, has led not only to abusive language but recurring communal violence as well. WATCH: Strife in India’s Assam rooted in poverty (2:39)
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