Oxomiya, The Poet

Poetry has become the medium of protest for Assam’s Miya community

- Abdul Gani

Across the length of Assam, as the Brahmaputra flows—the raging fury of the monsoons making way for sublime grace in the winters—the sand bars appear and disappear according to the mood of the river. These are the chars, made fertile by the annual alluvium deposits when the river overflows. These shifting landmasses are home to a hard-working community, whose roots lie across the international border, in present-day Bangladesh. They are the ‘miyas’, the settlers (pamua) on the chars, often reviled as “Bangladeshis” in a state where fear and loathing of the “outsider” runs deep.

And when the community took to poetry, in their own dialect, to depict the “discrimination” they face in their adopted homeland, the new literary genre has opened up old wounds in Assam and deepened the historical fractures that run along linguistic and religious lines. Earlier this month, a first information report (FIR) against 10 people was lodged, all Muslims, for alleged criminal conspiracy, promoting social enmity and insulting religion through poetry. The community, however, questions the timing of the complaint and the FIR. After all, the particular poem which sparked a controversy has been in public domain since 2016.

The complainant, Pranabjit Doloi, says that the “offensive” poem—by Hafiz Ahmed, the president of a literary society—was aimed at scuttling the ongoing exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a niggling project that aims to identify genuine Indian citizens. The poem also allegedly intends to create communal disturbance besides defaming the Assamese­speaking people as “xenophobic”. All the 10 people named in the FIR are either poets or involved in translating Miya literary work into Assamese and English.