Voices of Resistance: Gender, Citizenship, and Rights in Miyah Poetry

The term Miyah has a specific meaning in Assam. Unlike in other parts of India, where it is used to address a gentleman in an honourable way, in Assam it is a pejorative term that refers to the community of Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin. This community is now reclaiming this identity through various forms of creative expression including poetry. The perpetual “other” in Assamese nationalist assertions, the Miyah until recently was accorded very little agency in the popular imagination. Miyah poetry emerged as a powerful mode of resisting injustice and suffering during the preparation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam (NRC), a complex and tedious bureaucratic exercise that could render a huge section of the population “undocumented migrants.” This is a genre of poetry that is resisting two kinds of power relationships – the hegemony of the Assamese language and the class hierarchy associated with the term Miyah in everyday usage. I argue that there is an explicit gender dimension of the word Miyah which has remained largely unexplored. The question of citizenship has different implications for men and women within the Miyah community, and it merits our attention to explore this difference through a feminist reading of Miyah poetry.