Nasima Islam (Calcutta): Formation of the ‘Miya’: Examining how censored identities are talking back in the Indian state of Assam

As Butler in “Excitable Speech” (1997) popularly opines, fixing someone with a linguistically injurious name can be at the same time linguistically enabling the interpellated subject’s agency to respond to the very ground of such injurability. The offensive can have a productive/constructive aspect to it for the injured to cope with the very scene of vulnerability. This hypothesis can be quite discernible while scrutinising the power dynamic between the censor and the censored/censured as well. The case study of my research is on the community of Bengali-origin Assamese Muslims in the Indian state of Assam. The members of this particular community are pejoratively called ‘miya’ in an attempt to villainise their identity and at the same time, delegitimise their politico-legal claim to citizenship. Interestingly, however, the term otherwise means ‘a gentleman’ in Urdu.
Historically having been at the receiving end of deep structural discriminations and xenophobic violence, therefore, a few people from this community started to ‘write back’ about their marginalisation through poetry. The paper will shed light on how these poets – popularly known as ‘Miya poets’ – from the concerned community are reclaiming their ‘Miya’ identity gesturing towards a larger socio-cultural ‘Miya movement’ through which they are trying to resist on one hand, micro-aggressions and socio-cultural censorship at the hand of the other powerful and privileged Assamese indigenous communities, and on the other, secure their right to citizenship in the wake of an exclusivist statist measure called ‘National Register of Citizens’ (NRC) in India. The talk will also show how despite facing attempts of legal censorship, for example, literal arrests, bans, and threats, Miya poets are trying to renegotiate the identitarian contours of a community which is at the same time censored and minoritised within the framework of ‘larger Assamese identity.’ This strategic bargaining with the censor to de-stigmatise and reconstruct their identity is a unique act of resistance which the paper wants to enquire in detail.