The Resistance of the Traumatized Diaspora: A Socio-political Reading of Miya Poetry

In the context of post-NRC in Assam, the Bengali diaspora Muslim community is traumatized by the angst of becoming the new refugees in India. This ‘Char-Chapori community’ (people of the rivers islands), who migrated from undivided Bengal, has been a part of Assam since the first decade of the twentieth century. But they have been always otherized as ‘Miya’ in a derogatory sense connoting poverty, marginalization, lumpen and the enemy of Assam and an abroader perspective the enemy of India. Hafiz Ahmed, on 27 April 2016, composed a poem entitled ‘Write Down, I am a Miya’ to voice back against this otherization of being an internal refugee. Since then, this school of poetry has tried to establish their origin and flow both by looking back at diaspora history and by composing new poems of this school. This paper tries to trace back the socio-historical emergence of ‘Miya Poetry’ and the psychological aspects of the particular school to point out the pattern of the resistance as we find in the poem “Tomar Koletei Jonmechi Ma” [“I was Born in Your Lap Mother”] by Rehana Sultana: “You are my mother, I was born in your lap, My father and brother were born in your lap, Mother Even then, you say I am not yours I am nothing to you…” It also attempts to analyse how their literature captures the ‘traumascape’ of the angst of a diaspora community being the ‘internal’ refugee in India.