Beyond Resistance, Beyond Assimilation: Reimagining Citizenship through Poetry

Abstract

The members of the Miya community in Assam, India have been facing an exacerbated threat of statelessness. Among the emancipatory grassroots organizations that have emerged to defend the rights of the Miya community, is an aesthetic resistance movement, now recognized as the ‘Miya Poetry’ movement. The bulk of the movement’s work since its emergence in 2016 has been to call attention to the discriminations and human rights violations faced by the Miya people in citizenship contestation processes. Miya poetry has, on the one hand, received wide acceptance as a poetry of protest and resistance in artistic, academic, and liberal media circles, while on the other, its contributors have been frequently criminalized or questioned by the state for their political views. In this article, we argue that Miya poetry should be looked at beyond the frames of resistance and protest in order to understand its social work as a human-rights movement. These poems have the affective capacity to build resilience, to facilitate complex understandings of difference, and to reimagine equality, democratic values, and freedom from forced assimilation as integral to the idea of citizenship. We used innovative methods to form our data corpus, combining life history interviews with analyses of selected poems. We deployed thematic analysis to report our results. The findings will be useful not only for the poets and artists of different genres who seek to defend human rights, but more broadly for global human-rights practices that wish to actuate a deeper reflective engagement with art-based activisms.

Examining citizenship regimes in Assam through a structural and cultural violence lens

“…The profound scale of everyday violence notwithstanding, grassroots organizers and activists from Miya communities have been mobilizing to challenge intersecting vectors of political, social, epistemic, ethnic, and linguistic injustices. While it is not the focus of this paper, we believe it is important to recognize powerful enactments of decolonial resistance by Miya communities against the massive scale of oppression outlined here (e.g., Azad et al, 2022; Dutta et al, 2022b).…”

“…Gohain (2019a) argues that “progressive Muslim immigrants” who “want peace and normality” are “fluent and proficient in Assamese,” writing against Miya poets reclaiming Miya languages and dialects. Miya poets (including Ashraful Hussain and Abdul Kalam Azad) speak against assimilation as a criterion of being human (Azad et al, 2022). These assimilatory demands are a form of cultural violence—what Galtung (1990) called desocialization from one's culture (often through the prohibition and imposition of language) that renders subjected groups as second‐class citizens—and in case of Miya people, as noncitizens.…”

“…We begin by grounding with Hussain's poem as it exemplifies Miya people's struggles as they negotiate the quagmire of citizenship. Hussain's poem is also part of the collective resistance by Miya people in the face of their persecution (Azad et al, 2022). Our paper is rooted in these legacies of Miya people's struggles and resistance.…”

Odor, deodorization, and reodorization: Reflections of olfactory discrimination in the chars of Assam, India.

“…In addition, creative and counterstorytelling methods in the forms of poetry and community media have been used to resist and forge an identity (Dutta, Azad, & Hussain, 2022; Dutta, Azad, Mullah, et al, 2022). Together, these attempts are enabling the community to reclaim the “appropriate social description [and identity] for persons where genocidal consequences of inappropriate description are far too evident” (Azad et al, 2022).…”