The Ecopolitical Spirituality of Miya Poetry: Resistance Against Environmental Racism of the Majoritarian State in Assam, India

Abstract

Emerging from the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in the riverine environments of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, the Miya Poetry movement is a unique environmentalism of the marginalized in contemporary Assam, India. Writing as a native scholar of Assam, I look at how the poetry movement displays the ethos of an ecopolitical spirituality that embodies the riverine ecology, environmental politics, and sacrality and how it challenges the majoritarian state’s narrative of the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers being denigrated as the “environmental waste producers”. My concept of “ecopolitical spirituality” is in tandem with Carol White’s ‘African American religious naturalism’, which elucidates the remembrance and evocation of traditional environmental relationships of and by the marginalized communities with the purpose of healing and rehumanizing themselves. I begin with a short history of the Miya Poetry movement among the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in Assam. It narrates how the leading Miya poets adopt the local “Miya” dialect to express the traditional and continued relationships of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers who find themselves entangled with and nurtured by the land, rivers, plants, and animals. I then examine how Bengali Muslims have been framed by the majoritarian state and Assamese society as “environmental waste producers”. With climate change-induced destructive floods, along with post-colonial state’s rampant building of embankments leading to violent floods and erosion, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are forced to migrate to nearby government grazing reserves or national parks. There, the majoritarian state projects them to be damaging the environment and issues violent evictions. In state reports too, the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers have been equated with “rats”, “crows”, and “vultures”. I use the concept of “environmental racism” to show how this state-led denigration justifies the allegation of the Muslim char-dwellers as “environmental waste producers” and how the Miya Poetry movement counters the racist allegation with new metaphors by highlighting the traditional relationships of the marginalized community with the riverine environment. In the final section, I look in detail at the characteristics and reasons that make the poetry movement ecopolitically spiritual in nature. I thus lay out an argument that the ecopolitical spirituality of the Miya Poetry movement resists the statist dehumanization and devaluation of Miya Muslims by not mocking, violating, or degrading the majoritarian Assamese but by rehumanizing themselves and their relationship with the environment.

1. Introduction: Chars, Char-Dwellers, and Miya Poetry

In his poem, ‘Brother, I am a Man from the Chars’, Ashraful Islam (2024), a Miya poet, writes

• Brother, I am a man from the chars
• On the Brahmaputra among kohua, jhau-ikra;
• In the shade of nal-khagori is my jute-stick house.
• People call me a choruwa, Bhatiya, immigrant shaykh,
• Suspected Bangladeshi, non-aboriginal
• Bangladeshi and what-not.

In the poetry of Miya poets, the images of nature, particularly the river, along with images of violence and experiences of ‘outsiderness’ or alienation are often highlighted. In the fluvial geographies of chars, which are inhabited in Assam by mostly the Bengali Muslims or Miya Muslims, there arose a protest poetry movement. But then, what are chars and who are the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers that inhabit them?

Chars are river-islands that are extremely unstable in nature that get formed due to activities of tropical rivers. These fluvial ecologies can get submerged during heavy floods and through continuous erosion and then re-emerge post floods, often after years. They have also been described as ‘liminal’ ecologies (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013) since they are both land and part of water and yet, neither. This liminal nature of chars confuses colonial tight-fixed categorization of land–water binaries and instead allows one to acknowledge hybrid, fluvial ecologies or ecologies in flux where land and water are in close contact, in which they blend and mix with much greater intensity and intimacy.

These ecologies are extremely fertile as the river deposits a substantial amount of silt along with sand, clay, and mud. In Assam, these chars were temporarily cultivated once the water receded, particularly during winters, by people living near the river-banks or chaporis (Saikia 2020; Goswami 2010). The British saw temporary cultivation as non-profitable and, hence, termed them ‘wastelands’ (Hilaly 2016; Chakraborty 2012). Hence, to increase their revenue, they intended to turn these fertile fluvial patches of land into areas of permanent cultivation and settlement and consequently encouraged the migration of Bengali Muslim peasants from then East Bengal into Assam’s char areas. These peasants who had the knowledge and techniques of bringing char areas into cultivation were also eager to escape the oppressive zamindari system in East Bengal. They introduced jute in the chars of Assam, and from 1903 to 1919, jute production grew 3.6 times, and by the Second World War, Assam was the third largest producer of jute in India (Das and Saikia 2011, pp. 76–77). Given the nature of chars, this community has been historically migratory, but with the context of increased jute production and colonial policies, the migration of Bengali Muslims into Assam increased substantially. The Census Report of 1921 noted how East Bengali migrants, particularly from the districts of Mymensingh, Rangpur, and Jalpaiguri, were increasingly settling in Assam’s districts, particularly the ‘wastelands’, such that the numbers went up to 141,000 in Goalpara and 117,000 in other districts, respectively (Boruah 1980, p. 53). A land market and economy came up and were thriving, which eased the settlement of East Bengali Muslim peasants, particularly in the chars. There was a network of caste-Hindu Assamese land speculators, Marwari moneylenders, and East Bengali headmen (mattobars), which was an intricate network of exploitation for the poor East Bengali Muslim peasants who were already escaping oppressive taxation regimes in East Bengal (Guha 1977). However, with growing migration, the dominant caste-Hindu population feared losing their political, economic, and cultural dominance as migrant peasants started settling beyond chars, and hence, this educated upper-caste elite started demanding measures to protect the native interests. In 1920, the British introduced the ‘Line System’, wherein “revenue officials would draw lines on the map within which immigrants have to restrict their economic activities” (Das and Saikia 2011, p. 77). The immigrant villages were kept far away from the ‘native’ villages, and no ‘immigrant’ could buy land or settle in the ‘native’ villages demarcated by the system nor could the ‘natives’ sublet their land to the immigrants or employ ‘immigrant’ laborers to work in their fields. This system created new binaries, discourses, and terminologies such as ‘immigrant/native’ and was the beginning of a politics of violence that descendants of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers will continue to face in the upcoming decades.

Such policies and politics othered and demonized the Bengali Muslim char-dweller as one who is an ‘illegal immigrant’, eating away land and destroying Assamese culture and heritage. It is because of such narratives that the Bengali Muslim in Assam had to face continued violence, be it during the 1950s riots, the Nellie Massacre in 1983 that happened as part of the ‘anti-immigrant’ Assam Movement1, or the recent state project of the National Register of Citizens (NRC2). Thus, the continued violence, discrimination, and harassment faced by Bengali Muslims in Assam are due to a complex mix of factors—the colonial politics of permanent cultivation, settlement, and revenue generation in the chars, colonial policies encouraging rapid migration from East Bengal, repeated drawing of new boundaries for purely administrative convenience disconnecting connected communities and geographies and planting seeds of ‘othering’, the anxiety of the dominant upper-caste Assamese Hindus of losing control and becoming a minority, racist and xenophobic attitudes towards Muslims in general and Bengali Muslims in particular among the dominant community, among others (Ludden 2003; Sharma 2011; Hossain 2013; Sengupta 2016).

The Miya Poetry movement started as a response to such decades-long violence and harassment towards the Bengali Muslims (particularly char-dwelling Bengali Muslims) by the majoritarian state and the caste-Hindu Assamese society. Poetry depicting the deplorable condition of charua Bengali Muslims was first traced to be written back in 1939 by Maulana Bande Ali when he wrote the poem, ‘A Charuwa’s Proposition’. And then, in 1985, at the aftermath of the ‘anti-foreigner’ Assam Movement, Khabir Ahmed wrote the poem, ‘I Beg To State That’—however, these earlier poems were written with a tone of plea to be seen and accepted as an Assamese by the majoritarian society (Das 2021). In 2016, Hafiz Ahmed, the President of Char Chapori Sahitya Parishad, wrote the poem ‘Write Down ‘I am Miyah’’, which not only called out the violence faced by the Bengali Muslims but also celebrated and asserted their distinct identity. Ahmed’s poem contained pain and anger—emotions that were not visible in the previous poems—and was composed in the wake of the 2012 Bodo–Muslim violence and the NRC project, two events that were exceedingly violent towards the Bengali Muslims and left a deep mark of trauma on the community.

• Write
• I am a Miyah
• Of the Brahmaputra
• Your torture
• Has burnt my body black
• Reddened my eyes with fire.
• Beware!
• I have nothing but anger in stock.
• Keep away!
• Or
• Turn to Ashes.
(Ahmed 2024c)

As Ahmed posted his poem on Facebook, Shalim M. Hussain, a then university student, responded back to him by writing another poem titled ‘Nana I Have Written’. This started a chain reaction with many Bengali Muslims, most belonging to char chaporis, writing and sharing their poetry in social media.

The poetry is mostly written in the community’s local ‘Miya’ dialect, and its usage itself is a political choice. In 1951, at the time of reorganization of the states based on language, Assamese could only prove to be the dominant language when Bengali Muslims returned their language as Assamese in the census and Assam was carved out as a separate state. This also prevented the carving out of a Bengali-majority state out of Assam. However, just before the 1951 census, Bengali Muslims facing riots were given the option of either facing death or returning their language as Assamese (Sharma 1980). In fact, even before independence, this tactic of violent threatening has been used by Assamese nationalists when they called for a nation-wide agitation if Bengali Muslims did not return Assamese as their mother tongue (Pegu 2004). At times when the majoritarian state and society in Assam feared their numerical majority and there lurked a sense of uncertainty regarding their returning of language as Assamese, they have been framed as ‘illegal immigrants’. This, in fact, happened between 1961 and 1971 when the majority of them were deported back to, then, East Pakistan (Hussain 2000; Sharma 1980). Thus, Bengali Muslims, for decades, have been forcibly assimilated using language as a tool.

The writing and sharing of their poetry in their own ‘Miya dialect’ are challenges that forced assimilation and a celebration of their distinct identity, culture, and heritage. It is a celebration of the country’s culture of multilingualism—one of the most important fabrics of a democratic society (Azad et al. 2022; Daniyal 2019; Das 2021). It is the community’s assertion of belongingness to Assam and being an Assamese (and an Indian) without them giving up their own distinctiveness and, hence, is a call for keeping alive the culture and politics of plurality (Azad et al. 2022).

The word ‘Miya’ in Assam is also used very derogatorily and has histories of violence attached to it, wherein Bengali Muslims, mostly from chars, are mocked at and harassed using that word. There is otherness or outsiderness attached to it. In such a context, the use of the word ‘Miya’ to define the poetry movement and also their identities is a radical act wherein the community is reclaiming back the word and redefining it in a more empowering sense. As Shalim M. Hussain writes in his poem, ‘Nana I Have Written’—“I am Miyah/I am Proud” (Hussain 2024b, p. 22)—there is a sense of pride in their distinct identity, and with that, the community has found a sense of healing, which will be discussed in detail in the later parts of the paper.

This paper understands that the Miya Poetry movement embodies an ‘ecopolitical spirituality’ that counters the majoritarian state and society’s narratives of violence, particularly narratives that are premised on environmental racism and subsequent devaluation of the Bengali Muslim char-dweller. Post discussions on methodology, in the third section, I look at how environmental racism is propagated by the majoritarian state against the Bengali Muslim char-dweller and the consequences suffered by the community as a result of that. In the final section, which also forms the crux of this paper, I look at why I am calling the poetry movement embodying an ‘ecopolitical spirituality’ and how such a spirituality of the poetry movement is countering narratives of violence against the community and in turn helping them to rehumanize themselves.

2. Materials and Methods

The paper is based on my two-year-long doctoral ethnographic fieldwork with the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in western Assam, India, and as such, foregrounds their lived experiences. Though I have visited numerous chars, all situated in Barpeta district of Assam, most of my research has been focused in the chars of Baghbar circle in that district. Some of my critical observations surrounding environmental racism of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers have been derived from my participation in protests in December 2019 opposing the NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)3 because of their anti-Muslim nature. I participated in these protests both in Assam and in New Delhi where I was conducting my archival research as part of my doctoral work. Observations surrounding ecological and political precarity of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers who had migrated to urban areas have also arrived from several interviews that I conducted with such migrant informal laborers in Guwahati. Thus, besides the chars, several other sites have helped in arriving at conclusions that have been presented in this paper. This multi-sited nature (Katz 1994; Nast 1994; Sparke 1996) has allowed the study to be more dynamic and critical in its findings and conclusions.

I have also analyzed around 40 poems written by various Miya poets, which have been published in the poetry anthology, ‘Again I Hear These Waters’, curated by Shalim M. Hussain, with a few others published in online platforms. The poems whose excerpts have been used have been cited accordingly.

I would also like to engage briefly with my own positionality to highlight the situatedness of the knowledge presented here (Haraway 1988). I am an upper-caste, upper-middle-class, Assamese Hindu woman who was born and brought up in Assam but moved to Delhi and then Ireland to pursue my higher education. With regards to my caste, class, ethnic, and religious identities, I was not just the outsider, I was the oppressor too. This, along with the fact that I did not belong to the chars brought in complications surrounding positionality and my research. However, both me and the char-dwellers identified ourselves as belonging to Assam and as such ‘natives’ of that place. This, along with the fact that I was continually conscious of my positionality and practiced principles of care, reflection, and justice, which are embodied by feminist ethnographic methodology (Harding 1987; Haraway 1988; Abu-Lughod 1988; Acker 2001; Günel et al. 2020), ensured that power dynamics of oppression, objectification, and exploitation are not reproduced.

This positionality of a ‘partial insider’ or occupying the hyphen or the space in between (Narayan 1993; Dwyer and Buckle 2009; Kanuha 2000) allowed me to look at the lifeworld of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers through Miya Poetry both objectively and with care. The inhabitation of the hyphenated positional space also allowed me to see identities as not always absolute but in flow and contextually—allowing for the differences to exist alongside the similarities without the former turning the relationship as antagonistic (Fay 1996; Dwyer and Buckle 2009).

3. Environmental Racism of Bengali Muslim Char-Dwellers

The Baghbar area where I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork has the Brahmaputra flowing alongside and has an age-old massive hill sitting on the river-bank. The area is surrounded by numerous tiny unstable chars. Locals recall that because of the massive earthquakes of 1890 and 1920, the bed of the Brahmaputra rose significantly, and the river changed its course too, leading to the creation of several chars in the process. The rise in the riverbed of the Brahmaputra has also been one of the primary reasons of severely violent and frequent floods and more continued erosion in the chars, and since the 1970s, there has been an increasing and steady flow of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers to the Baghbar Hill or the Pahar, as it is locally called. This has created ethnic tensions in the Pahar. The Pahar earlier was dominated by caste-Hindu Assamese and tribal populations, but because of ecological precarity, particularly increasing floods and the widening of the river (submerging many lands in the process), most left and migrated to inland areas such as Barpeta, Howli, Barpeta Road, Goalpara, among others. With increased migration of displaced char-dwellers to the Pahar, the dominance of the non-Muslim population has been replaced by the Bengali Muslim population, leading to continued ethnic tensions.

In the past, the minority caste-Hindu population in the Pahar, with the help of the majoritarian Hindu state administration, have also enabled evictions of Bengali Muslims from the Pahar. When I asked one of my caste-Hindu Assamese informers about it, he said with a smirk, “Bhargabi, these Miya people from the chars have migrated and are inhabiting either forest department’s land or some of Hindu Assamese people’s lands who are no longer here. And then, they completely destroy the environment—they create a lot of waste, they are cutting down trees and illegally selling them” (Fieldnotes, February 2021). This narrative of migrant or internally displaced Bengali Muslims being environmental waste producers and destroyers of wetlands and natural habitats (Chatterjee et al. 2006; Sarma 2015) has also been used as a reason for them being framed as ‘illegal immigrants’ and then subsequently being violently evicted or kept in detention camps.

Such a narrative is also actively used for Bengali Muslim migrants who, after flood or erosion-led displacement from the chars, have no option but to settle down in nearby grazing reserves, forest lands, or even national parks.

In char areas, with climate change and the state rampantly building embankments, floods and erosion have become more violent and frequent, leading to more frequent, violent, and unplanned migrations. Char-dwellers have been, historically, a migratory community. However, many char-dwellers confessed how older memories of migration that they associated with fishing, rivers, boats, and boat songs are now replaced with memories of harassment, suspicion, disenfranchisement, and violence. The post-colonial state’s enthusiasm surrounding embankment building in an area that is criss-crossed by rivers and their tributaries can be traced back to colonial times.

The British, in order to separate land from water and guard fertile char-lands (particularly fields) against floods, started building permanent embankments that were particularly water-tight, disallowing the flow of any water at all (Dewan 2021; Saikia 2020). This deprived fields in the floodplains from receiving much required silt, fish, among others that were necessary to retain the fertility of the fields. Such imagination of embankments also came from an understanding that floods and floodwater were necessarily destructive, which was not how indigenous communities who lived in river-banks or even Bengali Muslim peasants looked at floodwater. To them, timely floods were necessary for better productivity, and floods were an integral part of the culture of chars and char-dwellers (Das 2021).

These things considered, the building of embankments was always centralized, without taking into account the community’s knowledge and opinions. This led to embankments being built in unsuitable areas, such that it impacted the course and flow of the river, and consequently, when floods came, they became destructive, destroying not just the embankments but also people’s homes and fields in the process. Char-dwellers use the term ‘over-flood’ for such floods. ‘Over-floods’ are events of destruction unlike timely floods that nourish and create. Over several years now, floods are now quickly getting replaced by over-floods.

Such strategies and politics of embankment building are carried forward by the post-colonial state too (Saikia 2020; Baruah 2023). An official at the Water Resources Department in Assam mentioned how the Bahari-Baghbar embankment that was built between 1954 and 1959 was breached on numerous occasions. He believes that this was partly due to the odd increase in sedimentation in some parts of the riverbed. Since then, the embankment has been breached in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2012. He admits that at present, the embankment that protects 122 villages in three blocks, mostly containing char villages, is in serious threat of another breach.

Despite this, the repair and celebration of embankments have not stopped. The local MLA of Baghbar announced how immediate measures to repair the Bahari-Baghbar embankment were approved with a funding of Rs. 2.3 crores. The repair work of embankments is leading to enormous spendings with no end in sight since almost every year the floods become violent, particularly in water-dominant ecologies like char-land regions. Such violent floods quickly cause breaches in embankments; therefore, they require more repair and ultimately further funding. According to an official on the Brahmaputra Board, this vicious cycle of construction and destruction is only helping the corrupt network of engineers, politicians, and contractors while char-dwellers suffer more and more violent floods and migrations.

In such a scenario, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers, after losing their land and homes, have no option but to migrate, and they end up squatting in nearby grazing reserves and national parks or they migrate to far away cities such as Guwahati or even further such as Delhi, Hyderabad, among others as landless laborers, providing cheap labor and helping run the urban capitalist economies. In such contexts, particularly those squatting in grazing reserves or national parks, the majoritarian state frames them as ‘illegal immigrants/Bangladeshis’, ‘poachers’ who are environmental waste producers and destroying the environment and wildlife (Chatterjee et al. 2006; Sarma 2015). Consequently, they are violently evicted. In September 2021, the right-wing state in Assam carried out a massive and violent eviction drive in the Gorukhuti grazing reserve, which led to the killing of two civilian Bengali Muslims who were protesting against the drive and became targets of brutal police firing.

Such deaths are not mourned, in fact they are celebrated by the majoritarian state and society because both believe that they are not just environmental waste producers but Bengali Muslim migrant char-dwellers ‘illegally’ squatting on government lands are ‘wastes’ in themselves too and are ‘objects’ to be rightfully removed.

Bengali Muslim migrants have often been referred and imagined as ‘ants’ and ‘crows’ in several government reports. In 1931, the then Census Superintendent of Assam, C. S. Mullan, in his Census Report regarding large-scale migration of Bengali Muslim peasants from East Bengal to Assam, writes “…an event, moreover, which seems likely to alter permanently the whole future of Assam …has been the invasion of a vast horde of land hungry Bengali immigrants; mostly Muslims, from the districts of Eastern Bengal…the only thing I can compare it to is the mass movement of large body of ants…” (Mullan 1931, p. 51). Mullan’s metaphor of ‘ants’ to refer to the Bengali Muslims has been used by the post-colonial state in its various reports—be it the Brahma Committee Report of 20174 that suggested measures on how to protect the land rights of ‘indigenous people’ in Assam or the S.K. Sinha Report of 19985 that looked at the situation of ‘illegal immigration’ to Assam.

The image of the ‘ants’ to refer to the Bengali Muslim migrants is interesting for it weaves the meaning of ‘incessant flow’ and ‘ungovernability’, something similar to unrecyclable ecological waste. Ghassan Hage writes

“The ecological crisis began to intrude into our lives as crisis precisely at the point when we started experiencing the results of industry’s and government’s loss of control and inability to manage and recycle waste in the ways we hoped for, giving rise to an ungoverned flow of unrecyclable waste that is increasingly polluting—visually, chemically, and in many other ways—our lands and waters as well as the atmosphere” (Hage 2017, p. 42).

Just like Hage (2017) mentions, the Muslim ‘other’ with their migratory nature and having been forced to squat and settle on government lands6 are imagined as ‘waste’ that are incessantly flowing and destroying the ‘natural habitat’. They are an ecological threat and, hence, need to be evicted. The incessant nature of their flow is conveyed through the metaphor of ‘ants’. Such usage of animalistic metaphors to refer to Muslims as ‘wastes’ is however not new. The use of ‘cockroaches’ to refer to Arabs showed how the racialized Muslim body was seen as closer to “dirt, rubbish and waste, an inevitable left-over of the process of colonization that one has to live with and manage but that one can do without” (Hage 2017, p. 41). The use of ‘crows’ to refer to the Bengali Muslims is to indicate how they live off wastes and are ‘wastes’ in themselves. Samyak Ghosh and Suraj Gogoi, while looking at ethno-nationalist street art in the streets of Guwahati, Assam, saw the repeated drawing of ants and crows. They write

“Within this space of a majoritarian political expression, the iconography of the outsiders or bongāls as poisonous ants and crows explain their location in the realm of elimination. Their dark bodies (kolāsarīra) are a sight of disgust. Their living is understood as an act of scavenging and their dwellings are believed to have been built on the resources of the insiders. The very precarity of their existence carries the burden of a possibility of elimination” (Ghosh and Gogoi 2019).

Thus, migrant Bengali Muslim bodies are seen as not just creating waste but as ‘ungovernable’ wastes in themselves and thus a threat to the environment. Muslim bodies become a threat to the environment or the community because of their continuous increase—just like ants—be it through the inflow of ‘illegal immigrants’ via a porous border or through their ‘bursting’ birth-rates, something that both the caste-Hindu Assamese nationalists and the Hindutva forces have used for their ‘anti-Muslim’ propaganda. The use of animalistic metaphors is particularly symbolic too. Hage (2017) notes that it is people who wish to dominate who employ animalistic metaphors. He quotes David Theo Goldberg (2015) who notes that animalization and bestialization have been critical for racist representation that implies ‘thingification’ of people or more precisely, dehumanization and devaluation (Hage 2017, p. 24).

Scholars like Mary Douglas (2002) and Gay Hawkins (2006) understand that ‘waste’/dirt is not outside ‘order or systems-thinking’ but allows the visibility of order. Thus, ‘Muslims as ungovernable waste’ is a narrative that is woven by the majoritarian state to highlight the ‘normal or desired’ order/system and how Muslims as ‘ungovernable, incessant wastes’ are a threat to that order. Hence, them being either violently evicted or facing harassment and violence from the police when they work as informal laborers in the cities is justified.

These narratives of violence reflect how Muslim bodies have continued to face environmental racism by majoritarian states and societies alike. The term environmental racism was coined as part of the environmental justice movement to highlight the ecological violence that was faced by marginalized communities—particularly in marginalized geographies and on marginalized bodies (Wright 2018). The environment becomes the site and the tool, the using of which furthers racist violence against marginalized communities. In Assam, such environmental racism (Wright 2018; Pulido 2017) of the state continues against the charua Bengali Muslim. Racist violence is conducted by the state using the environment, be it through its use of animalistic metaphors or in the name of ‘protecting the environment from waste producers’, such that it refuses to acknowledge that instead of them being ‘illegal immigrants’, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are instead Internally Displaced People (IDP) who are continually economically pauperized in the process. In fact, as discussed above, a huge reason for them having lost everything to violent floods–erosion and having to migrate so frequently is the post-colonial state’s obsession with building water-tight embankments. Thus, while the state continues calling them a large body of ‘ants’, incessantly flowing and destroying the environment and culture, it refuses to bring to light factors that are creating this incessant flow in the first place.

Consequently, this has resulted in the strengthening of the narrative that migrant Bengali Muslim charuas are ‘illegal immigrants’—facing police brutality, being stamped as a ‘doubtful voter’, and being stripped of their right to vote and dumped in detention camps. Thus, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are not just economically pauperized (losing land and homes, fighting court cases, etc.), but they become severely politically pauperized and precarious in the process too, making them objects of further state violence.

In the next section, we finally turn to how the ecopolitical spirituality of the Miya Poetry movement challenges such environmental racism of the state and is an attempt at rehumanizing the community.

4. Ecopolitical Spirituality of Miya Poetry Movement

My usage of the term ‘ecopolitical spirituality’ as an embodiment and one of the core characteristics of the Miya Poetry movement is primarily due to three reasons, each of which has been expressed in the poetry of Miya Muslim/Bengali Muslim char-dwelling poets: (a) the poetry fore-fronted the interconnectedness or relational nature of the lifeworld of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers; (b) the dehumanization of the Bengali Muslims in Assam is a deeply political project and so is the rehumanization of the community that is attempted by the poetry movement; and (c) the process of rehumanizing themselves does not involve violating the dominant community or the oppressor—hence it does not fall back into the trap of creating binaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and hence does not engage in othering.

4.1. Interconnectedness or Relational World of Char-Dwellers

• After my death I will live as a tree
• My fallen leaves a poet will save
• ….
• And as a river I will hear all sorrows, cry to them
• And save my tears in myself –
• I will witness the coming togethers
• I will witness the falling aparts—
Heena Al Haya (2024)

• If you ask me, I’ll tell you
• How the river nurtures me.
• The river is the nymph,
• That weave the gaps between
• Dearth and abundance.
• ….
• The tunes of river,
• Trace the song
• Of my ancestry.
• If you ask me, I’ll tell you,
• How with each curve it tells
• The history of a forbidden race,
• Dissolved in patriotic blood.—
Ahmed (2024a)

These two poems, ‘After My Death’ and ‘The River Nymph’ by Heena Al Haya and Ameena Ahmed, respectively, underline char-dwellers’ deep connections and relations with the ecology around, which is inclusive of non-humans. This is particularly true of their relationship with the river, which is amply evident in Ahmed’s poem. During my fieldwork when I would enquire about char-dwellers’ complex relationships with the river—since it nurtures them and yet causes them so much destruction—char-dwellers would always respond with a lot of love, recalling fond memories that they shared with the river. Abdul, one of my key informants, once mentioned how the river for them is like a lover, it nurtures them and frustrates them, “but how does one hate one’s lover?” He ended our conversation by leaving me with such a rhetorical question.

The char-dwellers’ personification of non-humans shows the affective relationship that they have traditionally shared with the environment around them. This also shows that non-humans are considered living entities with a will of their own (Suchet-Pearson et al. 2013; Rose 1996; Smyer Yü 2020), which is exemplified when the river is called ‘mad’ in several poems and songs that have come out of the chars (Hussain 2024a). Such acknowledgements of aliveness and agency allow char-dwellers to build such affective relationships. The poetry that evokes this traditional affective relationship “takes pride in the char-dwellers’ traditional ethics of care, not just for humans but also for nonhumans who share the same dwelling space” (Das 2021, p. 95). In fact, when it comes to land, they do not experience it simply economically but affectively too, which is represented in their songs called ‘jarigeet’ or ‘dhuageet’, which are sung during harvesting and celebrate the community’s traditional relationship with land. In an interview with Miya poet Hafiz Ahmed, he mentioned how traditionally the whole village would come together and help each other in harvesting their fields, and the landowner would organize communal feasts for everyone at the end of it all. This also indicates that land, the site of agriculture, is understood to be nurtured communally. Dutta et al. (2021) emphasize the nourishing relationship that Bengali Muslim char-dwellers share with land, river, crops, and livestock and consider themselves custodians rather than owners of land.

Land is also understood to have connotations of home and belongingness, which are well reflected in Ahmed’s poem, ‘Babajaan’, when he wrote “This land is not of attackers alone/This land is the land of your blood and sweat” (Ahmed 2024b, p. 19) or when Siraj Khan (2024) writes in his poem, ‘My Son Has Learnt to Cuss Like the City’,

• When I leave the chars for the city
• They holler, ‘Oi, what’s your language?’
• Just as the tongues of beasts and birds
• Have no books, my language has no school
• ….
• I match rhythm with rhythm
• Pain with pain
• Clasp the sounds of the land close to my heart
• And speak the whispers of the sand
• The language of earth is the same everywhere.
• ….
• How do I tell them that my jati is man
• That we are Hindu or Musalman
• Until the earth makes us one.

Thus, just like other elements of nature, land is not a resource but a site to evoke a “maternal principle of the earth” (Berry 2009, p. 116), through which they show their interconnectedness and oneness as humans and with non-humans (“speak the whispers of the sand”). Land is also used to challenge majoritarian society’s narrative of them being ‘outsiders’ and assert their belongingness to it and in the process redefines belongingness. Wherein, belongingness is not understood with regards to legality/illegality or nation-states alone but also in the relational connection to the earth—to which everyone returns and belongs.

Their acute awareness of the relational nature of the environment is reflected in their traditional relationship and memories that they share surrounding floodwater. Their understanding that floodwaters are essential since they help in renewing the soil, bringing new silt, and improving vegetation and fish have helped them to see floodwater as nurturing and necessary not just for humans but also non-humans. This also shows that the community, rather than considering human beings as superior to non-humans, understands the former being truly dependent on the latter and vice-versa. Baetrice Malovich understands this as ‘strange kinship’ (Malovich 2017), “which neither assimilates planetary others to the (always human) same nor writes them off as insignificant to our own flourishing” (Keller and Rubenstein 2017, p. 14).

Thus, this centering of the idea of relationality or interconnectedness that is embodied by the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers and expressed in the poetry of Miya poets de-centers the narrative where humans were either put in the forefront or outside the environment. It acknowledges “worlding with” (Haraway 2016, p. 58) or “co-becoming” (Suchet-Pearson et al. 2013, p. 2) in such an entangled reality. Carol White (2017b) understands that a vision that “emphasizes deep interconnectedness among humans and celebrates our kinship with other sentient life, accentuating a modality of existence in which transformation occurs…I consider humans’ awareness and appreciation to ‘all that is’ as an expression of sacrality…” (White 2017b, p. 253). Thus, the recognition and valuing of interconnectedness in itself are considered sacred. White terms this centering of entanglements as “sacred humanity” (White 2017b, p. 253), which I will elaborately look at when I discuss the rehumanization aspect of Miya Poetry. However, both the rehumanization and the dehumanization processes have been deeply political, and this is the next aspect to which I turn to.

4.2. Dehumanization and Rehumanization as Political Projects

As discussed before, the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers increasingly losing their land and homes to violent floods–erosion and then being forced to migrate is a state-enabled project with the rampant building of water-tight embankments in char areas by the state, it enabling the cutting down of forests, or building of high dams in the river’s upstream regions (Dutta 2013). Such Muslim migrants, who then squat in nearby grazing reserves and national parks face racist violence, are framed as ‘illegal immigrants’ and then are violently evicted. This is particularly interesting since the state has allowed an oil refinery to construct a massive golf course in the animal corridor of Kaziranga National Park while poor tribals and Bengali Muslim landless squatters are violently evicted (Borbora 2017). There is also a refusal of the state to recognize them as ‘internally displaced migrants’ since currently the country has no law surrounding IDP (Dasgupta 2001). Those who are forced to migrate to urban areas work as informal laborers in pathetic work conditions and wages lower than non-Muslim workers (Dasgupta 2001). This is in addition to the police harassment that they regularly have to face being suspected of ‘illegal immigrants’. Many workers that I spoke to in Guwahati mentioned how they wear special pocketed ‘lungis’ to always carry documents with them in case the police picked them up.

Such everyday violence along with the ’thingification’ of Bengali Muslims who are racialized using the environment as the site show how Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are systematically dehumanized and devalued. Dehumanization and devaluation occur when skilled Bengali Muslim char-dwelling cultivators are systematically made landless, politically precarious, and forced to sell their labor power in far worse rates and conditions. Dehumanization also happens when the deaths of poor Bengali Muslims in detention camps or in police firings are celebrated by the mainstream state and society alike.

The Miya Poetry movement is a challenge to such politics of dehumanization and violence through rehumanizing the community. Just like ecospiritual sites, such as sacred nature/groves, are sites of resistance against modern capitalist projects of destruction (Allison 2019), the poetry is a narrative of resistance or “counterstorytelling” (Dutta et al. 2021). The dehumanization and violence of environmental racism that the community suffer when the majoritarian state (including the media) uses racist metaphors like crows, ants, or rats are challenged by the poetry movement when it uses new metaphors to highlight a new relationship both with the environment and with themselves.

In the poem ‘Detention Camp’ by Ahmed (2024d), talking about a Bengali Muslim char-dweller who had been put in a detention camp, he writes

• It is said that they love the sky—they keep alive tales of rain,
• Floods, drought and spring; of thirteen days, of twelve months.
• Rakib chacha whose eyes go moist when you cry; his son sings.
• ‘O my own land’ and flowers rain upon him. You are not near
• To hear him.

Or in another of Kazi Neel’s poem, ‘Digging a Grave’ (Neel 2017) he writes,

• find the smell of wet soil inside my bosom,
• the broken remnants of a plough in my fist.
• Digging the grave I take out my sunless past.
• I see everyone has a history of journey…
• Digging my grave I myself carry my corpse to the graveyard.
• Whether they declare me a martyr or not,
• before this land is sold out, before this air is exhausted,
• before these rivers get poisoned,
• I wish to be devastated at least once in a tumultuous battle.

Such poetry creates new metaphors and imageries that allow one to understand the deep connections that this community shares with the environment around—that they observe, understand, and nurture the environment around instead of being ‘environmental waste producers’. They instead turn the gaze towards the factor that is truly destroying the environment—modern-day capitalism, which has damaged their local environments (river, land, air, birds) and their traditional relationships with the environment. When their poetry writes about “finding the smell of wet soil inside my bosom”, (Neel 2017), it shows that they recognize the relational and entangled nature of the environment, such that when rivers are destroyed, their own past is ‘sunless’ and they should prepare to dig their own graves.

The poetry also celebrates symbols like ‘lungi’, a traditional blue- and white-striped lower garment that is popularly associated with the community but often has been used to mock, belittle, or harass the community. When Abdul Mozid Sheikh (2024) writes in his poem, ‘First, Your Shadow’, about the lungi as a “guard against winter” (Sheikh 2024, p. 62) or Hussain (2024b), in his poem ‘Nana I Have Written’, writes about wearing “a lungi to space” (Hussain 2024b, p. 22), there is not only an acceptance but also a pride attached to it. There is thus a reclamation of meanings surrounding traditional objects of the community.

This process of rehumanization, which involves remembrance of traditional interconnected relationships with the environment, reviving metaphors and symbols that not only humanize their relationship with the environment but also with themselves, has been inspired by several political protest movements including the Black, Negritude, queer, feminist, and Dalit literary movements, opening spaces for building solidarities across varied oppressed people (Hassan 2021; Azad et al. 2022). In fact, Hafiz Ahmed’s poem, ‘Write Down ‘I am Miyah’’, that sparked the entire poetry movement was inspired by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, ‘Write Down, I am an Arab’. The rehumanization process is a deeply political project whose foundations are inspired by the earth’s principles of care, diversity, and justice or rather a “multispecies justice” (Chao and Celermajer 2023, p. 2), which aims to liberate all forms of species and their ways of being while situating oppressed people’s knowledges and lenses at the center of things.

The movement challenges statelessness and the suspicion over citizenship by re-imaging belongingness in “open and non-essentialized ways. Belonging then becomes an affect and ethic rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of the authentic or original inhabitant that are weaponized against Miya people” (Dutta et al. 2021, p. 66). Thus, it imagines community and belongingness with a different set of politics.

It is no surprise then that the movement received tremendous political backlash from the state and the majoritarian society. In July 2019, public intellectuals such as Hiren Gohain, Dilip Borah, among others publicly criticized the movement for its use of Miya dialect, calling it an attack on the Assamese language while police complaints were filed against several of the poets saying that the poetry movement was defaming the Assamese people as islamophobic and xenophobic (Singh 2019). The media dominated by caste-Hindu Assamese left no stone unturned to slander the movement (Badhwar 2019). However, the movement continued, growing into “one of the subcontinents most sustained artistic resistance movement of the 21st century” (Azad et al. 2022, p. 4).

This tussle is also reflective of the poetry movement’s upholding of principles of community, relationality, common humanity, and care against modern capitalism and the post-colonial majoritarian state’s principles of coloniality, exclusion, individuality, and superiority. The movement’s principles arrive from their understanding of and attunement with their immediate environment and the relations that they share with it.

4.3. Rehumanization Not Through Violating the Oppressor

The process of rehumanization that is attempted by the Miya Poetry movement is not achieved by violating or harassing the oppressor. This is in stark contrast to what Franz Fanon (2005) said about how violence shapes the identity of the colonized, and it is through violence that they regain back their humanity.

The poetry movement rehumanizes by foregrounding principles of “radical love” (Baldwin 1998)—where one embraces “otherness within oneself and as oneself” (White 2017b, p. 259). This is seen in their appeal to see the common humaneness of our existence rather than the constructed divisions, as highlighted in Siraj Khan’s (2024) poem when he writes “That we are Hindu or Musalman/Until the earth makes us one” (Khan 2024, p. 46).

This is also seen in Azad’s (2024) poem, ‘Seventy Years I Have Been Afraid’, where he writes about his ancestor’s preachings:

• ‘Open your heart and love’.
• ‘You are not one thread less or one thread more than anyone else’.
• ‘You have the right to a heart full of love’.
• They taught me that the corner of my heart
• That held love for them should still remain,
• That evicting them from that space would be
• Unlawful, unethical and anti-conscience.

Such responses to the oppressor’s violence by still holding space for love—love for oneself and others—are believed to help the oppressor see the mirror and bring transformation within the oppressor too as dehumanization by the oppressor dehumanizes the oppressor too (Baldwin 1998). Such “loving from below” (Urena 2017, p. 87) makes way for healing of not just the oppressed but the oppressor too since the colonial binary construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is broken to understand that relationships are processual and intersubjective. Such a decolonial love provides a different way to engage with otherness and can be a catalyst in dismantling oppressive regimes and structures (Urena 2017; Dutta et al. 2021).

But the poetry movement’s opening up of a space where the oppressed can accept and express their pain and humiliation that they have been carrying within themselves for decades without violating or belittling the oppressor has also enabled them to rehumanize themselves and allowed them to hold space for love towards the oppressor. Finally, this has helped in healing themselves.

The fact that the poetry movement rehumanizes the Bengali Muslims by upholding the principles of love, acceptance, and embracement of the pain without violating or creating an ‘other’ in the process is what makes it sacred and spiritual. The divine and spiritual foundations of love can be found in Bell Hooks (2001) saying that “all awakening to love is spiritual awakening” (Hooks 2001, p. 83). She brings in her memories of reading passages from “The love chapter” of First Corinthians that read “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthius 13), which implies how without love, resistance is empty or even harmful and has the potential to make the oppressed the oppressor. In line with Hooks (2001) who emphasized the politicization of spiritual love, the poetry movement foregrounds the principle of love with the aim of rehumanization of the oppressed and ending structures of domination and oppression.

I understand that this ability and embodiment of the poetry movement to rehumanize through principles of love and acceptance of pain, without violating the oppressor, are sourced from the community’s understanding of the environment as relational and interconnected. Such relational understanding of the environment challenges notions of superiority of humans and shows how each element in nature is interconnected and often interdependent with the other. Hence, the ‘us’ is never versus ‘them’ but the ‘us’ can be ‘them’ or the ‘us’ is with ‘them’. The nurturing and well-being of the self is vitally dependent on the nurturing of everything else surrounding because ultimately there remains no binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

This reminds me of White’s conception of ‘sacred humanity’, a concept I introduced in the beginning of the paper. Her conception of ‘sacred humanity’ has its tenets in religious naturalism (Stone 2008). Such a humanity “evokes our essential entangledness with each other and with other natural organisms” (White 2017b, p. 259). The concept of ‘sacred humanity’ encapsulates the aim and process of rehumanization that is embodied by the Miya Poetry movement. It presents a humanity or humanization process that identifies not just the interconnections as human beings with each other but also with other elements. The natural world is interconnected, and humans are a part of it, and hence rehumanization or “our wholeness occurs within a matrix of complex interconnectedness” (White 2017b, p. 262). Rehumanization that is based on such an understanding of interconnectedness is sacred considering sacrality is derived from this ability to see the interconnectedness (White 2017b). Rehumanization occurs not by violating the ‘other’ but by considering each element as sacred and that “our humanity is entangled with other natural processes of becoming” (White 2017b, p. 267) because not only do we share common grounds with each other as humans, but we are constituted by ‘more-than-humans’ too.

White’s understanding of sacred humanism that is derived from what she calls “African American religious naturalism” (White 2017b, p. 269) can be found in Bengali Muslim char-dwellers’ thoughts and their understanding of the environment, which are embodied by and are expressed in the Miya Poetry. And just like Black people in America rehumanized themselves and felt themselves whole through embodying sacred humanity, Miya Muslim people in Assam too are experiencing the very same through their poetry.

It is through such a humanization process, which is inspired by a naturalism that considers nature and its many elements as interconnected and hence sacred, that the continued dehumanization achieved through the narrative of environmental racism, which not only considers humans as superior than nature but also some humans as more superior than others, is challenged.

This understanding of humanism derived from religious naturalism is a challenge to liberal humanism, which “overestimated the autonomy of human animals” (White 2017a, p. 111), placing humans outside the natural world and making our connections to other life forms invisible. Such a humanism has advocated for a common humanity between the oppressed and oppressor but has been based on a foundation where the non-human is still considered below the human. Such a humanism is fundamentally based on the distinction between nature and culture, which is opposed by religious naturalism and sacred humanism (White 2017a, p. 113). Hence, such a humanism will advocate for Bengali Muslims (who are equated with rats, ants, crows, etc.) to be seen as equally human as the dominant because of the virtue of shared humanity, but it fails to see the devaluation/dishonoring meted out towards the non-human that is, rats, ants, or crows in this case. It is only when we see that humans are constituted of more-than-humans and that each is sacred, connected, and interdependent that we fully advocate for a radical humanism and rehumanization, honoring all life forms in the process.

5. Conclusions

During the month of ‘Kati’, a month known for its famines and lack, there remains a ritual among the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers called the ‘Ghassi Raat’. During the ritual, young boys go out at night in groups with axes and pretend to cut off trees that have not borne any fruit yet. To this, a few boys plead that the tree should not be axed as there remains still hope that its vitality would increase soon, singing

• Don’t cut the tree, don’t cut the tree, my lord
• Surely, surely it will bear fruit this time
• In the famine of Kati
• We won’t cut more trees
• We will sell its fruits
• And clear the year’s debts—
Hussain (2019)

Such rituals reflect the relational nature of the charua lifeworld along with the fact that there remains a deep understanding, respect, and appreciation among Bengali Muslim char-dwellers of that entangled nature of the environment. This understanding, which is replete in their culture, memories, everydayness, and economic activities, is captured in the poetry of the Miya poets.

Their remembrance and evocation of this relational understanding of the environment in their poetry are critical since these challenge the environmental racism that the majoritarian state and society direct towards them, devaluing and dehumanizing them in the process. Such dehumanization by the state is a systemic political project. Environment can be used as a site for violence and racism when humans are thought to be outside and superior to other natural elements. When humans are thought to be part of, dependent of, and connected with the other elements of nature, then the environment can become a site of sacrality and humanity.

This paper looked at how a protest poetry movement’s recognition and revival of their relational riverine lifeworld made it sacred or spiritual in nature and how this sacrality has allowed it to weave a counter politics of rehumanization that is based not on violating the oppressor but on love—love and justice for all humans and non-humans. In doing this, it has also opened pathways for the oppressor to be rehumanized too. Hence, the poetry movement of and by the marginalized is radical in every sense. The movement puts forward an appeal of building an alternative political community, which is not founded on principles of superiority, otherness, and exclusion but on recognition of plurality and “pluriverse” (Escobar 2016, p. 84), love, and multispecies justice.