A collection of powerfully political poetry and song, celebrating the lives and struggle of one of India’s most marginalised groups.
Miyah poetry is a literary movement of protest poetry by Bengali-Muslims living in the chars (low-lying islands prone to floods and erosion) of Assam. 20+ poets document stories of love, loss, and injustice, celebrating contemporary lives beyond mere victimisation, while also protesting bigotry, xenophobia, and social exclusion. Very rarely do we see translations of literature from India’s Northeast, a contested region seen as ‘off the map’ of India proper, or from the hundreds of languages which are not official at either national or state level. This volume will include songs alongside written poems, resisting the marginalisation of oral literatures and by extension the people who produce them.