Again I Hear These Waters. This item is unavailable.Again I Hear These Waters

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.

Shalim M. Hussain writes poetry and fiction and translates from Assamese, Bengali and Hindi to English. He has won awards for his own poetry and acclaim for previously published translations, including of Kamal Kumar Tanti. For this project of compiling an anthology of Miyah poetry, he was awarded a Charles Wallace India Trust Literary Translation and Creative Writing Fellowship.