Latest news with #Sylheti
Time of India
a day ago
- Politics
- Time of India
12-hr bandh called in Sribhumi on Sept 3 over dist's name change
1 2 Silchar: The Committee to Resist the Renaming of Karimganj District, which has been spearheading protests against Assam govt's decision to change the name of the district as Sribhumi, on Sunday announced a 12-hour total bandh across the Sribhumi district on Sept 3. Assam govt announced the change of the name of erstwhile Karimganj district on Nov 19 last year. The decision of calling a bandh was taken in a meeting held under the chairmanship of committee convenor Sunit Ranjan Dutta. The meeting expressed "deep concern" that despite continuous protests since Feb, the state govt has not taken any positive steps. The bandh call, leaders said, is aimed at making the people's voice heard more forcefully. Speakers also condemned BJP IT cell leader Amit Malviya's reported remarks describing the Sylheti dialect as a "Bangladeshi language" and criticised attacks on poor Bengali-speaking communities in Assam and other states. They alleged the name change move was taken "unilaterally" with "communal intent" and in violation of democratic traditions, erasing Karimganj's role in landmark struggles such as the Nankar Rebellion, the Chargoala Muluk Chalo movement, and the language movements of 1961, 1972, and 1986. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Villas For Sale in Dubai Might Surprise You Villas In Dubai | Search Ads Get Rates Undo The meeting also highlighted long-standing grievances in the Barak Valley, including the closure of the Cachar Paper Mill in 2015, reduction in assembly and district council seats, and recruitment policy changes that allegedly deprive local unemployed youth of lower-grade jobs in govt offices. Speakers criticised the poor condition of connectivity, the medical college, and the district hospital, terming them evidence of the state's "parochial and discriminatory attitude. " They accused the govt of "inhuman and communal" actions by evicting poor residents without rehabilitation. Leaders vowed to continue the united fight of Bengali, Manipuri, Bishnupriya, Hindi-speaking and other communities against the renaming. Stay updated with the latest local news from your city on Times of India (TOI). Check upcoming bank holidays , public holidays , and current gold rates and silver prices in your area.
Time of India
2 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Lobon or noon? The trouble with using language to draw borders
Radio host, novelist and commentator Sandip Roy is the author of Don't Let Him Know. However, his columns are all about letting people know his myriad opinions. There is indeed a 'Bangladeshi' language. But it's not what Delhi police were thinking when they put out a notice looking for interpreters 'proficient in Bangladeshi national language'. Nor is it what BJP IT cell convener Amit Malviya was thinking when he defended the letter saying, 'the official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis'. Neither are TMC politicians quite right when they stoutly lay claim to some uniform Bengali language identity spanning West Bengal and Bangladesh extending into Assam and Tripura. There is a difference. The first time I went to Dhaka, about a decade ago, a young man who was showing me around asked if I wanted to go to the museum. But he used the beautifully evocative Bengali word jadughar, house of magic, a word I had almost forgotten. In Kolkata, people like us just said 'museum' even when talking in Bangla. When I told my mother, she said they still speak in Bangla there, here you speak in Benglish. In Bangladesh, a country whose birth pangs were tied to Bangla, language felt far more potent than it did in Kolkata where Bengali, English, Hindi had all become mishmashed into a Radio Mirchi-style khichdi. At the liberation war museum in Dhaka, I saw an old clipping from the Pakistan Observer which declared that Tagore songs were deemed 'against Pakistan's cultural values'. The report's tone was matter of fact. But the headline gave away the shock with a punctuation gasp —Broadcast ban on Tagore! In a strange way what the current furore over Bengali has inadvertently done is re-ignite pride in Bangla as a language at a time when more and more of us have gotten used to not reading a Bengali newspaper, let alone a Bengali book. Memes have flooded social media reminding everyone that Bengali is not a 'foreign language', that it has given us a national anthem and a Nobel laureate; India's only Oscar winner for lifetime achievement Satyajit Ray made most of his films in Bangla. Even Vande Mataram, when read in its entirety, was written in Bengali script in a mix of Sanskrit and Bangla. I spotted a meme showing Rabindranath Tagore delivering a stinging slap to a Delhi police officer while saying, 'This slap is in Unicode Bangla'. Each side has its own political agenda. BJP wants to root out illegal migrants from Bangladesh from electoral rolls. Some of its supporters think they can use language as a quick and dirty way to mark people as the other. The Trinamool Congress wants to frame this as an attack on Bengali as a language rather than on illegal immigration. But this political slugfest has ended up being a fascinating linguistic education for the rest of us. For example, in the last few weeks I have learned that not only were there language martyrs in Bangladesh, eleven people protesting the erasure of the Bengali language were killed in Assam's Barak Valley in 1961. They were Sylheti Bengalis, the dialect Malviya called 'incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis'. The political problem of illegal migration the govt wants to tackle is real. But language remains an ineffective and blunt instrument to tackle it. For example, we keep hearing stories in the USA of Donald Trump supporters calling immigration enforcement on people they hear speaking Spanish in a public space. As a result, immigration raids have swept up US-born Latinos who have served in the US military just because they looked and sounded Latino. Language is not a citizenship ID. Bureaucrats draw borders but language seeps through them. The Bangla I spoke in Kolkata was very different from the Bangla the woman from Midnapore who raised me spoke. Kotiya chhua, little mouse, she called me, words my mother never used. Her Bangla was different as was the Bangla of my great aunts whose families hailed from what is now Bangladesh. We sometimes laughed at each other's peculiar turns of phrase. But there was enough room for all of us under the Bengali umbrella. While WhatsApp forwards claimed an easy language litmus test was to see who calls father 'baba' and who calls him 'abba', the linguistic roots of all these words defy 'otherisation'. Baba comes from Arabic. Abba comes from Aramaic. And while people on this side of the border might call salt 'noon' and on the other side they might say 'lobon', both ultimately trace back to the same Sanskrit root 'lavan'. But then I read an essay in The Aerogram by Californian writer Nazia Islam about a grandmother who used both in the same breath. 'Arre noon/lobon de (give me more salt),' she would say. What will we do with her? But then, is there any room for the salt of the earth in a world of namak harams? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Malviya tempers stand on Sylheti speakers after criticism
GUWAHATI Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Amit Malviya has recalibrated his view on people speaking the Sylheti variant of Bengali. This follows the criticism he faced from Sylheti speakers, including some party leaders from Assam's Bengali-dominated Barak Valley, for justifying the Delhi Police's description of Bengali as a 'Bangladeshi language'. Sylheti is a Bengali dialect associated with the Sylhet district of Bangladesh. More than 70 lakh people in Assam, Meghalaya, and Tripura also speak the dialect. In a long tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on Baishe Shrabon, marking his death anniversary, Mr. Malviya said the Nobel laureate believed in the unity of India and played a pivotal role in forcing the reversal of the 1905 British colonial decision to partition Bengal. 'He was acutely aware of the plight of hapless Hindu Bengali Sylhetis, separated from Bengal and tossed about by political machinations, and empathised with their suffering,' the BJP leader wrote. 'Sylhet should have been part of India, of Bengal, but the Muslim League's collusion with the British ensured otherwise. Yet Hindu Bengali Sylhetis remained tied to India's national identity, and many have risen to national prominence,' Mr. Malviya's post read. Calling Tagore Bengal's greatest gift not only to India but to the world, the BJP leader said the literary genius's greatest contribution was to elevate the Bangla (Bengali) language to the exalted status it enjoys today, at home and abroad. 'It is the second most spoken language in India and an official language of the country; globally, it ranks among the ten most spoken languages. Through both prose and poetry, Tagore gave Bangla a literary richness that resonates universally. The music he composed transcends linguistic and geographical barriers—its appeal is timeless and universal,' Mr. Malviya wrote. He said Tagore's political consciousness was as keen as his literary acumen, and that his belief in the unity of the Indian people was embodied in Visva-Bharati, the institution he founded. 'Today, the nation bows to this great son of Bharat who celebrated Bengal, Bangaliness, and Bangla bhasha (language), not from a narrow lens of parochialism or regionalism, but as part of a universal humanism deeply rooted in the soil, culture, and civilisation of India,' he wrote. Mr. Malviya also took aim at West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, accusing her of attempting to undo what Tagore stood for. 'Mamata Banerjee and her cohorts, who are stoking a spurious and divisive controversy over the language and identity of Bengal and Indian Bengalis, will never match Gurudev Tagore's grand vision of Indian unity,' he wrote. He insisted that for decades no government had recognised Bangla as one of India's most prominent languages with a defining role in the subcontinent's cultural and linguistic history. 'It is the (Narendra) Modi government which accorded Bangla the status of Classical Language on 3 October 2024, an acknowledgement of its profound impact on shaping the Indian mind,' Mr. Malviya wrote. 'The fake champions of Bangla bhasha, who aggressively promote Urdu as the official language of West Bengal to pander to the basest anti-Bangla sentiments of a certain group, are undermining the very 'harmony of one life' that Gurudev envisioned. They deserve nothing but contempt,' he concluded.
Scroll.in
4 days ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Opinion: In Assam, vicious communal rhetoric is putting democracy at risk
Never has politics been so nasty, brutal and vindictive. Political language is marked by slights and slurs that were unknown in the past despite politicians holding contesting ideologies and contradictory viewpoints. Today, the space for conversation between politicians representing Assam in the state assembly has shrunk beyond measure. The space for dissent in society has also shrivelled. The narrative that undocumented migrants are the bane of all that's happening in Assam today; the relentless drive to dehumanise Bengali-speaking Muslims, thousands of whom are now homeless and without a country, has crossed out 'human rights' from the political discourse. Most of those rendered homeless in the state's campaign against those it claims are encroachers are not necessarily Bangladeshi migrants but they carry the weight of being the consumers of what rightfully belongs to the sons of the soil (read Assamese). Social media has only amplified such drivel. The latest burst of propaganda – that anyone speaking Sylheti is a Bangladeshi – by the functionary running the Bharatiya Janata Party's media cell, Amit Malviya, has crossed all boundaries of political decency. Bengal was the largest province in British India. Lord Curzon partitioned the Bengal province in 1905 on the plea that it was too large to be governed properly. Post partition, West Bengal included Western Bengal and the provinces of Bihar and Orissa. Eastern Bengal comprised Assam, Chittagong, Dacca, Rajshahi division, Tripura and Malda. Mamata Banerjee's reaction to Delhi Police referring to the language used by infiltrators as 'Bangladeshi' is not just misplaced, it is dangerously inflammatory. Nowhere in the Delhi Police letter is Bangla or Bengali described as a 'Bangladeshi' language. To claim otherwise and… — Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) August 4, 2025 Kolkata was the capital of British India and Bengal was the hub of the nationalist movement. It produced fighters like Subhas Chandra Bose, poets like Rabindranath Tagore to whom we owe the national anthem, social reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy and the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. It was the British craftiness that divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim majority sections. After Independence, when East Bengal became East Pakistan, there were migrations to the Indian side of the border in the same manner that people from West Pakistan crossed to India at great cost to their lives. That's why Sylheti. the language of Sylhet, is spoken by Bengalis in the Barak Valley, which used to be East Bengal and is Bangladesh today. That period of history that caused so much trauma should have taught us that humans do better in a spirit of co-existence than in othering and hate-mongering. But humans hardly learn any lessons from adversity. And politics is the poisonous brew that drives this hatred. It is amplified by a section of the media that is more than willing to take sides. And whose side does the media take? Not that of suffering humanity but of those wielding power, for, the media today is a watered-down version of itself. Some decades ago. when US President Ronald Reagan was interviewed by a section of the media, he said, 'In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.' We could not agree more with Reagan on this. When those in government fail to deliver governance but want stint in power, they tend as elections approach to create issues not related to governance but issues that divide the polity. In Assam today. it is a one-man government. We don't hear voices that will calm the chaos. It's as if the chief minister alone has taken upon himself the sole right of addressing the media. Assam society today is completely divided between Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus. We are on a mission to RECLAIM what rightfully belongs to us. Our forests, our lands, our Satras, our agriculture fields; we are going ALL OUT to ensure that only legitimate Indian citizens enjoy the joy of being in Assam. Rengma Reserve Forest ~ now ENCROACHMENT FREE. — Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) July 30, 2025 The Assamese, on the face of it seem united, more so the gentry which equates development to flyovers and malls that appear on the Guwahati skyline. The social order is broken. For the casual observer it would appear that the Assamese gentry has absolute faith in Himanta Biswa Sarma to deliver them from a fate that has its genesis in the Partition. Is this a rational aspiration? The overt and covert support to the present government tells us that the space for dissent has shrunk and that protests have become obsolete. Today, politics is driven purely by divisiveness and hatred. Day after day, TV channels and YouTubers carry out a vicious campaign against Muslims as if they do not deserve to live. Thousands of them are reduced to a life that hangs by a thread in what is the most inhuman treatment meted out to them. Sadly, the Assamese gentry is led to believe that this is what the Miya Muslims of Bengali origin deserve. Today we have reached a point in this country when asking hard questions from the ruling establishment turns you into a Pakistan sympathiser or an 'anti-national'. Never in the past, not even during the Emergency, did we feel this sense of repression that we feel today. And look at how the law is stood on its head. The Assam chief minister glibly states that only Muslims are being evicted from what is termed as 'encroachment' on forest and other categories of lands while the indigenous people can continue to occupy such lands because they are genuine citizens. Does the law allow such discriminatory practices? In this anti-Muslim atmosphere, even neighbouring states are not spared. The Assam chief minister is hell-bent on bringing to its knees the University of Technology and Management located on the Meghalaya side of the Assam-Meghalaya border simply because its chancellor and founder is a Muslim. Which right-thinking politician will want to bring down an institution merely out of personal pique? He has large sections of the population backing him. 'Under the BJP and Himanta Biswa Sarma, we are seeing visible development,' is their refrain. The question is, development at what cost? When democracy is at risk, enlightened citizens, intellectuals and civil society are expected to put the brakes and say, 'enough is enough.' But there's a complicit silence here. One wonders what lectures on democracy are being given in colleges and universities in Assam. We need political catharsis before an entire generation forgets the core principles of democracy.
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
Why Sylheti is not a ‘Bangladeshi language'
Amid a roiling controversy triggered by a Delhi Police letter seemingly referring to Bengali as the 'Bangladeshi national language,' a social media post by BJP leader Amit Malviya has sparked an outcry in Assam's Barak Valley. In his defence of the letter, Malviya claimed it was referring to 'a set of dialects, syntax, and speech patterns that are distinctly different from the Bangla spoken in India', and gave the example of 'Sylhelti' as being 'nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis'. What is Sylheti? What is the history of its speakers? And why have Malviya's comments touched a raw nerve in Assam? Dialect or language? Sylheti is spoken on both sides of the border, in the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh as well as the Barak Valley Division of southern Assam. There is also a sizable presence of Sylheti-speakers in neighbouring Meghalaya and Tripura. 'Every language has dialects and Bengali has several of them,' said Joydeep Biswas, who teaches economics in Cachar College. The primary argument for referring to Sylheti as a dialect of Bengali — and not a language in its own right — is mutual intelligibility, that is, speakers of both tongues understand each other. However, there is significant scholarly disagreement on the matter. 'The claim of mutual intelligibility by some speakers of both Sylheti and Bengali may be more an effect of the speakers' exposure to both languages,' linguists Candide Simard, Sarah M Dopierala, and E Marie Thaut wrote in 'Introducing the Sylheti language and its speakers' (2020). 'Sylheti-speaking areas of Bangladesh and India are characterised by diglossia, where standard Bengali is the language of education and literacy and Sylheti is the vernacular variety used in everyday interactions,' the linguists wrote. Speakers on both sides of the border nonetheless have a strong affinity to the Bengali language, and often identify as Bengali themselves. 'Families such as mine also speak Sylheti. But I identify my linguistic identity as Bengali because Sylheti is a dialect. Even if non-Sylhetis do not understand Sylheti, that doesn't take away the [Bengali] linguistic identity of the Sylheti people,' Biswas said. Tapodhir Bhattacharjee, a former vice-chancellor of Assam University Silchar and a Bengali literary theorist, said that the primary difference between the Sylheti dialect and standardised Bengali is phonetical, while the two are almost identical in morphology and syntax. While Bhattacharjee recognises that there was once a Sylhet-Nagri script — the existence of a unique system of writing is often seen as a marker of a language — he refers to it as an 'esoteric script'. 'It was never a common script used by all. It came into existence in the late medieval ages in Muslim society due to Persian influence. It was mostly used by Sufi fakirs in texts to express their mystic approach towards the Almighty,' he said. Sylhet, Partition & migration Historian Ashfaque Hossain refers to Sylhet as historically being 'a frontier of Bengal'. The present-day Sylhet Division in Bangladesh, comprising the districts of Habibganj, Sunamganj, Sylhet, and Moulvibazar, was made a part of Assam soon after it was split from Bengal in 1874. 'Although vast in area, this new province [Assam], with its population of 2.4 million, had a low revenue potential… To make it financially viable… [the British] decided in September 1874 to annex the Bengali-speaking and populous district of Sylhet. With its population of 1.7 million, Sylhet had been historically an integral part of Bengal,' Hossain wrote in 'The Making and Unmaking of Assam-Bengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum' (2013). Geographically contiguous with Cachar in the Bengali-majority Barak Valley, between 1874 and 1947, Sylhet witnessed a sustained churn over the question of whether it should be a part of Assam or Bengal. 'On one side, this was a matter of Bengali versus Assamese, and on the other, Hindu versus Muslim,' Hossain wrote. Historian Anindita Dasgupta wrote in 'Remembering Sylhet: A Forgotten Story of India's 1947 Partition', '… the Hindus of Sylhet demanded for a return to the more 'advanced' Bengal, whereas the Muslims by and large preferred to remain in Assam where its leaders, along with the Assamese Muslims, found a more powerful political voice…' But come 1947, this situation reversed. Now the Hindus of Sylhet demanded to remain in Assam, and hence India, while the Muslims sought to join East Pakistan. This culminated in a controversial referendum on July 6 and 7, 1947 which sealed the fate of the region: 2,39,619 of the valid votes were for joining East Pakistan and 1,84,041 were for remaining in India. When the official border was finally revealed in August, a part of Sylhet, comprising present-day Sribhumi (formerly Karimganj) district in the Barak Valley, remained in Indian Assam. In the initial years after Partition, a wave of Hindu Sylheti refugees settled in this region. The story of Sylheti migration to parts of present-day Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, however, is even older. Dasgupta wrote about 'Sylheti Hindu bhodrolok' who were 'economic migrants' across the region. 'Sylheti middle-class economic migrants to the Brahmaputra Valley and Cachar areas were a population in motion in colonial Assam, moving back and forth, many with simultaneous homes in both Sylhet and the Brahmaputra Valley districts and Cachar since the late nineteenth century,' she wrote in 'Denial and resistance: Sylheti Partition 'refugees' in Assam' (2001). The Census of 1901 noted that 'Sylhetis who are good clerks and are enterprising traders are found, in small numbers, in most of the districts of the province [Assam]'. There was thus a significant population of Sylhetis in what is now India well before East Pakistan, let alone Bangladesh, was even imagined. Outrage in Barak Valley The Hindu Bengalis of the Barak Valley are one of the strongest support bases for the BJP in Assam. Malviya's claim of the dialect being 'a shorthand for the linguistic markers used to profile illegal immigrants from Bangladesh' has thus drawn strong reactions not only from the BJP's political opponents in the Barak Valley but from within the party. 'Even today, at least three MPs and several state legislators across Assam and Tripura speak Sylheti natively… Over 7 million people in Northeast India — across Barak Valley, parts of Meghalaya and Tripura — speak Sylheti. They are proud Indian and Bengalis. To dismiss their language as something foreign, or 'non-Bengali,' is to rub salt in the wounds of a people already scarred by Partition,' prominent BJP leader and former Silchar MP Rajdeep Roy posted on X.
