What It Means to Be a Bengali Muslim in India Today
Mass evictions of people living in slums across cities, using force, allegations of harbouring ‘illegal migrants’ have acquired phenomenal pace in the past few months. Calling out certain demographics, like Muslims and those who speak in Bengali, as non-citizens and housing them in ‘holding centres’ has made the exercise acquire a menacing character. The Wire reports on people vital to building city infrastructure, living on the margins, now suddenly finding their citizenship challenged.
My days are now buzzing with restless, anxious calls from friends, families, acquaintances and neighbours. All these calls carry the same helplessness, the same disbelief, the same problems, the same anxiety – the misspelt names of their respective parents, forefathers or their own.
When the NRC (National Register of Citizens) was introduced in Assam, about 3 crore Muslims in West Bengal were anxious and worried and started digging in the sands of papers. The never-so-politically conscious Bengali Muslims of Bengal had neither any clues nor did they have leaders from their communities who could guide them in the exercise.
After Bengal was partitioned and many eminent Bengalis migrated to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, Bengali Muslims never found the cultural, social and political clout in West Bengal as Bengali Muslims had had in an undivided Bengal.
When the Citizenship Amendment Bill (later Act) was brought and protests erupted, from the drawing room conversations of Bengali Muslims to the famous Bengali cha adda, everything revolved around the same conversations – the papers and the misspelt names.
Time is a monster. It eats up everything. And poverty and hunger are more conspicuous than anything. So, COVID-19 and the lockdown thereafter lulled the villainous NRC and thousands of migrant workers again started their journey in search of roti to different states, crammed into the general compartment of trains from Bengal to other places like Kerala, Maharashtra, Delhi, Tamil Nadu. All of them had the same name: migrant workers.
After Himanta Biswa Sarma started another round of vitriolic hate campaign in Assam, with the assembly elections looming on the horizon and SIR (special intensive revision) of the voter list started in Bihar, migrant workers have become the soft targets again. Bengali Muslim migrant workers are caught in the vortex of this and several have been mistreated and pushed into Bangladesh.
With the SIR implemented in Bihar, which the state’s people are calling votebandi (vote ban), the people of West Bengal, who are widely suffering from it, are calling it a new form of NRC. As a result, the ghost of 2019 NRC exercise has returned, or perhaps, it never died at all. People are once again running from pillar to post correcting names.
How can one correct the name of their dead ancestors? The answer remains unknown.
I had seen my paternal aunt, who got married in Assam, searching fanatically for her parents' land papers during the NRC in Assam. A mismatch was found in her papers. The prefix ‘Md’ – Mohammad – from my grandfather’s name was dropped in her paper. She failed to submit all the papers on time and her name was dropped from the NRC. Unfortunately or fortunately, she passed away last February.
A chill runs down my spine whenever I think of the trauma she would have faced in present-day Assam under the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led government. Death got rid of her pain from the papers.
Why Muslim Names Are Often Misspelt And Mispronounced
There are many reasons for this to happen. Arabic names with colloquial pronunciations sometimes make it difficult for data collectors to spell names correctly. At the same time, the role of job stress among contractual workers, who are given this work, can't be ignored.
In most cases, private firms are given responsibility for the data collection and document verification. The underpaid workers are overburdened. Focused on finishing the work, many have misspelt names.
The increase in job participation of Muslims in the government workforce could make things better. However, due to the backwardness of the Bengali Muslims in all the parameters of development, the number of Bengali Muslims in government jobs is 6.8% (between the years 2008-2016).
The misogynistic, patriarchal roles leading to mistakes in names or changes in the names of Muslim women can't be ignored either. In the Muslim community, there is a patriarchal notion of adding the suffix ‘Bibi’ if any enumerator finds a woman married.
I work in a village government-run madrasa in Murshidabad, where I have seen officials suddenly, without any affidavit and without even taking consent from the women themselves, adding ‘Bibi’ to their existing names if married, as if it is a stamp the married women must carry. In the same way, the suffix “বেওয়া” (Bewa) is added for widowed Muslim women.
No wonder when I visited an Aadhaar card correction centre in Murshidabad in 2019 for an appointment for address change, the officer-in-charge sarcastically said, “Here, 100% of Muslim women have mistakes in their names,” and then gave me an appointment one year later.
But even a missed alphabet is not just a benign mistake, it's about the indifference and reluctance of the majority community to acknowledge the culture and the existence of minorities.
No wonder Siddharth Varadarajan’s friend Ziya Us Salam could not travel with him to attend the book launch when both their names were misspelt on the tickets. But while Siddharth was allowed to enter, they did not let in Zia, who has a long beard.
A drop of a letter from a Muslim name not only prevents them from boarding a flight, but also can completely undo a person and push them into Bangladesh.
No wonder Bengali Muslims are once again searching for their papers, for only they know how dangerous the cocktail of this dual identity – Bengali and Muslim – is in present-day India.
Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. She has two published collections of poetry. Her work has been translated in Telugu and Tamil.
This article went live on August seventh, two thousand twenty five, at fifty-two minutes past eight in the morning.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
