On June 12, three literary bodies representing the Muslims of Bengali origin in Assam asked members of the community to declare their language as Assamese in the ongoing Census.
There was nothing exceptional about the statement. Since the 1950s, Muslims of Bengali origin, whose ancestors had settled in the region in the late 19th century , have been enlisting themselves as Assamese in every Census. They have done so to assimilate with the native population, as well as to blunt the hostility of the larger Assamese society towards “outsiders”.
But a day later, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma dismissed the appeal by the organisations and called it a “fraud” by the Bengali-origin Muslim community, who are also sometimes derogatorily referred to as Miya Muslims.
“What is the benefit if one doesn’t speak Assamese at home but writes Assamese as their mother tongue?” Sarma said at a press conference in Dispur.
The Assamese language, Sarma said, will survive even if only 20% of the state’s population declare it as their language.
But Assamese authors and civil society groups have sharply criticised the chief minister, arguing that the historical role of the Muslims of Bengali origin in protecting the language cannot be denied. If Assamese is spoken by only 20% of the population, “the Assamese-speakers will become a linguistic minority in Assam,” said Harekerishna Deka, a writer and the former director-general of police. “Hindutva may win, but Assameseness will not.”
Representatives of three literary bodies of char dwellers from Muslim communities. Credit: Special Arrangement. The neo-Assamese
Language is a highly emotive subject in Assam and intertwined with Assamese subnationalism and identity.
In 1836, the British government had declared Bengali the official language of the state, leading to widespread protests. The decision was eventually withdrawn, but it seeded an anxiety about linguistic identity that has persisted to this day.
Assam is also home to several linguistic communities, and in the 1931 Census, Assamese speakers accounted for only 31.4% of the population.
Two decades later, the proportion of Assamese speakers in the state went up sharply to 56.7%, as a large number of Muslims of Bengali origin identified themselves as Assamese speakers.
In their June 12 statement, the three literary bodies – Char Chapori Sahitya Sabha, Char Chapori Sahitya Parishad and Char Chapori Axomiya Samaj – laid out a historical account of how the dwellers of chars, shifting riverine islands in the Brahmaputra, adopted the Assamese identity. They were described variously as “Na-Asomiya” or Neo-Assamese, Assamese of East Bengal origin and by the derogatory epithet of Miya Muslims.
“Our ancestors decided, from the third and fourth decades of the 20th century, that the mother tongue of the Char-Chaporis would be written as Assamese in the Census,” the bodies said. “Not just that, our ancestors established the first Assamese medium school in 1899, and we have been studying in Assamese medium schools to be part of Assamese society since then.”
The literary bodies asserted: “[Our] mother tongue is still Assamese and will remain Assamese in the future.”
For most of Assam’s history, the Bengali-origin Muslims have stuck to this decision, with many of them refusing to identify as Bengalis. An exception arose in 2019, during the contentious updating of the National Register of Citizens, when a campaign urged Bengali-origin Muslims not to enlist themselves as Assamese, as adopting the language had not prevented their citizenship to be called into doubt.
However, that stayed a minority view.
The appeal by the prominent literary bodies came weeks after the remarks of Basanta Kumar Goswami, who heads the Asam Sahitya Sabha, the apex literary body in the state.
Goswami had lauded the role of the Muslims of Assam’s chars in “strengthening the Assamese linguistic community” as their continued identification as Assamese speakers in the Census is “crucial for safeguarding” the language and cultural identity of the state.
“If the Muslims of char-chapori areas do not support the Assamese language movement, Assamese people may one day become second-class citizens,” he said. “We consider the people of the chars as Assamese and as sons of the soil. A large section of Assamese speakers today comes from these areas,” Goswami said.
অসমীয়া ভাষা অসমত চন্দ্ৰ সূৰ্য থকালৈকে ২০% শতাংশই কলেও থাকিব বুলি মুখ্যমন্ত্ৰীয়ে কোৱা কথা বিশ্বাস নকৰিব । অসমীয়া ভাষাক নিশকটীয়া কৰিবলৈ এফালৰ পৰা চৰকাৰী মাধ্যমিক বিদ্যালয় সমূহ নিঃশেষ কৰি অহা হৈছে । হিন্দী বলয়ৰ কবলত অসম ! এটা জাতি জীয়াই থাকিবলৈ ভাষা , সংস্কৃতি জীয়াই ৰাখিব…
— Mira Borthakur Goswami (@borthakur_mira) June 15, 2026
Who is Assamese?
The Assam chief minister, who has repeatedly targeted the Bengali-origin Muslim community throughout his tenure, appeared to downplay that history.
Sarma said that debates surrounding the survival of Assamese based on percentage calculations were outdated. He accused…
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