The ‘Miyah’ community of the Northeast Indian state of Assam is formed from the descendants of migrant Bengali-Muslims living in the chars (low-lying islands prone to floods and erosion). 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 the national or state level. In poetry and song originally written mostly in Assamese or local dialects spok...