‘I will never [again] sing in Assamese’

In August 2023, Afiya Khatun’s singing went viral.

It happened by chance: a user on X (formerly Twitter) shared a video of hers. It showed Khatun singing in a dialect native to the Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam. Accompanying her were her two sons playing the dotara (a two-stringed instrument used in Bengali folk music) and dhol (drum).

The lyrics of her song went:

Jonotare’i shobai mile thana’e thana’e ejaar diley, Himanto Sorkar bule doiyoshi reh.
Jonotare zalahiya, Himantor ei jontrona, Jonota’e shoite ar pare na.
Ar koto jalai’be bolo na,
Ar koto jalai’be bolo na

[People have collectively filed police complaints in one police station after another; they say that the Himanta government is guilty.
People are being harassed, see the torture by Himanta. People cannot tolerate it anymore.
Please tell me how much more you will harass us?
Please tell me how much more you will harass us?]

The song, she tells us, was in response to the mass arrests of people from her Muslim community under Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s state-wide drive to curb child marriage.

“The song came from deep anguish and the collective suffering of my community,” Khatun says. “Someone had to raise their voice.” Over 3,900 people were arrested in Assam in the first crackdown on child marriages launched in February 2023. Hundreds more have been arrested since, and an overwhelming number are Bengali Muslims.

In no time, the song and the description of her as an ‘Assamese mother’ in the X post put Khatun at the centre of a raging political debate on social media. People online posted harsh and derogatory tweets questioning the legitimacy of her identity as an Assamese woman.

Khatun was however, unaware of the scorn, and what many see as orchestrated hate, that her video received. The 36-year-old from Dera Pathar No. 4 NC village has been a social media content creator for the last two years. Raised by Bengali Muslim parents who stayed away from music in line with their religious values, Khatun was the exception – a child prodigy with a penchant for singing and composing songs.

Her home lies in the rich sugarcane belt of Assam’s Hojai district. Her studio is a room with bamboo walls; musical instruments, a desk crowded with electronics, a standing mike and a poster with details of her social media handles lie around. Khatun’s days usually follow a regular pattern: she finishes her household chores in the morning, then draped in her best saree, she dresses up her younger children and sings Bengali folk songs. “I like my bit of singing and dancing for the world to see,” she tells PARI.

Khatun’s eldest son, Atikur Rahman, shoots these songs on an iPhone they purchased recently. He later edits the videos with his friend on a second-hand laptop, before uploading them to Khatun’s social media accounts. Her two younger sons – 12-year-old Monzurul Haque and 8-year-old Jahangir Alam – often join their mother in singing. “This is our world now,” Khatun says, joyfully. Her avatar as a social media content creator does not surprise her children.

“You give my amma [mother] a word, and she will make a song out of it,” Rahman, her eldest son, says with pride. “She is that good.”

The idea of introducing his mother to social media struck 21-year-old Rahman during the nationwide lockdown following the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2021. He was working as a mason in Kerala then. “The lockdown brought our work to a halt and I used to spend time watching reels and videos on social media of men and women singing songs,” he says. “This is when I thought, ‘Why not launch my mother on social media?’”

A year later Rahman returned to the village and on October 26, 2022, created a YouTube channel under Khatun’s name. A day later, Khatun uploaded her first video singing a Bengali folk song titled, ‘Amrar Duniyar etim karur baba-mai kamun roilo’ (How do the parents of those orphaned live in our world)? Her younger sons, her husband Abdul Shohid and some neighbours joined the chorus. “The video received 5,000 views in just a few days,” Rahman recalls. “We saw people subscribing to the channel.”

Khatun was a singing sensation on social media!

Now two years later (February 2025), Khatun has over 468,000 subscribers on YouTube, and roughly 578,000 followers on Facebook.

When PARI visited her at her home in July 2024, Khatun was initially hesitant to speak. “The complaint and the ridicule she faced demoralised her,” her husband Shohid, a sugarcane farmer, told us. “[Earlier] she would always welcome guests and sing for them,” he added.

But this changed after a police complaint was lodged against her on May 9, 2024, by Sonai Poria Silpi Mancha, a collective of artists from Assam’s Nagaon district.

The complaint came a few days after Khatun uploaded a video of herself and her two children singing ‘Bilote Halise’, a song by the late Assamese artist Bishnu Prasad Rabha.

“This is a song I have grown up listening to and singing,” she says. “So I thought I should sing this in his honour.”

But Jitu Srawan, president of the Sonai Poria Silpi Mancha claims that her song was musically unsound and ‘hurt’ the sentiments of Assamese people. Srawan added that he asked the police to take action against her “so that in future no such activities ‘shaming’ Assamese happen.”

The local authorities soon knocked on Khatun’s door. “It felt like the land beneath us caved in when we saw them,” she says. “We had never had police at our door.” Multiple trips to the police station would follow until the collective withdrew their complaint once Khatun and her children apologised and deleted the video from their social media.

Khatun points out that although many Assamese sing in Hindi, no one files complaints against them. “Because we are Miyas, we are being legally harassed for singing an Assamese song.” The word ‘Miya’ is often used pejoratively for Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam. “We will never [again] sing in Assamese,” she says. “Never.”

However, Khatun’s children have taken up the mike: “Ami ashami singer bonmu ekdin [I will become an Assamese singer one day]”, says Jahangir Alam, the youngest son who features in most of the videos. He is more resolute than ever about earning respect for her saying, “I will sing Assamese songs on behalf of my mother.”

Bengali Muslims have time and again faced resistance from Assamese ethno-nationalist groups, especially when they’ve tried to assert their cultural identity in the face of allegedly state-led oppression.

On July 10, 2019, several poets from the Bengali Muslim community were booked in a case after a journalist from Guwahati filed a FIR (First Information Report) against them for writing poetry in their native Miya dialect. The verses criticised the final draft of the National Register of Citizens which was slated to be published on August 31 of that year.

In another incident in October 2022, the Assam government shut down a museum commemorating the cultural history of Bengali Muslims stating that the items displayed were not unique to their culture. The Assam police also detained three Muslim men linked to the museum for having alleged ties to terror outfits and booked them under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

Suraj Gogoi, an Assamese sociologist points out that only those that caste Assamese consider indigenous can sing an Assamese song. “The rest like Khatun and her community which are seen as poor ‘illegal immigrants’ face criminalisation if they want to assert their cultural identities through their art as a mark of resistance against majoritarian oppression,” adds Gogoi who teaches at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode.

Despite the relentless slings and arrows of prejudice and oppression, Khatun has become an icon for many. While she has stopped singing songs on social issues surrounding her community, locals as well as people from other villages approach her to raise funds for medical and educational help through her channel.

“I will sing for those who need me,” she says. “At least those I help will not file a complaint against me over my identity.”