Aleya Akhtara: Voicing the stories of the silenced

Of the six fundamental rights guaranteed to every Indian citizen under the constitution, right to culture and education is one. ‘Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part there of having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same”, says the constitution.

The question is, how do you ensure these rights to people who don’t get to know their culture in the first place?

Aleya Akhtara Begum, a Community Correspondent for IndiaUnheard community news service comes from West Garo Hills of Meghalaya. A Bengali Muslim, Aleya represents a community which is both lingual and religious minority in Meghalaya.

Her village Halladiyaganj is located along the Indo-Bangladesh border. Like everyone else in her village, Aleya’s mother tongue is also Bengali. But to get admission in a school, she needed to learn Assamese. Why? Because there are no schools in her area offering education in Bengali medium. Why so? ‘Because being we are not Garos or Khasis – the majority tribes. In fact we are often branded as ‘foreigners’ and told to be happy with whatever options we got’, she says.

Aleya stopped studying once she completed high school. Because there was no Assamese college. All the state colleges had English as the official language, which she had little knowledge of.

5 years after that, Aleya got married. A day before the marriage, her mother arranged for a few women to come and sing wedding songs while Aleya had Henna applied on her hands. Like the mehandi/henna, the geet/music had been part of a wedding in that village for generations. But this time it caused an uproar nobody ever expected.

‘The Maulavi who was to perform the rituals of getting us married’, recalls Aleya, ‘came to know there were women singing at my home. He stormed in, without a notice and scolded my mother for having such “ indecent” event. He said by singing songs about other gods, we had violated our religion. We couldn’t believe just by singing songs we could become ungodly’

The shock notwithstanding, Aleya’s mom had to send everyone back home because the Maulavi had threatened to call the marriage off if the music didn’t stop at once. What made him furious was that all the songs that the ladies sang were about the love story of Krishna and Radha – the Hindu god and his consort. It was a common theme of wedding songs in both Hindu and Muslim communities along Indo-Bangla border. ‘For centuries folk writers and singers of both communities wrote and sang them and nobody ever saw it as a religious issue. But now we were told, these were not our songs’, Aleya says, with a wry smile.

So here she is – a community voice who, as a child, was denied the opportunity to study the language she speaks, and as an adult, barred from celebrating her culture. She is here, so no more stories like hers go unheard.