Sylhetis Erotic

Ask a Sylheti where home is and the answer often comes in two places at once: a village in the Surma or Kushiyara floodplain, and a street in East London or Birmingham. Sylhetis are the people of the Sylhet region in northeastern Bangladesh and the neighboring Barak Valley of Assam, India. It is a low, green country of tea gardens, rivers and haor wetlands that flood into inland seas every monsoon. Three things hold Sylhetis together: a language of their own, a religious life built around saints and song, and more than a century of working abroad and sending money home. Sylheti is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, closely related to Bengali and Assamese. Bangladesh treats it as a dialect of Bengali, but a listener from Dhaka will struggle with it. Many consonants shift, so the word for water, pani in Bengali, becomes fani. The grammar and vocabulary differ enough that many linguists count Sylheti as a separate language. It once had its own script, Sylheti Nagri, used mainly for Muslim religious and story poems. The script faded in the twentieth century and is now seeing a small revival. Most Sylhetis read and write standard Bengali, and many born in Britain speak English first.

Most Sylhetis are Sunni Muslims, and Islam here has a strong Sufi stamp. Local memory credits the coming of Islam to Shah Jalal, a saint who arrived with his companions in the early fourteenth century. His shrine in Sylhet city draws pilgrims every day. There is also a sizable Hindu minority, which makes up a larger share of the population in the Barak Valley. Hindus have a saint of their own to claim: the family of Chaitanya, the Bengali Vaishnava reformer, came from Sylhet. The mystic songs of Hason Raja and Shah Abdul Karim belong to everyone. At Hindu weddings, women still clap and move in a circle for the dhamail, a dance set to songs about Radha and Krishna. Sylheti history runs on borders and departures. In 1947 a referendum moved most of Sylhet, until then part of Assam, into Pakistan's eastern wing. The Karimganj area stayed with India, and the new border cut through families and markets. Long before that, Sylheti men had worked as stokers and cooks on British steamships out of Calcutta, and some settled in London. Their ties to home villages and relatives grew into mass migration to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and Sylhetis came to run most of the country's curry houses. In Whitechapel in 1978, the murder of garment worker Altab Ali brought thousands of people into the streets. It became a turning point in the fight against racist violence. Back in Sylhet, Londoni is still the word for a family with British money, and their tall houses stand out among the rice fields.