What Are Your Names?
What are your names?
Feroz, Munna Quereshi, Rashid, Irshad, Naseem,
Monu, Naseer, Ankur, Jatin, Saurabh, Wakeel Hassan, Devender.
And what are your titles?
We are miners, sir.
But what are your titles?
We don’t have any
We never had any
We are miners or labourers or farmers or mill workers
or the thousands who die unnamed
cleaning the nullahs and the sewages
We are bound by our sweat, oppression and precarity
This is our title in India, sir.
(end)
Moumita Alam
On the night of November 28, 2023, relief was felt across India when, one by one, 41 men trapped in a tunnel in the hilly northern state of Uttarakhand came out alive, all of them, after 17 days of suspense. Fraternity’s scent spread nationwide as names appeared of the twelve toilers who, after giant machines had failed, dug with their hands the hole through which the trapped men surfaced. West Bengal’s young poet Moumita Alam wrote this poem about the diggers, who, as the names showed, included Muslims and Hindus.