‘Chakmak’: A poetry collection about tribal life is essential for the re-education of the urban mind

Some time ago, I spent a week staying among and interacting with the staff and the students at three remote tribal schools of Dahanu Taluka in Maharashtra’s Palghar District. I stayed long enough to catch bursts of ebullience on the school playground day after day. That ebullience is the very force of nature running through their veins – the nature that they don’t see themselves as being distinct from.

Ramesh Karthik Nayak’s poetry collection Chakmak is replete with bursts of the very same ebullience throughout this book. It is best manifested in the way Nayak constructs his imagery. The abstract nouns or the qualitative adjectives that account for the lock, stock, and barrel of much of the imagery in mainstream poetry are not his weapons. Instead, it is the action verbs that convey the images in his poems. Consider the way Nayak captures nightlife in a forest:

Bats and owls
ransack the night.

He strips the image to the bare minimum and then lets the verb carry it. All the vividity and the vivacity of that image come from that one word: ransack. Even when an image is loaded with sensory words, it is his verbs that carry the image:

The ambience
of pollen dust-stained fireflies
churn darkness.

It’s really fascinating to see how, in...

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