I spent a week staying among and interacting with the staff and the students at three remote tribal schools of Dahanu Taluka in Palghar District. Almost all the urban teachers had the same complaints against their students: “They don’t sit in one place at all.” “They have a very limited attention span.” “When inside the classroom, they keep staring vacantly through the windows; but the moment they leave the classroom, they run around like a calf with zoomies.” I was so happy to hear these complaints because these are the same complaints that have been made by generations of the urban teachers who embarked on the mission to educate the tribals as a response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call at the 1937 Wardha Conference. Fortunately, I stayed long enough to catch those 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 apart from. Nor do they look at it as a thing they can exploit for their benefit using geo-metry and geo-graphy. For them, the earth is still their Mother, to be revered, to be cherished. I was happy to see that all the efforts to bottle up that force of nature have failed rather spectacularly. The reason to bring up all this schmaltz is the poetry collection Chakmak by Ramesh Karthik Nayak. And it gladdens my heart to note here that I found the bursts of the very same ebullience throughout this book.

 

 

This ebullience is best manifested in the way Ramesh constructs his imagery. Neither the abstract nouns nor the qualitative adjectives that make up the lock, stock, and barrel for much of mainstream poetry’s imagery, but the action verbs carry the images in his poems. Look at how exquisitely he captures the night-life in a forest in this striking image:

​

Bats and owls

ransack the night.

(‘Night’, p. 15)

 

Notice how he strips the image to the bare minimum and then lets the verb carry it. All the vividity and all the vivacity of that image comes from that one word: ransack. Ramesh is such an excellent master of verbs that 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.

(‘Celebration’, p. 19)

 

It’s really fascinating to see how in his images Ramesh coaxes all other words to inevitably converge on the verb which then propels that image with such might onto the reader’s mind-screen that it burns-in deep and stays there long after the book is kept aside. And the reason that he is able to achieve this humongous artistic feat with such effortless consistency is that his poems are born through inextricable living (as opposed to imaginary) interactions between the natural world and the humans that inhabit it. In contrast, the majority of the poems born within the confines of four walls have to rely on all the crutches that ballast-words can provide. You will find no such ballast-words in Chakmak since all the poems in this collection are as lean as the inhabitants of the natural world they champion.

 

 

Ramesh is a master-craftsman, too, who has a profound understanding of the poetic form, which he has apparently inherited from the Banjara folk songs that he grew up listening to. In a poem titled “The Moon” (p. 19), he lets the reader enter with their guards down:

 

A white bird

in the quest for star grains.

 

A white boat

in the boundless dark blue ocean.

 

And when they are about to adjudicate “been there, done that”, he hits them in the solar plexus with the next three stanzas, beginning with:

           

A white wound

in the labyrinth of life.

 

At the same time, he also exhibits exemplary restraint in abstaining from chasing such urbane poetic forms as sonnet even when they are well within reach. For instance, his poem ‘Dream of an Eagle’ comes in two stanzas of 7 and 6 lines each. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to turn this neatly constructed poem into a very plausible sonnet, but Ramesh does not fall for that trap and chooses to maintain the integrity of his poetic lineage. Such artistic restraint is a sure shot sign that a great poet is in making!

 

 

Like any true tribal man, Ramesh’s mind feasts on music viz. Banjara folk music. The ebullient rhythms of frame-drums and the nangaras reverberate throughout his collection. If you find that you are not able to match steps with his lines, get acquainted with the primordial rhythms of the nangara — not the fake nangaras that the politicians pose with for their electorates, but the ones that you can actually hear in ritualistic Banjara bhajans, because this collection arises from a world in which:

 

Women circle around the bonfire and sing,

men beat frame drums,

children touch nangara.

(‘Celebration’, p. 18)

 

In this world, music is not just a means of scuttling from one bored moment to another but an integral part of life and acts as a power that elevates the humans to a plane of existence where their kinship with the natural world becomes self-evident. In the same poem quoted above, Ramesh speaks of this transcendental experience:

 

thunder bands of frame-drums

create a familiarity

between nature and tribe.

(‘Celebration’, p. 19)

 

Not just that the rhythms are delectably different, but Ramesh has a knack to infuse day-to-day words with the shades of meaning they couldn’t hold before. Here, the dictionary meaning of the word ‘familiarity’ will take the readers miles away from the core of the poem that celebrates:

 

…discovering

and bowing souls before nature.

 

 

I also employed a couple of digital humanities tools to quantitatively analyse Ramesh’s poems in this collection. Quite as I expected, I found the nature-words such as ‘earth’ and ‘sky’ topping the list with 35 and 23 occurrences respectively. What came as a not-so-pleasant surprise is that the word ‘tree’ appears on the sixth place with only 13 occurrences (all the declensions computed). It saddened me to see that trees are disappearing even from the poems of our tribal poets. Of course, I am not pedalling a reductionist dogma here that the tribal poets must write about trees, but the fact remains that trees are disappearing from our tribal poetry. Need proof? How about rummaging through the pages of the magnificent tome (510 pages) that Kanjibhai Patel has put together in An Unanswered People: An Anthology of Contemporary Adivasi Poetry from India (2025) and see how many poems actually contain the word ‘tree’. Out of sight, out of mind, right? How long can a poet go on writing enthusiastically about something that they can’t see anymore? The situation with our tree-cover is much worse than we like to admit. In one of his poems, Ramesh has provided us a clue to this stark reality:

 

Trees:

the forest that

our ancestors lost.

(‘Tattoo’, p. 56)

 

Their trees didn’t disappear in his times, or his father’s: they were already gone long, long ago. No wonder that the most poignant lines about trees in this collection take the form of a distant memory:

 

Grandmother said

trees are my ancestors.

(‘Tree’, p. 13)

 

 

Now, the only reason that I could carry out all of the above analyses of the poems in Chakmak is because Ramesh Karthik Nayak has written it in English. This one attribute makes it uniquely different from the majority of tribal poetry that reaches us through translation. With translation comes — whether you like it or not — flattening of not just the poet’s language but even of the poet’s experiences. By writing this collection in English, Ramesh has spared his poems from suffering this ontological nightmare of translational flattening (although there are visible signs of editorial flattening). This is the reason I could focus on unravelling the linguistic and formal beauty of this exquisitely written collection rather than having to focus entirely on its themes and its ecocriticality. Hoping that this young poet from Telangana keeps on exploring uncharted territories in his future collections, I will wrap up with an unsolicited advice: Dear friend, stick to your own word-choices which are born out of your own lived experiences because no matter how talented and how well-meaning your draft-readers and editors are, they can never reach anywhere near your lived-reality — even if their equivalents on the pages seem to effervesce. You have succeeded in capturing your lived experiences like the living colours of the wings of the butterflies in your poems. Please protect their life spirit from any touch of urbane artificiality. Stay young and stay tribal.

 

 

 

Disclaimer: The author does not consider the efforts towards tribal education as a failure. Mr. Ramesh Karthik Nayak himself is a perfect example of its success.