Till the time Jacinta Kerketta went to a missionary boarding school in Jharkhand’s Manoharpur at the age of 13, she was witness to her mother Pushpa Anima Kerketta being beaten up and abused. This was at home in Siwan in undivided Bihar, where her father worked as a policeman.

In her book Angor (“embers” in her language, Sadri), Kerketta, an Adivasi, says: “For a long time, it was my mother’s sobs that resounded in the silence of my heart.”

Kerketta gets angry even now when she speaks of watching her mother walk behind her father in public, or having to wait till he finishes his meals before she can eat. It is this anguish that the 32-year old expresses in her poem “Bawandar aur Dishaayein,” talking of a tribal village being blown away like chaff by “development”, because “someone ought to make a sacrifice” – and this time too it is the turn of the Adivasi village. Read more

Source: Dhaka Tribune