Book Review -Chakmak by Ramesh Karthik Nayak
1 min read
Palash Mahmud reviews Chakmak by Ramesh Karthik Nayak calling it a poetic portrait of Banjara ancestry.
- ISBN: 978-8195305698
- Publisher: Red River Press
- Year of Publishing: 2023
- No. Pages: 72 pp.
- Price: ₹272
Why do we go back to our past to meet with our roots? Times pass by as far as ahead but we can’t leave behind the world where our constructed lives and evolved consciousness refuges. We cannot erase them from our collective memory. They remain, whether we exist or not. This sense of eternal returning to the ancestral identity vibrates and echoes from the “Spells of their past lives”, the prime verse of the first poem “Butterflies” to “They always wish they wander/into black clouds like Banjara Tribes:/the people with no address on the earth,/gypsies in the tale of times.”, the last stanza of the penultimate poem “Peacock” from the debut English poetry collection titled “Chakmak” (Red River Press, August 2023) penned by Ramesh Karthik Nayak, one of the pioneering poets from Banjara Tribes in South India, who writes in multiple languages namely Telugu, English, and Banjara dialect, the raw and rare incident in contemporary Indian poetry and a prime asset for the world literature from wandering people as we already have the enchanting American poet, Natalie Diaz.
