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

— from ‘Night’

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

— from ‘Celebration’

of pollen dust-stained fireflies

churndarkness.

It’s really fascinating to see how, in these images, Nayak coaxes all other words to converge on the verb, which then propels that image into the reader’s mind-screen. And the reason he is able to achieve this artistic feat with such consistency is that his poems flow from living (as opposed to imaginary) interactions between the natural world and humans who inhabit it. There are very few ballast-words in Chakmak, since all the poems in this collection are as lean as the inhabitants of the natural world they champion.

Nayak may have apparently inherited from the Banjara folk songs that he grew up listening to. In a poem titled “The Moon”, he lets the reader enter with their guard down:

A white bird

in the quest for star grains.A white boat

in the boundless dark blue ocean.

And just as they are about to conclude, “been there, done that”, he hits them with the next three stanzas, beginning with:

A white wound

in the labyrinth of life.

Nayak abstains from urbane poetic forms such as the sonnet even when they are well within reach. For instance, his poem “Dream of an Eagle” is in two stanzas of seven and six lines, respectively. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to turn this neatly constructed poem into a sonnet, but Nayak does not fall into that trap and chooses to maintain the integrity of his poetic lineage.

Feasting on music

Like any true tribal, Nayak often feasts on folk. The infectious rhythms of frame-drums and nangaras reverberate throughout the collection. If you find yourself unable to match steps with his lines, get acquainted with the primordial rhythms of the nangara – the kind that you can actually hear in ritualistic Banjara bhajans. The verses come from a world in which:

Women circle around the bonfire and sing,

— from ‘Celebration’

men beat frame drums,

children touchnangara.

In this world, music is not just a means of scuttling from one bored moment to another but an integral part of life, elevating humans to a plane where their kinship with the natural world becomes evident. In the same poem, Nayak speaks of this transcendental experience:

thunder bands of frame-drums

— from ‘Celebration’

create a familiarity

between nature and tribe.

Not only are the rhythms original, but Nayak also infuses day-to-day words with new shades of meaning. Here, the dictionary meaning of the word “familiarity” will take readers some distance away from the core of the poem that celebrates:

…discovering

and bowing souls before nature.

Where are the trees?

I also employed a couple of digital humanities tools to quantitatively analyse Ramesh’s poems in this collection. Perhaps not unexpectedly, I found nature words such as “earth” and “sky” topping the list with 35 and 23 occurrences, respectively. Somewhat unexpectedly, the word “tree” appears in sixth place with only 13 occurrences. It saddened me to see that trees are disappearing even from the poems of our tribal poets.

While I am not pedalling the reductionist dogma that tribal poets must write about trees, but maybe trees are indeed disappearing from our tribal poetry. In An Unanswered People: An Anthology of Contemporary Adivasi Poetry from India (2025), edited by Kanjibhai Patel, a surprisingly meagre number of poems actually contains the word “tree”. In one of his poems, Nayak provides us with a clue to this brutal reality:

Trees:

— from ‘Tattoo’

the forest that

our ancestors lost.

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

Grandmother said

— from ‘Tree’

trees are my ancestors.

The fact that Nayak’s poems are in English distinguishes Chakmak from the majority of tribal poetry, which reaches many of us through translation. With translation comes – whether you like it or not – a flattening of not just the poet’s language but even of the poet’s experiences. By writing this collection in English, Nayak has spared his poems the ontological nightmare of translational flattening (although there are visible signs of editorial flattening). Here’s hoping this young poet from Telangana keeps exploring uncharted territories in his future collections.

Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre is a bilingual poet, translator, and scholar of Marathi Bhakti poetry. He is a recipient of the 2025 PEN Presents × SALT award for his translation of poems by 14th-century Dalit saint-poets. He is the Founder-President of the Sitaram Mhatre Foundation, where he runs the Bhakti Digital Humanities Lab for computational literary research. He also serves as Editor-at-Large (India) for Asymptote Journal.

Chakmak, Ramesh Karthik Nayak, Red River Press.

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