O ancestral spirits!
How now do we escape,
From the conspiracies of time,
Concocted on the flames
That from the sweltering earth rise?
Where all is slowly being roasted alive,
The air, the forests, and the soil,
And man – in body and in mind?
– Lament in Songs (Geeton Ke Bilaap) through Jacinta Kerketta
A profound political philosopher of ancient Athens whose administrational academics left people in admiration and aghast protested against poets and critiqued poetries. He feared the passion or public emotion evoked by poets, and he reckoned that rational thought could be ravaged by public passion.
“For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.”
― Plato
Poetry is one of the ancient art forms, the earliest kinds of poems were recited and passed on orally before the evolution of scripts. Administrative and ancestral accounts were more merely to remember due to the poem’s rhythmic and repetitious nature.
Influence of poetry in politics
Through triumph and terror or from pain to power, poetry allows people to paint different shades of human emotions. Poetry has served as a significant tool to convey meanings and messages since the beginning. It is also used as a channel to cast awareness on sound socio-economic concerns and personify political questions. Poems play a pivotal role in collective resonation to specific themes and it embraces the efficiency of words which could be serene as a sea or sharp as a sword.
In the year 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote eloquently in his essay A Defence of Poetry that the poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that shape the social order and“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Political poetries pave a path to discuss injustice in the societies and build a bridge between the emotive expression of the state administrators and its citizens. Political poetries are not definitive they are not bureaucratic blueprints or literary balms either, they imprint the cyclic endurance of the past, present, and future. They massively represent the public’s fear and anguish or equip the endangered with empowerment.
Adrienne Rich compellingly stated in a commentary that –
Profile and position of indigenous people of India
Histories have created many poets and many poets have influenced histories, traditionally archiving their histories through songs, folklore, and myths. Adivasis have aced their way through their ancestral accounts accumulation. Adivasis are folks who function their lives through flourishing flora and fauna encapsulated with enriching cultures and practices and lives among the areas of the Indian sub-continent. Adivasi is a common term that was coined in the 1930s to address the indigenous groups of India, while the legal term ”scheduled tribes” is used in the constitution. They are the most prehistoric inhabitants of the sub-continent who are a heterogeneous group with diverse ethnicity and linguistics. Post the Aryan intervention the Adivasis began to trade with people of the plains, it was during the mid-eighteenth century that the indigenous people of the east revolted against the political British and its intrusive regulation upon the mainlands of the indigenous folks.
This renounced the defenceless position of the land and its people. Even, today the Adivasis encounter various forms of social discrimination, political power lash, and remain economically stagnant.
Balance between battles and banquets- Political poetries of the past and the present
Songs, myths, and folklore revolving around landscapes, political relations among the Adivasis or with the non-Adivasis, human emotions were all oral histories being passed on to the next generation. The stories of Adivasis were massively written by people who did not belong to the Adivasi community, the literary endeavours of the tribes were not adequately acknowledged due to the lack of recognition of languages amongst the state. The poems written by the poets or writers of the community have an extensive influence over the political lives of Adivasis in terms of the political periphery. In most poems by the Adivasis, the muscles of metaphors were majorly merged with nature or the environment. The largest of them are written in their indigenous languages like Kotas, Santali, and Ho & others where some are translated to other vernacular languages and some are not. Many political poetries raise questions against the havoc harboured by a biased notion of “progress”. The following are a few poetical works of indigenous people of India which brought out Adivasi’s political proximity.
The editor of Chandini Magazine, Susheela Samad was one of the earliest Adivasi writers in the 1920s, where two of her poetry were published in the 1940s. In the year 1960 several stories of Alice Ekka were published in the Adivasi Patrika who was also the first female Adivasi writer.
The very famous Temsüla Ao an Ao Naga tribal poet and an ethnographer who worked on Oral histories published plenty of poetry from 1988 to 2007 shedding light on the word “song” in all her titles emphasizing the essence of poems in tribal song culture and expressing the voices of her community against land & cultural alienation.
Referring to the violence in the valley, the poet says
Of sophisticated weaponry. ” (“My Hills” 19-23)
The poet laments the loss of peace and verdure in her region.
The director of Adivasi Bhasha Shodh Sansthan (Tribal Language Research Institute) Ushakiran Atram is a Koitur poet and a writer who held compelling narratives on patriarchal injustice and political vocalization from a woman’s scope of the lens.
the mentioned poem is from one of her books named ‘Motiyarin’ A Gonti term which means a position given to a woman leader who supervises the overall activities in Gotul.
“Unless you speak their dialect, you’re an outsider,” says Lakshmanan who accompanied Tamil Nadu Pazhankudi Makkal Sangam, a movement that worked for indigenous welfare. In 2010, he also wrote an anthology of poems titled ‘Odiyan’ which means the evil spirit through which he paints the colours of pain and anguish of the Irular community which was partly in their language.
Jacinda Kerketta a young poet and a journalist of the Oraon tribe raises questions about the standpoint on “development” on tribal lands, In the poem “Oh Shahar” (Oh City) she writes
Their soil, their bales of straw,
Fleeing the roof over their heads, they often ask,
Are you ever wrenched by the very roots?
In the name of so-called progress?
The author brings out the intensity of anthropocentrism imposed upon the Adivasi arena and all her poems do not victimize their position instead evokes thought-provoking questions.
Recently, Arivu a resounding rapper and a political poet brought out many problematic political practices of history and the present against his community through his album called ‘Therukural’ (voices of the streets), and in 2021 the song “Enjoy Enjaami” which is a blend of Rap and ‘oppari'(lament song sung during mourning )took over the stage of multi-media, the artist poetically and politically protested in all his works intending to enlighten the traces of civilization before caste and issues of inequality.
Waharu Sonavane, a Bhilli poet and an activist whose “Stage” was an icebreaker that questioned the leadership of a major movement – Narmada Bachao Andolan and indigenous representation in bearing the torch.
Will the mainstream history intersect Adivasi’s ancestral accounts? or will they contradict? Poetical poems fade along with time, they lose their essence of eventual happenings but strikingly hold the public psychology of the period. Political poems of indigenous tribes of India pose their position into viewing history from a different lens – meaning to revisit the history not just from conventional collectives but also to learn from our oral archives, songs and stories.
The following poem was written by Waharu Sonavane; translated by Bharat Patankar, Gail Omvedt, and Suhas Paranjape –
and “they”, standing on the stage,
kept on telling us of our sorrows.
they perked their ears to listen,
Feature Image Credit: www.climatescorecard.org
