Development & Growth! What's at stake ?

O, city!

Leaving behind their homes,

Their soil, and bales of straw

Fleeing the roof over their heads, they often ask:

O, city!

Are you ever wrenched by the very roots

In the name of so-called progress?

A site called "the world counts" caught my attention recently where it shows how we humans are awfully capable of dwindling this planet every fraction of seconds. There is this unnerving tick-tock-tick-tock of days lost due to Mercury intoxication from mining. Years of lives lost, mutational health hazards, toxins in blood & breath, and deaths, oh so mute and mum!

If you are from India, tell me the above piece didn't throw you instantly into the leached beauties of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha? Whom are we fooling when we say that everything is for growth & development? A better and advanced future? At the stake of what? When we take pride in possessing Asia's largest Sal forest, Saranda, do we also take the responsibility of talking about the silent deaths of those indigenous tribes?

Are we aware of the miseries of the habitats that lie within the Singhbhums?

(Read the piece "Mining devours Saranda" @ India.mongabay.com)

Sugna's wife and children

Will this time not starve to death.

They will take their own lives instead.

For dying of hunger, they know too well,

Stirs up no storms, does not sell.

A suicide, on the other hand,

Guarantees their corpse will make headlines,

And probes into the whys and wherefores

Will lead them to many more doors

With stoves unlit and ovens gone cold.

Mining health hazards being just a part, Jacinta Kerketta talks about several issues of an Adivasi community that people like you and me are ignorant of. Displacement, violence, discrimination, and horrors of her days of innocence. How beautifully has she portrayed the essence of Sal forests along with what happens within them! I would insist you all read the interview of the poet at "Kavishala . in". There is the part where she said, " I resisted the Adivasi girls cheating in exams so that they can approach life with dignity and honesty". I know what a rebel in your own home and challenging the years of toxic norms feel like. 

You fight alone!

And that questions your intents at every step.

Some of the poems in Angor are Kerketta's attempt to express the struggles and hopes of young Adivasis of Jharkhand, within the state and outside in big cities while they look for jobs. Others show how people killed in land disputes in these areas are portrayed as tribal human sacrifices and no one even cares to hear their side of the story. Kerketta also thinks that Adivasi youths join the Maoist movements because the current model of industrialization poses a threat to their livelihood and pushes them into economic insecurity. For some, picking a gun offers a route to money and power.

"Right now, several young people who have got educated are not interested in public issues, and the poorest are pressed for survival." - Jacinta Kerketta.

Being beautiful in its natural state, Angor's English translation (my POV) could have been poetically more beautiful. Jacinta's words have power, conveying them in our ways needs energy that matches her intentions. I won't say the essence is lost in translation, but people like us crave words that have the power to move us from our seats. But, coming to the issues mentioned here, the tribes of India do need independent voices like Jacinta that question the state's vision of the development of Adivasi and challenge the societal norms that affect them.

In the name of progress, now

There are to be four and six-lane roads.

But those labouring away on concrete and asphalt

Are unaware. They know not

How many more free lanes of deceit

Run through the forests of Saranda.

. . .

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