Of Rivers, Jungles and Mountains

In Adivasi poetry, everything breathes, everything is alive and nothing is inferior to humans

- Jacinta Kerketta

WHEN I first started writing Hindi poems, I heard people from the Hindi literary world say: "The voice in your poems is masculine and feminine at once. This makes it hard to guess the poet's gender." Sometimes, they also claimed that the author of those poems must be a man since they have a greater presence of the masculine voice in them.

I found it to be true that my poems contained voices in both the masculine and the feminine genders. This prompted me to look within myself to understand why I wrote in that manner. I realised that every individual, woman or man, grows up carrying a society within them and is constituted by its languages. The way they think, act and write draws upon this outer world carried within.

The Adivasi community that I belong to did not have Hindi as its language, therefore I was not brought up in a Hindi-speaking society. I learnt the language later when I started school, by reading books, and it then became a part of my writing and speaking. But I lived and grew up among different Adivasi communities, such as the Oraons, Santhals, Hos and Mundas, and their way of thinking lives on in me, travels along with me and informs my writing style.