 |
| Paramita Mukherjee Mullick |
From my early childhood I was fascinated by indigenous people, their culture and their language. This was the influence of my father, a very renowned Anthropologist who always discussed about indigenous culture and rituals. Our house was filled with books depicting artifacts of indigenous head gears, weapons and decorative items. Growing up, I trained as a Molecular Biologist with a Ph.D. in Genetic Toxicology…taught in a college and then headed an institution. The latent love of Literature resurfaced at quite a mature age and I became a poet. I remember my mother very fondly, who was a great reciter of Bengali poems and knew by heart almost all poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam. So, I had to be a poet in this life itself!
Whatever I do, I do with my heart and soul, so some of my mentors fondly call me Powerhouse Paramita. With my new found love of poetry, along with writing poetry, I started promoting different kinds of poetry. While promoting peace poetry, multilingual and global poetry I remembered what my father used to say. He always said, “You always have to respect the old to achieve the new; you always have to respect the indigenous people because they are the original inhabitants of a place to achieve the modern way of life”. A surge of passion for indigenous poetry came into me and I started promoting indigenous poetry. I have curated and conducted numerous events of indigenous poetry for the last two to three years. The online mode of operation helped me connect to different poets of indigenous languages all over India.
“Poetry is the language of the mother tongue”, so promoting poetry in a certain language is preservation of that language. So when people write poetry in their own indigenous mother tongue, they not only preserve but also gradually bring that language in the main stream. Poems give voice to the feelings of indigenous people, poems can express their challenges and the problems specific to their lives. The indigenous people have ancestral knowledge and expertise to help and reduce climate change and other natural disasters. So their poems will help in conservation of the world’s resources and guide and protect human kind from natural calamities.
In this section of Setu titled, “Indigenous Voices of India”, I have tried to bring in a handful of extremely talented indigenous poets, some of them Sahitya Akademi awardees who have voiced their thoughts through poetry. I am very grateful to Dr. Sunil Sharma who had given me this opportunity to edit this section as a guest editor.
Paramita Mukherjee Mullick
Guest Editor, SETU, November 2022, Indigenous Voices of India
Special Edition: Indigenous Voices of India
Featured Authors
