Kishore Mura Singh

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Kishore Mura Singh

Kishore Mura Singh has been awarded this year for his literary works. Tribal Research Institute of Tripura conferred him the honour ceremonially recently.

Dipankar Sen Gupta of Eastern Panorama recently met up with this noted poet and speaking about literature, Mr. Singh says, “Sometimes inferior complex even serves as a guiding force.”

A farmer by profession and now aged thirty-five years old, Mr. Singh is one of the leading poets of Tripura’s second major language, a Mongoloid dialect called Kakborok and has been penning down his thoughts for the last seventeen years.

He says, “We have much to write about, sorrow, pleasure, nature and of course politics and the plight of the oppressed. Our traditional culture has a rich treasure of oral literature but all these are either in the form of tales or songs. The practices of Jhum or shifting cultivation and hunting as the way of life of the Kakborok speaking people have made it such that they were once solely dependent on the cultivation at hilly slopes and hunting.

The rhythm or lyrical sweetness is not in short supply in traditional songs but it is time to shape the literature of the language in a more diversified way. The history of poetry of the Kakborok language is not very old; it can hardly be of a hundred year or a little more. You can say that the language still is in a stage of transition towards mordenisation. The following are extracts of this interview.

DSG: How does the history of Kakborok poetry clip its journey through the passage of time?

KMS: Doulat Ahamed and Radha Mohan Thakur have to be accounted first. They penned grammar in the early years of the twentieth century. The duo also produced some poems. It brought a new approach that virtually set the stage for the language.

Then in the middle of the last century, Janashiksha Andolan or the Mass Education Movement came to the fore and this boosted Kakborok further and was a real thrust and many present-day leading writers of the language here actually took inspiration from that. The great Vasha Andolan, famous as the Bengali Language Movement of 1952 in the then East Pakistan and Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 also encouraged the Kakborok authors to do something in their mother tongue. The government of Tripura recognised the language in the late seventies. Thus basically a dialect has transformed into some sort of mainstream language.

DSG: What according to you are now the points to mark?

KMS: Not many read poetry, this is true for any given time and place. My medium of writing is again locked in this state, besides some areas in Chittagong hill tracts in Bangladesh. In this state also, statistically the language may be the second language but how many belong to this group? Ethnic populace constitutes only one third of the total mass and that population further gets divided into nineteen different sets. You know, in this age of so called globalisation, which in my opinion is aggression of commodities when every trait of life is weighed in terms of corporate interest, it is not strange that the reader base of the Kakborok works is poor. Getting publishers for such a small number of readers is difficult. But all these are the negative points. The positive side is that literature never stops.

To bridge the gap between Kakborok and mainland languages, we are trying to translate our works into Bengali, to which we are closer after our mother tongue. The other point which should be highlighted is that because of the shifting cultivation and life in the hills far away from advanced societies, the language had not developed vast vocabulary, it has mainly those words which were essentially required in daily life and also there are many sounds rather than words which once were used for communication.

For example, you will not find a substitute word for the word ‘fossil’ in Kakborok. I assume it had no impression among my ancestors but now you need it to put across certain objects.

Kishore Mura Singh

Kishore Mura Singh has been awarded this year for his literary works. Tribal Research Institute of Tripura conferred him the honour ceremonially recently.

Dipankar Sen Gupta of Eastern Panorama recently met up with this noted poet and speaking about literature, Mr. Singh says, “Sometimes inferior complex even serves as a guiding force.”

A farmer by profession and now aged thirty-five years old, Mr. Singh is one of the leading poets of Tripura’s second major language, a Mongoloid dialect called Kakborok and has been penning down his thoughts for the last seventeen years.

He says, “We have much to write about, sorrow, pleasure, nature and of course politics and the plight of the oppressed. Our traditional culture has a rich treasure of oral literature but all these are either in the form of tales or songs. The practices of Jhum or shifting cultivation and hunting as the way of life of the Kakborok speaking people have made it such that they were once solely dependent on the cultivation at hilly slopes and hunting.

The rhythm or lyrical sweetness is not in short supply in traditional songs but it is time to shape the literature of the language in a more diversified way. The history of poetry of the Kakborok language is not very old; it can hardly be of a hundred year or a little more. You can say that the language still is in a stage of transition towards mordenisation. The following are extracts of this interview.

DSG: How does the history of Kakborok poetry clip its journey through the passage of time?

KMS: Doulat Ahamed and Radha Mohan Thakur have to be accounted first. They penned grammar in the early years of the twentieth century. The duo also produced some poems. It brought a new approach that virtually set the stage for the language.

Then in the middle of the last century, Janashiksha Andolan or the Mass Education Movement came to the fore and this boosted Kakborok further and was a real thrust and many present-day leading writers of the language here actually took inspiration from that. The great Vasha Andolan, famous as the Bengali Language Movement of 1952 in the then East Pakistan and Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 also encouraged the Kakborok authors to do something in their mother tongue. The government of Tripura recognised the language in the late seventies. Thus basically a dialect has transformed into some sort of mainstream language.

DSG: What according to you are now the points to mark?

KMS: Not many read poetry, this is true for any given time and place. My medium of writing is again locked in this state, besides some areas in Chittagong hill tracts in Bangladesh. In this state also, statistically the language may be the second language but how many belong to this group? Ethnic populace constitutes only one third of the total mass and that population further gets divided into nineteen different sets. You know, in this age of so called globalisation, which in my opinion is aggression of commodities when every trait of life is weighed in terms of corporate interest, it is not strange that the reader base of the Kakborok works is poor. Getting publishers for such a small number of readers is difficult. But all these are the negative points. The positive side is that literature never stops.

To bridge the gap between Kakborok and mainland languages, we are trying to translate our works into Bengali, to which we are closer after our mother tongue. The other point which should be highlighted is that because of the shifting cultivation and life in the hills far away from advanced societies, the language had not developed vast vocabulary, it has mainly those words which were essentially required in daily life and also there are many sounds rather than words which once were used for communication.

For example, you will not find a substitute word for the word ‘fossil’ in Kakborok. I assume it had no impression among my ancestors but now you need it to put across certain objects.

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My latest book has been named; ‘Ang Kuthang Jibashma’ which translates as, ‘I am living like a fossil’.

I could invent a word of my own or use a Kakborok-make word, which I tried to do but I did not get the feeling of ‘fossil’ in those efforts. The new words must be created, but not in a way that fails to communicate. I do not find any harm in using the Bengali word, ‘Jibashma’ for ‘fossil’. Time and again languages get richer by incorporating words from others; that is the greatness of language. It is to make a bridge not a hurdle.

However, my intension is not to clone other words abruptly and thus diluting the originality of Kakborok. It should not be like the prevalent trend of today to mix up English, Hindi, one’s own language, etc in a hodgepodge to deliver something clumsy which is neither aurally pleasing nor capable of making the sense intended in full.

DSG: What is your way in composing poems?

KMS: Literature is the ultimate resort of humans; here you can get all the spheres of life. It reacts to everything. It can not be suppressed in any way, a community may be forced to flee from a particular location but the literature still gets a spark from that too; it does not escape. So my way is also life, it may sounds cliché, but it is my way.

However, I think that the literary values should be given the first chance to grip a writing, the message through should be linear. I want to say, the part of the message of the piece should not be in that form that snaps the delicacy of the language, in short, it should not be a slogan, if so, there would be little scope of development of the language. Slogans are important, but not in poetry. In making a slogan of a rally, you may not care for the fine tuning of the language, the pure literalistic values. And the poetry does not have any purpose, whatever it is, that may not be a composition at all.

I am trying to get out of the traditional ‘too lyrical’ version of the language and also the direct narration of nature, the sun, the birds, animals, the terrain, cultivation, harvesting, etc.

I think that the language is yet to be matured in catching the free verse style or free prose style of poems. The structure of Kakborok poems are still simple to some extent, and what is needed to be molded. I am working on this part also. Novels in Kakborok are very rare; that has to be looked into.

Here again, I reiterate that the great works of other languages should be translated into Kakborok. A fresh approach is to be brought-in which is able to attract the young ones.

DSG: How do you react to the present generation, who even being from the Kakborok group who do not prefer to use the language? Rather they are lured in so called ‘modernism’.

KMS: This is not a problem only with Kakborok but it has now become a trend. But if one does not love his own language, how could he love another’s? Perhaps, an inferiority complex drives them to do so. For me, the same complex drives me to hold the language tighter. Inferiority complex may be caused by somebody finding that the language is not known outside the state. This however guides me to do better and better.

DSG: Can you comment on your slogans on politics?

KMS: I want equality, that is my politics and militancy in the North East region of India in the name of sovereignty is just damaging the future. I do not think that any struggle is possible through the killing of innocent people.

In this state, for a long time, the politics or polytricks with the Kakborok script issue has been going on. Some advocate Roman letters or some Bengali letters and to me it is a non-issue. The main object of the language is communication, not bias over the written style which is causing serious damage and blocking the progression. Again, the choice is personal, however, I think that Bengali would be better for us as the language is more similar to ours than Roman.

To drop the scene on the marathon discourse, he quoted lines from his poem ‘Bekar’

‘Bufuru Tai Chakri Manay

Hamjakma Bouroue Sougang

Siya, Unaue Mukturui Kharau|’

Kishore makes a conduit for us to penetrate into the sense in-between words,

“Fiancée asks when I shall be in some job/ Getting no response, she thinks twice/ Getting no answer, I am doomed to sleepless nights.”

Dipankar Sen Gupta