As a part of the Rupkatha Translation Project 2025, Pragya Shukla has translated Parwati Tirkey’s (b. 1994, Gumla, Jharkhand) Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-winning (2025) Hindi poetry collection Phir Ugna (2023, Rajkamal Prakashan), into English (Bloom Again). It is noteworthy that this poetry collection is Tirkey’s debut creation. This poetry collection, published in digital format, is currently available for free.
In an interview with Outlook India, Tirkey said about her poetry: ‘Phir Ugna reflects the intrinsic connection Adivasis have with water, forest and life itself. It’s about their emotional bond with nature and their deep faith in it; how nature shapes their social structures, and how committed they are to preserving it. The forest is not just resources; it is an emotional and spiritual space for Adivasis. The poems revolve around this deep love for the forest and society born from it. However, I believe different readers may interpret the message in their own unique ways’ (p. xii-xiii).
Parwati Tirkey’s poetry is a profound and evocative body of work that serves as both a cultural archive and a living, breathing testament to the indigenous worldview of the tribal communities of the Chhota Nagpur plateau. Her poems are not merely literary creations but are deeply embedded in the ecological, spiritual, and social fabric of her heritage.
Tirkey’s central poetic project is the representation of a tribal cosmology into contemporary verse. Her work dismantles the modern binaries of nature and culture, human and non-human, spiritual and material. Instead, she presents a holistic world where everything is interconnected and animate. The forest, rivers, mountains, and celestial bodies are not resources or backdrops but sentient kin, guides, and active participants in life. Poems like ‘Spirits of the Forests’ and ‘Earth’ articulate a creation myth built on cooperation between animals and humans, establishing a worldview where reverence, balance, and relational accountability are paramount.
A dominant theme in her poetry is what can be termed ‘ecological intimacy’— a sensory and spiritual attunement to the natural world inherited through ancestral memory. This is vividly illustrated in poems like ‘Nakdauna Bird’, where the bird’s song and the Kurukh people’s language merge to create a shared ‘dialect’ for forecasting rain. Similarly, in ‘Dhano Granny’s Songs’, human voice commands the elements, showcasing a world where language is a bridge to the more-than-human world. Her poetry often carries the cadence of oral traditions—chants, lullabies, and ceremonial invocations—making it a vehicle for preserving and transmitting ancestral knowledge.
While deeply spiritual, Tirkey’s work is not divorced from historical and political realities. She subtly critiques the forces of cultural erasure, Brahminical oppression, colonial imposition, and extractive modernity. Poems like ‘Soso Bungalow’ recount the betrayal of land through linguistic trickery, while the ‘Hunting Festival of Women’ and ‘Their Language of Revolt’ celebrate feminist resistance, the defense of tribal autonomy and gender equality. Her lament for the lost traditional education system, the ‘Dhumkudiya’, is a powerful protest against the systematic exclusion of indigenous pedagogies.
The very title Bloom Again (or Phir Ugna) encapsulates the collection’s core ethos. It is not a nostalgic look at a lost past but a powerful assertion of a cyclical ethic of renewal, re-rooting, and reclamation. Even as poems like ‘Migration’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Return’ mourn the dislocation caused by urbanization and modernity. The collection collectively gestures toward hope and resistance. It suggests that tribal lifeways are dormant, not dead, and can bloom again through the revival of language, storytelling, and ecological reverence. The editor says, ‘The title Phir Ugna suggests rebirth and invokes a cyclical ethic, where blooming is not a one-time event but a recurrent act of re-rooting, reblooming and re-claiming. This is cultural vegetation, where forgotten songs, rituals, and kinship ethics begin to re-emerge. Modern displacement imposes a linear, irreversible temporality like progress, development, and migration. But Phir Ugna restores the seasonal cycle, where loss is followed by renewal, and memory is transformed into future growth. The tile affirms that tribal lifeways are not extinct but dormant, waiting for the right conditions to bloom again. The title is not just symbolic; it is directive. It calls upon all to return to ancestral knowledge and create spaces—literal and metaphorical—where tribal cosmologies can flourish again’ (p. xxiv).
In conclusion, Parwati Tirkey’s poetry is an essential voice in contemporary Indian literature. It offers a crucial, ground-up perspective that challenges dominant narratives of progress and development. Her work is an invitation to listen to the land, to learn from ancestral wisdom, and to envision a future built on the values of harmony, community, and a deep, abiding love for the natural world.