Ramesh Karthik Nayak: When Language Changes Thought

Indian poet and short-story writer Ramesh Karthik Nayak, a member of the nomadic Gor Banjara community, speaks with Asymptote about the complicated relationship between language, identity, and indigenous literature. Nayak speaks Telugu, Hindi, English, and Gor Boli, his mother tongue, but Gor Boli still lacks a universally accepted script, making literary writing in the language especially difficult. For Nayak, multilingualism is both a gift and a burden: each language offers a different way of seeing the world, while also changing the way a thought is expressed. A poem written in one language, he argues, cannot simply remain the same poem in another, because every language carries its own memories, rhythms, emotions, and cultural associations. The interview also turns to the history of the Gor Banjara, a community stigmatized as a "criminal tribe" under British colonial rule and still struggling to preserve its language, land, and cultural heritage. Nayak says he began writing because he could find almost no literature about his own people. If indigenous communities do not tell their own stories of hunger, anger, displacement, and survival, he asks, who else will?