‘I Walk Instead’: Maitreyee B Chowdhury turns unique personal experience into compelling poems
The poems are a chronicle of her walks across the length and breadth of India.
Black News 
In a recent judgment, the Supreme Court of India, while discussing the citizen’s fundamental right to walk, observed that walking has always stimulated the Indian imagination with deep cultural, social, religious, political, and reformative roots.
It recalled traditions such as Nagar Sankirtan, a traditional neighbourhood procession where communities walk through the streets singing devotional folk songs to reclaim public spaces as sites of shared cultural and musical heritage and Pandhapuri Wari, an 800-year-old pilgrimage that temporarily dissolves caste hierarchies as thousands walk together in egalitarian devotion.
Then there was Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan Movement and Dandi March, when Mahatma Gandhi’s 380-kilometre padayatra transformed a simple act of walking into a powerful tool of anti-colonial resistance.
In Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece The Storyteller, one remembers Saúl Zuratas’s recounting how, to remain alive, their tribe of Machiguengas kept walking, with or without rain, by land or by water, climbing up the mountain slopes and climbing down the ravines, their march through the forest a celebration, like going fishing or hunting, their determination keeping them pure. “We live, we walk. That is happiness, it seems,” he said.
Onwards we walk
Maitreyee B Chowdhury’s fourth book, a collection of poems titled I Walk Instead, is a chronicle of her walks across the length and breadth of India....
