Chandalini’s Poems are poems woven around intensely felt private love and loss, if the poems depict nature they inevitably lead to private memories of ruefulness. The poems depict society at large as a machinery of caste oppression articulated from a personal perspective which is unmistakably the Dalit existence of Kalyani Thakur Charal. The volume is replete with images of blacksmiths, farmers, weavers, poverty, misfortune, sickness, injuries— there lingers an overpowering aroma of boiled paddy around a cow-dung smeared courtyard. Kalyani Thakur’s poetry is a genuinely bitter and scathy critique of cultural intolerance, opportunism and oppressive conditions of Dalit women. There is always a tone of high justice in her armoury.
