“God, save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?” − With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.
− S.T.Coleridge in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner
(Edited By Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter Fourth Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 1997, p.433)

Under an overhang of crags
fierce bird-love:
the monals mated, clawed and screamed;
the female brown and nondescript
the male was king, a fire-dream!
My barrel spoke one word of lead:
the bird came down, the king was dead,
− Keki N. Daruwalla in Death of A Bird
(Crossing of Rivers and The Keeper of the Dead, Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, 1991, p.47)

Keki N.Daruwalla, who was born on the 24th of January,1937 at Lahore, in the then time British India, is without any doubt one of those writers of Indian English poetry who have really worked for the growth, development and furtherance of modern creative poetry right from the seventies and since then have been contributing to it to enrich with the poems of a new standing and tenor tendered to us from time to time.

Now the time has come to make a full-length assessment of his poetry. One among the Parsi quartet, taking Adil Jussawalla, K.D. Katrak and Gieve Patel altogether, he has been plodding his way to leave an imprint of his own individuality and caliber. Sardonic and sarcastic, he is a poet of some hard heart, as because sentimentality has nothing to do with. He sees it all with his hawkish imagery and landscape of delving. Really, a tough talking lies therein. Violence, pestilence, epidemic, drought, famine, bloodshed, riot, murder, suicide, enmity, vengeance, wrath, anger, animality and curfew are the specific words of the poet. As a writer of verse, he is but a tragedian and poems to him as dramatic monologues or the bits of tragedies. Tears are not there into the eyes of the poet and these cannot wet him.

A few have really understood his worth and relevance, so substantial, so robust and healthy and his scribbling is not for a timid heart at all, as because his is a heart of a hunter; that of a falconer. Nature red in tooth and claw is the spirit and he seeks to view life in that perspective, as by training and profession he is an IPS officer, writing poems in English.

Apart from his early education taken here and there, he finally did his M.A. in English from Govt. College, Ludhiana. In 1958, he qualified for the IPS and joined it and the resultant posting and placement thereafter took him to different places, as such Dehradun, Meerut, Agra, Barabanki, Farrukhabad, Luknow, Joshimath, Ranikhet and others in the U.P.

Daruwalla was a Visiting Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford during 1980-82. Under Orion is the first book of poems with which he starts the poetic journey of his life and it was none but P. Lal who himself brought it out from his Writers Workshop. At that time there had been a few takers of his poetry. But the fist work too showed the promise it had to demonstrate. Apparition in April,1971, Crossing of Rivers, 1976, Winter Poems, 1980, The Keeper of the Dead, 1982, Landscapes, 1987, A Summer of Tigers, 1995, Night River, 2000, The Map-maker, 2002, The Scarecrow and the Ghost, 2004, etc. are the collections of poems. He received the Sahitya Alademi Award for his book named The Keeper of the Dead in 1984. Collected Poems (1970-2005) has appeared from Penguin, India in 2006; Two Decades of Indian Poetry (1960-1980), published in 1980, is his edited volume. Today he is not only a poet, but has turned into a short story writer as well as a novelist.

A modern poet, he has his own terminology and diction to state forth, to give poetic statements, as it is a case with most of the writers of today, so much individualized and personalized in their ways and depiction of life. Most of the poems which they have to us from the poetic pen of Daruwalla appear to be hard and tough from the exterior level, but are not so, as because there is a softer interior to be seen across and admired for and this is his specific quality, which he has been perfecting for so long, and that too since the start.

Daruwalla as a poet is not at all concerned with the innocence and ignorance with which we see it all, but with all brave-manly heart and spirit. The modern English poets are the poetic specimens of the poet under our scrutiny and perusal as he has been delving into the domains of Indian English poesy in his own way. Though there is something very strongly Indian in him, but instead of it, his is a Parsi heart and soul and his ethos, lineage, legacy, history, myth and mysticism cannot of ours which we hold them so blindly, so strongly, as because he has also something of his own to say and to share with. Everything of ours cannot be the way of evaluation for all.

A Parsi poet, if to go deep into his thematic content and life-philosophy, the bits of Zoroaster, what did he say and what it were his teachings, we shall come to mark them naturally. The references to the tower of silence, on which the Parsis place their dead for the scavenger birds to do away with and to the fire hymns find mentioned in the works of the poet apart from the things of his place of growing up and living down. The decades of human time can be penetrated in terms of home-seeking, shelter, displacement, ethnicity and humanism. There is nothing to question him with regard to the theme of Indianness, the process of Indianization that it takes within its course of naturalization and the Indianism he propagates for in the usage and selection of words and terms, as because he is deeply rooted into the soil of India, apart from his legacy, heritage, history, lineage, thought and tradition he belongs to and there is nothing as that to intercept him on the midway in connection with that.

His understanding of India; Indian thought, culture and philosophy can be found in his love for Charvaka and Karna as Adil Jussawalla has for Eklavya. To read Daruwalla is to take into consideration the other part of India which remains incomplete if we know not Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and so on. If Jayanta Mahapatra seems to be inclined towards Odisha and Odia culture and thought, landscape and scenery, Keki N. Daruwalla seems to be inclined towards U.P. as for posting and landscapic imagery and so much beholden to Maharashtra and Gujarat as for Parsi dispersion and searching of roots and nativity and
tradition.

If we go through the poems of Keki N. Daruwalla, we shall come to feel it that the dramatic monologue, internal rhyme-scheme and tougher exterior which he employs for his poetry take him to the pedestal of Robert Browning and his poems and the violence, cruelty and wolfish wrap of Ted Huhes-like imagery and metaphor present the other side of the creation. A modern poet, he cannot be laid bare of so easily as we think about. Daruwalla’s heart is not at all a Blakian heart, so full of childish innocence and ignorance, nor that of Vaughan looking up to God in thankfulness and astonishment as for to mark the retreat shaded with palm trees, nor Herrickan eve-praying with the daffodils in the evening to part ways, but is one of its kind, Ted Hughesian indeed, but without any Sylvia Plath to be dodged and betrayed, as Hughes did it to a nervous patient so treacherously.

The call of the wild he hears by slinging the gun over the shoulder; the hyenas giving calls at dark eve into the forests, the roars and growls of tigers and lions and the deer fleeing for life is the scenery of his poetry and this too is a truth which but we cannot negate it. The rule of the jungle only the junglees, jungle-dwelling ones know it well, what it happens therein, deep into the forests. Survival of the fittest is the focal point of brooding. The wild will remain wild, treacherous and impregnable, brutal, bloody and bestial. There is nothing that you can do, nor I can. The other violence lies nurtured within as man too is called an animal and sometimes when spurred on or provoked, it comes to in terms of mob violence and gunfire.

As a poet, Daruwalla is a tragedian as because his is a tragic vision of life, seen through adverse conditions, situations, circumstances and times. There is nothing as the Hamletian dilemma of to be or not to be; the sense of guilt taking over. He is hard of heart and bold enough as the barrel of the gun will speak forth. There is nothing as daya-maya; a policeman on duty with the revolver stuck into the waist is he Daruwalla the poet. The ups and downs of the poetic diagram show him in different shreds of thought and reflection. The two-forked facets of his poetry, the widening horizons, diversifying dimensions and broadening spectrums of his delving are beyond our deliberation. The satiric tone, laughing mockery, ironic tinge and tougher talk are the salient features of his poetry.

Toughened stand and hardened heart do it all; complete the process, leaving no scope for sentimentality to creep in. The hawk, the kite and the vulture, not the scarecrow, are therein and he tries to see all though that landscape and vision. The poet does not shed crocodile’s tears as for feminism sake. It is very difficult to say who is really a feminist in the right sense of the term. Are they not all for namesake just? Feminism has now turned into a wolf’s cry or may it that the shepherd boy is crying that the wolf has come, has come as a boyish prank. Hearing the call, a few will turn up naturally, but a day comes when the wolf appears really and he calls for help, but none comes to his rescue as for taking it befalse. Similar is the case with feminism and the so-called, media-savvy paparazzi feminists.

Draupadi as a small poem from The Map-Maker speaks it all, how the style and the tenor of his writing:

The travails of Draupadi
are never-ending.
It seems—some people have it
in their bleeding stars:
first exploited by the Pandavas,
five to one,
then by the Kauravas,
hundred to one
and now by the feminists
in millions.
(Keki N.Daruwalla, Collected Poems (1970-2005), Penguin Books, India, New Delhi, 2006, p.340)

A globe-trotter, a tour-taker, an adventurer, he is like Tennyson’s Ulysses or the ancient mariner of Coleridge, holding the hand, telling the tales of different climes, nationalities, historical myths and alienations, but not at all with any kind of remorse or expiation. Wrath and anger, bloodshed and violence are just elementary to all. In his thought and vision, he can move to Iran, Palestine, Syria and others. Daruwalla is not a writer like Wordsworth who will write To The Skylark and Shelley who will To A Skylark, he is a poet of the hawk, the kite and the vulture ruminating over, meditating and swooping down to catch and take a hold of not the vegetarian stuffs, but the non-vegetarian things. But the depleting population of the vultures maraud the self of the poet. The tight and compact poems which he has given are not at all easy to be handled with. The silence of the curfew-clamped towns, man-less streets, shops shut down, the palanquin-bearers taking the cholera-patients away from the rural areas and the Ghagra in spate, the flood waters swirling and swerving, corroding the banks and engulfing a vast tract of land by inundating it are the scenery of his. The Robert Frostian snowy, eve-time mystery and beauty of the woods not, but one with the calls of hyenas, tigers, jackals and wolfs is the poetic space of the poet. Blake’s lamb and the child will fear to dare into.

The Professor Condoles is one of those representative poems of Daruwalla where the protagonist, taking an accident, tries to define what it is tragedy, how does it come to all of a sudden keeping the people so benumbed and awe-stricken, blood gets spilled over, left out with nothing to do and nothing to complain against fate and destiny:

Your brother died, you said?
Eleven years old and run over by a car?
I am so terribly sorry to hear it!
(Keki N. Daruwalla, Winter Poems, Allied Publishers, New Delhi,1980, p.58)

Such is the masculine verve, fervor, strength and vigor of the poet, that his condensed and cramming poetic statements have drawn praise from not only the critics from India, but from foreign, as such Robert Graves, James Finn Cotter, C. Wrightman and others. The Unrest of Desire, though of just three stanzas, covers in the psychological things. The words, such as the unrest of desire, shadow in the heart, cave-impulse at the mouth and whatever mask you slap upon your face can show it all about his diction and phraseology. Psychological insight, probing temperament and facial reading which he applies in while dealing with the small poem named The Unrest of Desire add to it differently. The poet means to say it that internal disturbances or feelings going underneath themselves reveal it what it is taking place at the inward level. The embers can never be kept hidden under the cover of the ashes. The things of the heart the face will speak it up. There is nothing as that can keep it hidden or may conceal it. Even if one puts on the mask to hide himself, one day that too will de-mask automatically. The inner conscience can never negate it. Truth will hammer down out the things lying hidden and the outer plasters will break forth to fall down. The slabs of concrete cannot keep it hidden. An attempt to give it some outlook of an aboriginal art too will fail finally and the truth will come to light. The tongue will automatically click out, may be it a slip of wording. Inner tumult and turbulence taking over can never be hidden. The face is the speaker itself and the eye the indicator.

Let us how see how he takes to in the poem The Unrest of Desire selected in The Keeper of the Dead collection:

You can’t erase the burn. It will char your dreams
however you bury the shadow in the heart.
(Crossing of Rivers and The Keeper of the Dead, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1991, p.43)

Curfew in a Riot-torn City, Pestilence, The Epileptic, Monologue in the Chambal Valley, Shiva: At Timarsain, Dialogues with a Third Voice, My Poetry, A Simple Poet, etc. are the poems which figure in Under Orion collection of poems and the poems of the first collection itself speaks of what the poet is going to be in near future, all about his poetic personality and its composition and the selection of poetic themes and words. Fire-hymn, The Snowman, Pilgrimage to Badrinath, Carvak, Routine, Love in Meerut, etc. lie in included in Apparition in April anthology of his own. History, Finalities, Of Muhammad Ali Pasha, The Chillum, The Glassblower, Childhood Poem, Fragment, Chess, Insomnia, etc. are the poems which have been inducted in A Summer of Tigers. Exile and the Chinese Poets, Living on Hyphens, Partition Ghazal, A Faiz Quatrain, Letter from Helsinki, On a Dying Millennium, Egyptian Testament, Going Down the Night River, etc. are the poems of Night River collection.

Death of a Bird which figures in Crossing of Rivers is one like the shooting episode of Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell, but the context is different here. The poet as the hunter shoots the bird, but the cries and shrieks of the other mate touch him deeply, as it is cautioned by his ever watchful, accompanying beloved. The evening changing into the night too corroborates the atmosphere and some sort of guilt takes over. Instead of the depiction, the protagonist does not melt so much required to be as the lady speaker is concluding her part. The poem in some way reminds us of one of the cronch birds killed by the falconer and thereafter follows the shriek of the mate and the scene tears apart the heart of poet Valmiki, but the case is different here, as in Daruwalla, the barrel of the gun speaks it itself. The poem is tragic as well as revelatory and here he strikes the pathos indirectly and this is the thing which the readers expect from him.

The mood is one of Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess:

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her?
(Palgrave’s golden Treasury, p.350)

Old Sailor, The Hebrew Professor, Nativity Poem, The Ghana Scholar Reflects on His Thesis, The Medhdi of Sudan, Agni Sutta, The Birth of Maya, Roof Observatory, Of Insights, Mirror Poem, Time, Bars, TwoWords, etc. are the poems included in The Map-maker collection of poems. The poem Migrations from The Map-Maker collection is without any doubt a poem which reminds us of the painful partition and the aftermath of it, so many got displaced and separated, so many lost the precious lives of their. It was just like a whirlwind which K.A. Abbas felt in his story The Refugee, which Khushwant Singh in Train toPakistan, Krishan Chander in Peshawar Express and others felt it. Here the poet is quite reflective and reminiscent of an age of turmoil and unrest gone by, but the memories still go on pricking him. He remembers the word of his mother telling of her own mother and with that the search for location begins with. But we modern men are heartless, as we continue to be blind to our faith, respect not others.

Though in India, his memories and reflections travel back to across the Jhelum river to Iran, refreshing the memory of Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum. Here the poem itself speaks out clearly. To read him is not to be able to digest his materials easily as he draws his matters from foreign climes and environs, trespassing boundaries, where visas and passports can do no good. A poet of displaced and disintegrated psyche, he goes on searching constantly and he does not have any affinity with the word ‘home’ and a sense of belonging. A Research and Analysis Wing additional director, he also adds to his experience of visiting foreign countries together his own ethos and racial literature.

In the first poem, from The Keeper of The Dead, titled Hawk, the poet writes,

I saw the wild hawk-king this morning
riding an ascending wind
as he drilled the sky.
The land beneath him was filmed with salt:
grass-seed, insect, bird—
nothing could thrive here. But he was lost
in the momentum of his own gyre,
a frustrated parricide on the kill.
The fuse of his hate was burning still.
(Ibid, p.9)

Let us compare with The Eagle of Alfred Lord Tennyson,

He clings to the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
(Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, With A Fifth Book selected by John
Press, Oxford Univ. Press, Calcutta, 2000, p.331)

A stanza from Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting will corroborate it,

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
(Ibid, p.564)

It is a charge against Daruwalla that some of the words which he uses put the readers into trouble. Side by side it is also a truth that he uses the verbose structure for his bold and tight vocabulary. As a poet, we would call him bombastic as well sardonic and sarcastic, mocking at, holding the tongue in cheek. To go deep into his meaning is to open the dictionaries and consult the things of other cultural
spaces. If he moves to Yemen, Sudan, Nigeria or elsewhere as per his RAW assignment and assessment, he will include that stuff of his paper into the texture of his poetry. Those in the RAW deal with the domestic conditions and foreign policies of specific nations and this is true in respect of his stance. The poems which they have come from the pen of Daruwalla are not entertainment poems, but are as such that the reader will just flip over the pages rather taking him into confidence. He will scratch the head for meaning as it is not in the lines and stanzas. The problem is this that he is a Parsi writing poems in English and the other thing is this that his personality is composed of what he has seen in the erstwhile undivided Punjab of the then time India. Hindustani stuffs, Arabic and Persian wisps and whiffs combined with those of the undivided U.P. make a way into the poetry of his.

The other thing is this that he is an Indian Police Officer switching over finally to Research and Analysis Wing of the Govt. of India. Hence, poetry as something crude material is in the grasp of Daruwalla. The barrel of the gun will speak. There is nothing as that to compromise. Death, disease and ailment are not going to weaken his heart and these constitute a larger bulk and chunk of his hardcore poetry. There is nothing as that to carry forward for the emotional sake as he has not seen poetry in that perspective. To him, life is an accident; a tragedy, of course not an Indian tragedy, but a Greek one. The images of the vultures, kites and hawks sitting in his poetry adds to the imagery of the poem and strengthens the mythical base archetypally. Violence is but in our nature. To comprehend the
poetry of Daruwalla is definitely to be having a tough time as because he is really a very difficult poet. From the morgue, sees he human life and the worth of its existence; from the Tower of Silence, feels he the value and worth of living. The dead bodies placed over the Tower and the flesh-eating birds circling over and perched to cleanse the flesh off the skeletons and the structure. This too is scenery of life which you accept it or not. As a poet, Daruwalla is a landscapist and his poetry covers up a larger territory and domain, the landscapes widening and widening, trespassing Arunachal one can slip into China and there across Kashmir, lies it Afghanistan and the rest. His landscape is one taken from a map-maker who keeps mapping, nay at all a border-man.

He is a poet of flood, drought, famine; outbreak of an epidemic, the cholera ward, he is a poet of the morgue and the Tower of Silence, where the dead bodies are kept and the autopsy done and the bodies placed upon the structure as for the birds of prey to feast and feed upon, he is a poet of violence and curfew-clamped towns, riot-stricken and burning, controlling mob fury and patrolling the areas, he is a poet of the call of wild nature, punctuated by the evening falling in the woods and the wild animals calling. Daruwalla is a poet of the hawk, the vulture and the kite which are now a rarer species almost on the brink of extinction. His things may appear different, but are the words of reckoning. So much psychological and sociological, he observes the things from his own standpoint, human nature and ailment, society and culture, holding belief in disbelief. Daruwalla is a poet of The Eagle of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting and The Tiger of William Blake. The hawk imagery is crucial to the understanding of his poetry and he derives from substantially. Human innocence, the innocence of the heart is not the thing of his concern, but ignorance seconded by wrath and anger takes the center space. Criminology is but a part of human nature.

Keki.N. Daruwalla describes his love of Indian English language in his own way:

No one believes me when I say
my mistress is half-caste. Perched
on the genealogical tree somewhere
is a Muslim midwife and a Goan cook.
But she is more mixed than that.
Down the genetic lane, babus
and professors of English
have also made their one-night contributions.
(Ibid, p.22)

Keki N. Daruwalla is not at all a common man’s poet, but a skilled craftsman, deft and dexterous; a master poet of landscapes; a tragedian falling short of becoming a playwright rather than a poet substantial and consummate in his poetical art and his stanzas the stanzas of dramatic monologues brought on from Robert Browning and curtail matters from G.M. Hopkins and the imagery drawn from Ted Hughes. With nothing to dwell upon the things of pity and compassion commonly, he pursues the track of his, considering violence, criminology and bloodshed, disease, death and ailment as a part of human nature and life. There is nothing as that to revert it and derail the process of making and un-making. There is something always as that of the command and order in him and he often starting with an address or an abrupt start. In the midst of the outward hard exterior, lies it an inward softer interior to be seen and marked through in him and his poetry and one needs to address that first in order to comprehend his vision and philosophy of life which it lies interspersed with. The poet as ever seems to be searching something in his poetry, his lost land and mother tongue, the quest for an identity grips and he seeks for the company of older acquaintances and things, which perhaps are ordained otherwise, lying in the abyss of treacherous history. He too had everything there, but was compelled to leave behind, marking the abrupt change in human nature and mentality and the situations doing the rounds there. Displacement and dislocation are the two main things of his poetry and he is in search of an ethos to take refuge in. Instead of that, experience has taught him otherwise and he is what one can see it thoroughly.

Winter View (Midlands) as a small poem from A Summer of Tigers can be quoted in full:

The fields enclosed, but no sign of someone
driving a stake in or stringing a wire.
The streams sapphire-clear as they ripple over
reflections of long-drowned church spires.
They have superior rain-gods and grass-gods
and clover-gods--the whole earth blessed with green
under skies always cursed with grey—
and all the trees charred by an unseen fire.
(Collected Poems, ibid, p.257)