Blood and fog
are over half the town
and curfew stamps across the empty street.
– Keki N. Daruwalla in the poem, Curfew in a Riot-torn City
(Under Orion, Indus, Delhi,1991, Revised Edition, p.13)

And every year
the Ghaghra changes course
turning over and over in her sleep.
– Keki N. Daruwalla in the poem, The Ghaghra in Spate (Ibid, p.74)

Kerki N. Daruwalla (24 January 1937 – 26 September 2024) is one of those writers of modern Indian English poetry whose names are taken with P. Lal, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Shiv K. Kumar, P. Nandy, A. K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, A. K. Mehrotra and so on and to read them is to take their names collectively. What differentiates him from them is his poetic craftsmanship, his verbose poetic style and poetic diction. When one sits to read him for the first time, one may not like him as this is the case with almost all the writers of such a virgin field of literature. His works too were out of stock for quite a long time. It cannot be denied that they have evolved over the years and there were no takers of Indian English poetry then.

Thanks must go to as for introducing them in our syllabuses, a part of our curricula and for making the PhD mandatory for promotion and career advancement. The publishers too took an interest and published them with a limited number of copies. Had they not recommended and prescribed, the British classic-read olden professors of English would have dismissed them after teeming them derivative, imitative, copious and substandard verse. What troubles us most is to think that we have so far picked stray poems. We do not have epical poems. We have not prescribed representative books of them so far. The works, like Songs of Innocence and Experience, In Memoriam, Tintern Abbey, Lucy Poems and others, have not from them. If we compare him with Jayanta Mahapatra, we shall comer to mark that Jayanta is but reciprocates with Lord Jagannath and the Puri temple, the Rathayatra and the lore of Orissa. Keki N. Daruwalla’s English is Hindustani English with a tinge towards Persian world, the myths. Sometimes it appears to be as Iranian, Persian English.

K. N. Daruwalla is one among the Parsi quartet, the others being, K. D. Katrak, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel. A student of English literature, he was an IPS, a RAW persona, a member of the Minorities Commission, but so landscapic, cartographic, taking to U. P. and its hilly terrains is weighty, verbose, bombastic, caustic and unsentimental. He too was a first book writer and started turning famous from first entry. But later on emboldened his stand, strengthened his position with more and more publications. If we judge him from this point of view, he too was a self-styled poet.

Born in Lahore in a Parsi family in 1937, Daruwalla moves to India before the Partition of India with his father and family in 1945 and so as a result of displacement, he gets his education in Junagarh and Rampur learning through different mediums and languages before being coming down with a Master’s degree in English Literature from Govt. College, Ludhiana, from University of Punjab. In 1958, he joined the IPS and served the U. P. before switching over to the RAW. During 1980-81, he had a brief stint as a Queen Elizabeth House fellow at Oxford. Her received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Landscapes in 1987. In 1984, he got the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Keeper of the Dead from India’s National Academy of Letters and Padma Sri in 2014.

In the afternoon she is a grey smudge
exploring a grey canvas.
When dusk reaches her
through an overhang of cloud
she is overstewed coffee.
At night she is a red weal
across the spine of the land.
– Daruwalla in The Ghaghra in Spate
(Under Orion, ibid, p. 74)

He was first of all an IPS of the U. P. cadre posted in Uttarakhand and then an Indian writing in English which is but not Indian English, but written English and that too not heartily, soulfully, emotionally, passionately, not even poetically, but unpoetically after loading the gun, putting the barrel over the shoulders and visiting the sites secluded, densely forested or populated. In him, the gun speaks, the revolver, but the criminal we find not.

Under Orion as a book is of Badrinath, the Ghagra in Spate, Shiva of Timarsain, the myth of Siva, cholera, communal tension, curfew and riot-torn landscape and so on of that type as he is accustomed to that type of landscape painting and scenery. Something it is about his Persian connection as he is a Parsee, something it is related to the quest for identity as is often asked with regard to an Indian writing in English and something it is of his posting and placement. The poems are no doubt of a different space and archetype whatever be the thought and content.

Whose map is this? The map-maker is none but Daruwalla thinking of boundaries and borders. He is the keeper of the dead, the keeper of the Tower of Silence speaking through the lines, dovetailing the stories of Persia and far beyond.

Curfew in a Riot-torn City, Pestilence, The Epileptic, Monologue in the Chambal Valley, Shiva: At Timarsain, Shiva: At Lodheshwar, The Ghaghra in Spate, The Parijat Tree, Death by Burial, Rumination, etc. are the poems which figure in Under Orion.

Under Orion (Harper Collins Publishers India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 1970), Apparitions in April (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1971), Crossing of Rivers (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1976), Winter Poems (Allied Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 1980), The Keeper of the Dead (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1982), Landscapes (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1987), A Summer of Tigers (Indus, New Delhi, 1995), Night River (Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2000), The Map-maker (Ravi Dayal, Delhi, 2002), etc. are his works.

Daruwalla edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry 1960-1980 (Vikas, Delhi, 1980).

The Map-maker seems to be a work of international studies and relations as because the RAW data and assignments have got mixed with and Daruwalla too appears to be outlandish. Middle East, Central Asia get priorities of the poet. Perhaps some Ulysses is herein, some Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Marco Polo he is on his exploring, voyaging trip. Though he could not be an explorer, a voyager, a navigator, a mariner, instead of that he tried his utmost best to be on a trip to the Himalayas and around it. Yeats’ Meru he could not understand, Eliot’s legend of Bhagirath and Himavant, but instead of tried to draw from landscape and imagery.

We remember his The Professor Condoles, Fire-Hymn, Bombay Prayers, The Ghaghra in Spate, Death of a Bird, Wolf, Hawk and think about the poet so stout and masculine,
crisp and curtailed. Keki N. Daruwalla the man and poet, we talk about, his verbose style, poetic diction, syntax and phraseology. A poet unsentimental has but epidemic, disease and death, curfew, violence and bloodshed, hatred, jealousy and vengeance, blood clots, accident and tragedy to grapple with and dabble in.

On Reading Daruwalla, we come to feel it, poetry bombastic, cathartic, purgatory, verbose, a reading in prose poems, cut short, curtailed and clipped, continued and carried it forward. A poet of the Parsi psyche he often lapses into the trauma of some sort resultant of displacement, dislocation, disassociation though not expressive of in public and is psychological, sociological and observatory to put on his observation draped in matter and fact.

The professor condoles or Daruwalla condoles, who is taking a stock of tragedy, its causes, why does it befall one striking dumbfounded, why do unwanted accidents take place, can they be not averted, Fire-hymn, he remembers how did he consign the dead new born to flames and saw them feeding upon helplessly, Bombay prayers taking to the story of guilt and its confession, sin and expiation?

Crime and punishment interests him, but who is in reality a convict, a criminal if we take to in the words of John Galsworthy? The unrest of mind can never be shrugged off. When the monal bird is stricken dead, the female companion shrieked in pain and came closer to give life and fall dead. The scene is almost like of Valmiki describing the kill of the kronch bird by the falconer and the poet so moved by the scene giving vent to his emotions ready to gush forth, but Daruwalla is very, very unsentimental. He does not have a heart, a soul to be touched with; he is so hard of heart that can withstand and bear with.

Daruwalla derived it from the map-maker, the scarecrow, the sultry winter, the keeper of the dead, the rivers in spate, the flooded countryside marooned and reeling under, patients taken on rope-strung bamboo cots, cholera, T. B. wards and so on.

Unfazed by loose emotion and feeling, he went on grappling with craftsmanship, laying it bare his Parsi psyche, cutting the ice of and shrugging off dislocation and displacement to write his ethos and milieu to live by and sustain it.

Keki N. Daruwalla even though seemed to be after Browning and Hughes was a. poet of a hard heart always by descent appeared hankering after Persia or after the craze found out of the RAW trying to delve into international affairs and realms, learning through travels and journeys undertaken or planned across boundaries and borders which but fence us and restrict from any entry. But are we free and open-minded? Partition Ghazal has come down from his pen finally after a long time, but not Partition Qawwalli.

A Parsi poet, he loved to dwell in the lore of Persia and beyond, Greece drew him close and a strong sense of belonging overpowered him to let it out. He took to poetry not emotionally, passionately, but casually as for poetic catharsis and experimented with poetry curtailed and clipped to continue with broken rhythms making a meaning.

To read him is to locate him from Persia to Lahore to Ludhiana to Gujarat to Delhi. To read him is to know the Fire Temples, the Towers of Silence and the Zend Avesta. A poet he was of the U. P. , the hilly terrains and the landscape of it. Flood, rural space, cholera, tragedy, accident and curfew engaged him and he dabbled in verse to express what it was in his heart.

Keki N. Daruwalla saw poetry from the prism of observation and personal space. Nature red in tooth and claw, drew him close and he found refuge in Landscape clawed him for a penetration and he tried to paint from his level. But sometimes home thoughts disturbed his psyche with the experience of dislocation and displacement, but what can a man if one is driven as thus and the things slipping out of?

To read Daruwalla is to experience a different feeling of a different psyche and space and he seems to be one of some other space who has nothing to do with Indian culture and tradition, ethos and milieu.

He is a poet of some hard heart and so unsentimental that one cannot make it what he is taking up and what he is saying. Lahore, with it the story of life began, but the Partition spoilt the game and they came before it taking place. But dislocation took him to Gujarat, Ludhiana. His father too had been a professor of English. Things took a turn unexpectedly and he took time to clutch them along with.

He loved to cherish in the thoughts and reckonings of Iran, Greece and beyond and tried to give a verbose structure to his poetry. By heart he belonged to Lahore, Persia, but could not dismiss his nostalgia rather than something as Indian and Hinduistic. Instead of it he showed how poetry could be written with an unsentimental heart.

Keki N. Daruwalla fathomed the sociological and the psychological realms rather than Indian culture as most of the modern poets were private and personal. The U. P.  Lahore, Persia, had been the location, the landscape, the canvas of his poetry and he chose to delve into the Parsi ethos as had a strong sense of belonging. Flood, outbreak of a disease, tragedy, accident and so on had been on his mind as the substances of his poetry.

Though he has written a few poems pertaining to Shiva-temples, but apart from that to note in exception, the myths and legends of Persia and Greece he fails to discern them and is more of there than here. In him the revolver speaks, the revolver of a policeman; the Iranian speaks. But the pain is in it to feel that the Parsis were driven out of their land and they could not understand the beauty of Zoroastrianism.

What surprises us is this that Daruwalla keeps mum on Partition literature. He may be sympathetic to Dalit literature. He must have definitely said about the bloody, brutal, barbaric, bestial, fanatic and idiotic Partition of India where the satans, demons and devils got a free hand in the forcible, unmindful partition of borders and boundaries which was done in a haste. We doubt if they were at least men, human beings or the fanatics, zealots empowered to do. Perhaps they were beasts and brutes, animals. Instead of that ones or twos from him have come. Migrations from The Map-maker as a poetical piece is a Partition poem taking us back to those troubled times of frenzy and madness when the nation was partitioned and the people were pushed out of homes and left to the roads to go, but where would they have? Have you thought about it?

It is really a grappling with to take into confidence his ancestral affairs, Iranian or Persian heart, Parsi psyche, folklore brothers, shipwrecks and hard-shelled words. He acts as an observer and his is an observation-based poetry where experience teaches it. The Hebrew scholar, the Ghana researcher are his matters rather than Sanskrit.

Even a few years ago the abandoned cholera wards we used to see them while passing the hospital complex, stand alone malaria hospitals and the sanatoriums used to speak a lot. How was cholera an epidemic? How was typhoid fatal once upon a time? Daruwalla makes us rethink them which is but a quality of his poetry. How did small pox use to pester us from time to time?

Poetry to Daruwalla is syntax and phraseology and he goes on experimenting with

verbose style, poetic diction, curtailed prose, using and applying in bombastic words, venting out what is in his heart, a Parsi poet he sees from his lens the country and the populace, the landscape draped in hills, forests and haunted by, frequented with the lurking shadows of brutes and beasts, wolves calling, hyenas gnashing teeth in conspiracy with nights descending upon, enveloping in the surrounding, now it is time to return, go back home.

What is it in Daruwalla? He is an Indian poet writing in English whose English is Hindustani English, Persian English so resonant with Old Persia and its tales and if he is a myth-maker, he is but a Persian myth-maker, not an Indian myth-maker. The Vedas, the Upanishadas he has failed to understand, Himalayan wisdom burning as a lamp in some cave of the sadhaka. But instead of is uniquely Indian in his description.

Daruwalla as a poet is concerned with the inner space of man, the psychological spectrum and the sociological perspective. A Parsi, his heart hankers after Persia, but of no avail and use. He penetrates deep into the guilty conscience of man and tries to go to the roots of tragedy. Why do accidents happen? Flood waters how do they keep engulfing the area, inundating and submerging it all?

Keki N. Daruwalla is first an IPS is a fact and then an Indian Parsi poet writing in English, which is but Hindustani English, an acquired and laboured version of the language and his word stock not English, but Hindustani pidgin-English as his lore the lore of Persia, not the lore of India and his verses the verses of general scrutiny and observation, landscape and populace, human psyche and self.

If we through the titles of his books, Under Orion, Winter Poems, The Keeper of the Dead, Landscapes, Crossing of Rivers and others, we shall come to mark how has taken to poetry. Poetry is not sentiment, emotion and feeling. Poetry is in being unsentimental. What does Fire lesson it? The Fire Temples are on his vision and mind; the Towers of Silence to reflect upon life.

Hawk as a poem can be taken into consideration. The opening stanza can be studied:

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 gyre,
a frustrated parricide on the kill.
The fuse of his hate was burning still.
– (Keki N. Daruwalla, The Keeper of the Dead, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 9)

In Daruwalla, tragedy, violence, wrath, anger, human greed, frailty, foible, violence, bloodshed, bloodletting, tragedy, accident, death, disease, mortality, curfew, corpse, sniffer dogs, detectives, spies, revolver, fate, destiny, disaster, etc, make a way for into the poetic texture of his poetry.

Daruwalla's is a strange poetic world peopled by different sorts of people and their different situations taking them over. Somewhere it is the flood doing the rounds, somewhere it is but the morgue, somewhere the cholera ward. He is a poet of the curfew time when it is clamped upon, prohibitionary orders are issued restricting movement, shoot at sight remains in vogue. He is a poet of the hawk, the kite and the vulture.

Style is the man, holds it true as and when we sit to appreciate his poetry as Daruwalla likes to draw and derive from his own myths, as he likes to connect with the landscapes rather than the history and culture of the land. Sometimes we think of putting the same question to him, how far Indian is Indian English poetry?