Keki N. Daruwalla, is one among India’s foremost writers and poets. He is the author of more than twelve books, including the novel, “For Pepper and Christ” (2009), and five collections of short stories. He received the highest honour in India for Literature, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 for his poetry collection, “The Keeper of the Dead. He is also recipient of several other prestigious awards like the Commonwealth Poetry Award (Asia) in 1987, and the Padma Shri in 2014. His latest novel, “Ancestral Affairs”, was published in 2015.
Born in Lahore, Daruwalla holds a Masters degree in English from Punjab University, Chandigarh. He joined the Indian Police Service in 1958 and was eventually appointed as a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs. He subsequently was in the Cabinet Secretariat until his retirement. He is retired and lives in Delhi.
So, what makes his poetry so popular? Of course, like any great writer and poet he has retained a strong distinctive style of writing. Some of the features that characterise his poetry are irony, themes based on stark realities of the Indian way of life and violence (attributed to his profession), vivid imagery about landscapes, history, diverse cultural ethos, a keen eye for detail and a seamless narrative that holds your interest and his versatility to traverse the metrical style and free verse with ease and panache’.
J. P. Dutta’s Hindi film Refugee is attributed to have been inspired by the story of Keki N. Daruwalla based around the Great Rann of Kutch titled “Love Across the Salt Desert” which is also included as one of the short stories in the School Standard XII syllabus English textbook of NCERT in India.
In these lines for example, are his rumblings after listening to an inflammatory political speech: “Within the empty belly/ the enzymes turn multi-lingual/ their speech vociferous/ simmering on stomach wall”.
He etches beautiful imagery through diverse landscapes from the ancient kingdom of Kalinga seething in the bloodbath after the war, to the metro city of Bombay (“From the lepers, the acid-scarred, the amputees/ I turn my face. The road, I feel/ should be stratified so that/ I rub shoulders only with my kind”), rural as well as towns of India (Benaras is unforgettably evoked as the place where “corpse-fires and cooking-fires/ burn side by side”, even while the sacred river Ganga flows on, “dark as gangrene”).
His latest poem “What lights up?… has the following lines that so vividly capture the moments from his Himalayan safari of seventy eight days.
the ibex looking down
quizzically
at our car from cliff
the croc sunning corrugated hide
Link to his poem “What Lights Up?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150250/what-lights-up
The time when Martin Luther King was shot, was a turning point in his life. He was so moved that he wrote from his inner angst and dashed off a poem to the Weekly, and was sure it would be published. That’s how he first became known! He also speaks of his struggles with paucity of time to write, how he wrote on weekends and that he read a lot. He tells the younger generation of poets to read a lot, be demotic, and not to spell out everything in their poems and not to use the formal letter writing style of language.
To read his poignant poem on “Mother” click on the following link.
The poem “Cranes” which depicts the migration of Cranes from Tibet to Gangtey Valley in Sikkim is beautiful. Please click link below to read it.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449855.2015.1067946?journalCode=rjpw20
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