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Remembering Keki N Daruwalla

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By Dr Sanjeev Chopra

The 2019 edition of the Valley of Words was privileged to host Keki N Daruwalla – India’s foremost poet and writer. By this time, he had received the Sahitya Akademi and the Padma Shri Awards. He had been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Literature Prize as well as the Poet Laureateship of the Mumbai Litfest 2017. JP Dutta‘s Bollywood film ‘Refugee’ has been  inspired by his story ‘Love Across the Salt Desert.’

When I met him in 2019, there was a new confidence amongst Indian writers writing in English. He agreed in the course of his conversation that English was no longer ‘The Mistress’ but had an identity and status in her own right as an Indian language. But it is important to place on record that, in the seventies, political leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia, Raj Narain and Charan Singh, among others, made it a point to castigate it as ‘foreign’. For the record, funds for the study and research of English were curtailed and even the name of the Central Institute for English (at Hyderabad) was changed to the Central Institute of English and Foreign languages to drive home the point that English was  an alien tongue: even though it was the language of the higher judiciary, the official language of many states and UTs in the NE, as well an associate official language of India.

Let’s read this poem, which shows how Indians had adapted and used English giving it a distinct Indian flavour. Even as she is ignored by the dominant political elite:

 ‘She is vain,

Flashes her bangles and her tinsel;

Wears heels even though her feet

Are smeared up to the ankle with henna…’

 

By 2019, English could stand up on her own two feet, without any need, for either henna or heels.

My introduction to Daruwalla started with a thin OUP volume, Crossing of Rivers, which I received as a prize for topping the Honours examination in the first year of my college. It was not part of prescribed text, but it was the beginning of a deep fascination both with Ganga and Benares.

 ‘Dante would have been confused here,

Where would he place this city/ In Paradise or Purgatory,/ or lower down/ Where fires smoulder beyond the reach of pity? The concept of the goddess baffles you – Ganga as mother, daughter, bride

What plane of destiny have I arrived at/

Where corpse-fires and cooking-fires Burn side by side’

 

In the early nineties, he wrote of his Persian and Zoroastrian roots in ‘Fire and Altar’. Although it was a project for a coffee table book on the heritage of his community, it ended up becoming a book of conversations between Cyrus and his contemporaries.

‘Here I lie, Cyrus, King of the Persians.

Stranger, don’t grudge me these few feet of space’.

And thus, Daruwalla resurrects a king, long dead, who comes alive briefly as the monarch under whom the Babylonian captivity of the Jews ended.

 

‘You met them by the waters of the Euphrates

their faces gaunt and ridged, their looks intense:

their eye sockets were as old as history.

To you their language didn’t make much sense.’

 

Cyrus has to reach beyond language and connect with the Jews. The next sonnet has an interesting visual image of history being ‘reversed’, literally, as the loot of Nebuchadnezzar is returned:

‘each bronze pillar he brought

goes back, as does gold and silver, each vessel, urn. 

‘But it is a tough call, almost akin to making a skeleton out of some bone splinter,

an imperial precinct out of fluting columns,

an ice age out of one solitary winter.’

It is not easy but that is precisely what the poet proceeds to dream up. Even as he complains of a history that fades because the ‘signposts are so few’. Daruwalla creates those signposts and also gives us the perspective of the plebeians. An unhappy subject of history, Cambyses, speaks back to Herodotus, the historian and, in another, a captain insists that

‘Delphi is for kings and Greek kings at that,

not for oarsmen or those who tinker with mast and rudder.

Delphi is for guys who have a ruddy future’.

He also wrote historical fiction. ‘For Pepper and Christ’ is a novel which sets out to capture the mood of the 15th century when Portuguese traders are stealthily watching Arabs carry out their spice trade with India. The scope of the book is magnificent as it captures the intrigues of maritime trade through the souks and lanes of Cairo, Mombasa and Calicut. But pepper wasn’t the only motivation. There was also Christianity and the search for the kingdom of the mythical Christian King called Prester John. The Portuguese, in fact, had never heard of Hindus – and for them a kingdom, if it wasn’t Muslim, had to be Christian. So strong was the belief that when they landed in Calicut, they mistook the local goddess for the Virgin Mary and thought that Krishna was a colloquialism for Christ.

In her review of Ranikhet, VoW Awardee Namita Gokhale writes,

‘A sense of loss is a constant in this volume and the directness and unsentimentality of its perception have all the clarity of poetry. The stories that constitute ‘A House in Ranikhet’ are interlinked by strange and erratic narrative compulsions. The karmic destiny and random coincidences that bind the lives of Mrs Ganguly, Cynthia Craig, Freny Batlibhoy and the wily Tripathiji are balanced by a multilayered understanding of the consequences and interaction of characters with class and society.’

One of his lifelong regrets was that he had not memorised his poems. He said that he had a ‘ranjish’ an untranslatable word – the closest to my mind being ‘anguish’ (perhaps because it rhymes with ranjish) for unlike the Hindi poets and Urdu shayars, he could not recite or sing his songs. As he said in an interview (“It’s so tragic I can recite so many of Robert Frost’s and none of mine”).

Daruwalla’s reading list was eclectic: from district gazetteers to writings of fellow policemen like KF Rustomji and Ashwini Kumar to political biographies, and about nations in our neighbourhood (which was perhaps part of his official assignment). He was well aware of the tense geopolitical environment of India’s neighbourhood. Among the Indian poets, his favourites were Nissim Ezekiel, Jayant Mahapatra and Kamala Das. He was interested in classics of the ancient civilisations – Greek, Persian and Latin, as well as the magical realism of the Latin American authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Luis Borges the Russian Anna Akhmatova, besides all of TS Eliot and Walt Whitman.

And, finally, he was a dreamer and a visionary and a great wordsmith. The power of dreams was so strong that it did not matter where one lived, or for that matter, how long one lived. For dreams go on to eternity, unaffected either by river, or by fire.

Keki Daruwalla is dead. Long live his dreams, and his works!

Sanjeev Chopra (born 3 March, 1961) is a retired IAS officer of the 1985 batch, from Kapurthala, Punjab. He is a resident of Dehradun. He is a former Director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and has written a book, “We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries”, published in 2022. He is now the patron and honorary consultant to a literary festival, the Valley of Words International Literary Festival, held annually in Dehradun. Chopra has held the Hubert H Humphrey Fellowship (Cornell), the Robert S McNamara Fellowship (World Bank) and positions at Royal Asiatic Society, London, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (Harvard).