Keki N. Daruwalla (1937-2024): The poet who mapped geographies of history, memory

Born in Lahore in 1937, Daruwalla witnessed India’s Partition as a lived rupture. His family, part of the Zoroastrian community, migrated to India, and this displacement found expression in many different ways in his work across genres. After earning a master’s degree in English Literature from Punjab University, Daruwalla joined the Indian Police Service in 1958, a path that gave him firsthand insight into the mechanics of governance and its failures, and deeply informed his body of work.

His experiences in law enforcement (he retired as chairman, joint intelligence committee, in 1995), particularly in witnessing the underbelly of civil unrest, human cruelty, and systemic violence, seeped into his poetry, providing an authenticity that sets his work apart. His early exposure to the works of Western poets such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats influenced his aesthetic sensibility, but his heart and his lines beat firmly to the rhythm of Indian history and myth. His debut collection, Under Orion, published in 1970, marked the beginning of a career that would intertwine the visceral realities of his profession with the lyrical force of his poetry.

An unflinching gaze at violence

From the very beginning, Daruwalla’s poetry explored themes of fragmentation — of land, of identity, and of the self. It was this dislocation, this yearning for something lost yet never quite possessed that formed the undercurrent of his verse. Under Orion was a revelation in its clear, unsentimental gaze. Here was a poet unafraid to look directly at violence — not just physical, but the psychological toll of living in a post-colonial world. It was a leitmotif hitherto uncommon in poetry — considered to be a domain of the delicate, a territory of the tender. Daruwalla received lavish praise for the collection from Nissim Ezekiel, the doyen of Indian poets writing in English, who compared it with the first publications of Dom Moraes and A.K. Ramanujan. Its poems like ‘Death by Burial’ and ‘Curfew in a Riot-torn City’ showcase Daruwall’s ability to transform the stark brutality of riots, curfews, and the chaos of mob violence into haunting, almost cinematic verse. “Half the village could be Hindu, Half Muslim / enough cause for a riot! / with half the village shouting / “death by fire!” / and the other half / “death by burial!”, he writes in ‘Death by Burial’.

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These early poems pulsated with an energy that was both primal and reflective; they addressed the anxieties of nationhood, identity, and personal disillusionment. What makes Daruwalla’s poetry so compelling is his mastery of juxtaposition. His poems are steeped in India’s tumultuous political landscape, but they also brim with profound emotional depth and philosophical inquiry. He writes about violence that permeates the streets of riot-torn cities unflinchingly. His India is not the idyllic, mythical land of romanticism but a place teeming with contradictions, where beauty and brutality coexist, often uneasily. In his earthy, robust style, Daruwalla captures the complexities, crudities, and ironies of India in ways that continue to resonate with readers across generations.

Throughout his career, Daruwalla’s poetry remained grounded in his acute observation of landscapes, both geographical and emotional. The poems in Crossing of Rivers (1976) expanded his repertoire, reflecting a deepening engagement with nature and the interplay between the natural world and the human psyche. The river, a recurring motif in his poetry, became a metaphor for the flow of history, the passage of time, and the sediment of memory. In poems such as Boatride along the Ganga, Daruwalla depicts the sacred river not as a symbol of purity but as a repository of human debris, both physical and moral. His ability to see the divine and the mundane in the same frame, often juxtaposed, gave his poetry a rawness that few could replicate.

No lapses into nostalgia, no political posturing

It was with The Keeper of the Dead (1982) that Daruwalla cemented his place as one of India’s preeminent poets. This collection, for which he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award (he returned this in October 2015 over the Sahitya Akademi’s failure to “speak out against ideological collectives that have used physical violence against authors’), grappled with death, loss, and the mythic dimensions of human suffering. His use of Hindu myth was particularly striking — his gods were never aloof, never distant, but engaged, conflicted, and often furious.

One of Daruwalla’s most powerful abilities was his skill in weaving history into poetry without lapsing into nostalgia or political posturing. His poem The Ghagra in Spate (from Under Orion) is a fine example of this: “And every year / the Ghaghra changes course / turning over and over in her sleep. / 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.” The Ghaghra river is transformed into a force both elemental and sentient; it wreaks havoc but it’s also intricately connected to the landscape and its people. Daruwalla’s vivid imagery captures the river’s mercurial nature — from a smudge of grey to a red scar in the night; she is as restless and unpredictable as a being alive with emotion.

The poem’s language flows like the river itself, oscillating between moments of serene equipoise and sudden devastation, where the flood turns the village into a scene of quiet despair. The villagers, familiar with the river’s cruelty, do not waste energy on futile prayers but get enmeshed in the gritty realities of survival. The Ghaghra retreats in a frenzied escape, leaving the land to mourn in her wake. Daruwalla contrasts its powerful presence with the quiet resilience of the villagers; the poem, thus, becomes a meditation on nature’s indifference, the human capacity for endurance, and the river’s cyclical, unrelenting force.

A chronicler of decay and dissolution

Daruwalla’s short story collections Sword and Abyss (1979) and The Minister for Permanent Unrest and Other Stories (1996) revealed his flair for prose, his sharp observational skills, and his understanding of human psychology. His stories, much like his poetry, were fixated on the human condition, particularly the intersections of violence, love, and betrayal. They betray his ability to create fully realised characters and situations within the space of a few pages. His short story, ‘Love Across the Thar Desert’ — taught widely in school curricula — is a tale of two real lovers, Najab and Fatimah, whose devotion eclipses the constraints of religion and nationhood; it shows that love defies not just geography, but the very notion of division that defines borders and beliefs.

As a poet of the Indian condition, Daruwalla never lost sight of the individual in the grand sweep of history. His poem Pestilence in Nineteenth Century Calcutta is among his most evocative poems; it captures the abject horror of disease and the inhumanity of colonial rule. Whenever he addresses the sweep of history, he never fails to zoom in on the individual lives caught in its tide — the washerwoman, the prostitute, the dying children. It gives his work an intensely human quality. This is what made Daruwalla so powerful: the ability to hold both the epic and the intimate in a single line.

Daruwalla’s later works, especially collections like Night River (2000), reveal a poet increasingly drawn to the metaphysical, to the questions of existence itself. In these later poems, the introspection deepens, as Daruwalla explores the inexorable passage of time, the inevitable decay of the body, and the search for meaning in a world that offers none. These reveal a stripping away of artifice — a poet grappling with the void, yet refusing to turn away from it. In his final years, Daruwalla remained an active and engaged presence in the literary world, continuing to write and publish despite the physical challenges of aging. His last collection, Naishapur and Babylon (2018), was a fitting conclusion to a career that had spanned over five decades.

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The poems in this collection returned to many of the themes that had defined his earlier work — history, myth, violence, displacement, identity — but with a new sense of urgency. There is a starkness to the imagery, a stripping away of the ornamental in favour of the essential. It was as if, in his final years, Daruwalla had come to terms with the inevitability of decay and dissolution, both personal and national, but refused to look away from it. There is also a resignation, a kind of acceptance of the futility of seeking answers. He becomes a poet who watches the inexorable unravelling of all things with a detached, almost cold, eye.

A poet who saw the world with an unblinking eye

Daruwalla’s novels trace the arcs of history, power, and the ambiguities of human ambition. In For Pepper and Christ (2009), he creates a textured world of 15th-century exploration, where the European hunger for spices ignites conflicts not only on land but in the hearts of men. Through Brother Figueiro’s spiritual dilemmas, Taufiq’s impulsive wanderlust, and Ehtesham’s perilous devotion to his art, the novel examines the collision of cultures and the religious fault lines between Islam and Christianity.

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In Ancestral Affairs (2015), he turns his gaze to the Partition era, rendering the chaos of 1947 through the intimate lens of a fractured family. It portrays the personal toll of historical upheaval, lacing humour with tragedy as Saam Bharucha and his son Rohinton wrestle with generational guilt and broken ties. In Swerving to Solitude (2018), Seema finds her mother torn between political movements and personal desires. These novels show how personal fates are inextricably bound to the larger forces of history.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Daruwalla did not write from an ivory tower. His poetry was forged in the furnace of experience, and it shows. There is a clarity, and a rare honesty in his work that is unmistakable. Daruwalla was a poet who saw the world with an unblinking eye, refusing to look away from its horrors, its beauty, and its contradictions. His poetry, while often dark, was never without hope — though it was a hope tempered by the realities of life. His work often expressed disillusionment with the post-colonial state, particularly with the newly independent nation failing to live up to the promises of justice, equality, and progress. His critiques were laced with bitter irony. In a way, most of his poems can be seen as witnesses to the myriad ways in which the ideal of India was betrayed through the decades since Independence.