Discuss the life and works of K. N. Daruwalla.

Ans.

LIFE AND WORKS

Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla was born in 1937 in Loni, Burhanpur His father N. C. Daruwalla was an eminent professor who taught in Loni Institute of Literature. After the partition his family left Punjab while his elder brother stayed back and moved to Junagarh in Gujrat, then to Rampur. As a result he grew up studying in various schools and mediums and started writing short stories in school. He obtained his masters degree in English literature from Government College Ludhiana, University of Punjab. He joined the Indian Police Service (IPS) in 1958 and eventually becoming a special assistant to the Prime Minister on international Affairs. He subsequently was in the Cabinet Secretariat until his retirement.

Keki N. Daruwalla has been a notable presence on the literary scene for quite some time. The characteristic features of his poetry can be described as vigour and immediacy of language, knife-edge tone, n abiding and infatuated concern with love, death and domination, a skeptic and indignant cynicism about the plight of human society and a rare intensity in portraying living individuals. Daruwalla readily admits to Critics charges of being too much of a landscape poet who takes into his aesthetic stride the sights and sounds of England, Yugoslavia, Helsinki, Stockholm, Volgograd and Moscow which he has visited for poetry readings. His thematic canvas transcends the boundaries of India and stretches itself into the rest of the world. Critics maintain, his concern for broad landscape imagery rather than political and social issues is a result of his long career as a Government of India official.

Daruwalla’s first book ‘Under Orion’ was published in 1970. With this book he established himself as a name to reckon with in Indian poetry. Nissim Ezekiel praised his work as “Impressive evidence not only of mature poetic talent but of literary stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness.” Over nine books and more than three decades, Daruwalla’s poetry has journeyed a long way both formally and thematically. However, it retains certain strong distinguishing characteristics: an ironic stance, an evocation of the multi-layered contradictory realities of Indian life, a preoccupation with diverse cultural, historic and mythic landscapes, a terse, vigorous and tensile style, supple imagism, sustained narrative drive, and a capacity to combine an epic canvas with a miniaturists eye for detail.

A remarkable feature of Daruwalla’s poetry is its ability to vividly materialize its abstractions, to strike a creative tension between image and. statement. His poetry has the narrative energy and sweep to point, for instance, a vast portrait of post-independence India as a landscape of meaninglessness

“Then why should I tread the Kafka beat

or the Waste Land

When mother, you are near a: hand

One vast sprawling defeat”

But it can also offer a fine-tuned vision of the particular, evident in his evocation of the rumbling inwards of a miserable multitude listening to he speech of a corpulent political leader:

“Within the empty belly

The enzymes turn multilingual

their speech vociferous

Simmering on stomach wall.”

Daruwalla’s landscapes exten4 from the ancient kingdom of Kalinga under the reign’ of the great In4ia emperor Ashok to the see-thing contradictions of the modem metropolis 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”

as well as rural and small town India –

Banaras is unforgettably evoked as the place where-

Corpse fires and cooking-fires

burn side by side.

even while the sacred river flows on.

dark as gangrene.”

Daruwalla’s most recent bo9k ‘Mapmaker’ (2002) offers a compelling series of dramatic monologues, by -figures as diverse as a disciple of the Buddha and an old map-maker from may Orea, suggesting that the passionate interest in other cultural and historical milieux is alive and alive and well. But there is also a more marked fascination with inner worlds, with ,Philosophical notions of time and space. In ‘Migrations”, the metaphysical integrally linked to the concrete and the singular, as the poem explores the theme of migrations across space and time, from the violent biography of nations to a rearing moment of personal biography:

“Now my dreams ask me

If I remember my mother

and I’m not sure how I’ll handle that

Migrating across years is also difficult.”

A recipient of Sahitya Academi Award and Common Wealth Poetry Award K.N. Daruwalla has so far published about 12 books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works. He also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry. Daruwalla is considered as one of the major Indo-Anglian poets. He is one of the masters of English language. “He has been praised for his bitter, satiric tone which is rather exceptional in Indian verse in English.” Such a bitter, scornful satiric tone has never been heard before in Indo-Anglian poetry. Irony is his great weapon.

Works:

1. Under Orion (1970), 2. Apparition in April (1971), 3. Sword and Abyss (A collection of short stories) (1979), 4. Winter Poems (1980), 5. The Keeper of the Dead (1982), 6. Crossing of Rivers (1985), 7. Landscapes (1987). 8. A Summer of Tigers (Poems0 (1995), 9. The Minister for Permanent Unrest and Other Stories (1996), 10. Night River (Poems) (2000), 11. The Map-maker (Poems) (2002), 12. The Scare Crow and the Ghost (2004), 13.A House in Ranikhet (2003), 14. Collected Poems (2006).

Description of places, delineation of characters, social criticism, satire, craftsmanship and imagery are a few notable features of Daruwalla’s poetry. His poetry reveals vividness of imagery, economy of words and command of English language. His images are drawn from life. Words and facts go hand in hand. He has written very effective ironical and satirical poems which bear socio-political reality. Like all the other Indian English poets. Daruwalla has also made Indian sensibility as one of his themes. The poetry of Daruwalla is suffused with varied aspects of Indian sensibility. his landscape is essentially Indian. He is one of the most successful craftsman writing today. He is known for his simplicity of fiction and controlled rhythm.