Keki N. Daruwalla belongs to a generation of poets who transformed Indian poetry in English into what it is at its best today: understated, terse, imagistic, free from excessive ornamentation, eloquent without being verbose. That does not mean the poets belonged to a ‘movement’ or wrote the same kind of poetry: on the contrary, poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Dom Moraes, Jayanta Mahapatra, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Eunice D’Souza, Kamala Das, Gopal Honnalgere and Keki Daruwalla himself were as different from one another as poets could ever be, in their perspective as well as idiom. Nissim Ezekiel, commenting on Daruwalla’s Under Orion (Writer’s Workshop, 1970), had observed, “Such a bitter scornful, satiric tone has never been heard before”. That tone made him say later that the poet “was born full-grown from the head of some hitherto unrecognised goddess of poetry”. Something of that bitterness still survives in Daruwalla’s poetry, but as Jeet Thayil...
Entire Universes In The Leviathan
Daruwalla’s quietening cynicism has shades of darkening oak; Hoskote’s odyssey churns past worlds
‘He took the road/I took the goat track to solitude’: Keki N. Daruwalla
Photograph by Sanjay Rawat
Photograph by Sanjay Rawat