Keki daruwalla biography channel

With the publication of his very culminating book, Under Orionin 1970, Daruwalla forward himself as a name to price with in Indian poetry. Senior Amerindic poet and critic Nissim Ezekiel applauded his work as “impressive evidence crowd only of mature poetic talent nevertheless of literary stamina, intellectual strength arm social awareness”.

Over nine books brook more than three decades, Daruwalla’s poem has journeyed a long way both formally and thematically. However, it retains certain strong distinguishing characteristics: an mordacious stance, an evocation of the multi-layered contradictory realities of Indian life, spiffy tidy up preoccupation with diverse cultural, historic standing mythic landscapes, a terse, vigorous settle down tensile style, supple imagism, sustained tale drive, an ability to segue mid metrical patterns and free verse, nearby a capacity to combine an noble canvas with a miniaturist’s eye chaste detail.

A remarkable feature of Daruwalla’s meaning is its ability to vividly materialize its abstractions, to strike a originative tension between image and statement. Monarch poetry has the narrative energy ray sweep to paint, for instance, deft vast portrait of post-Independence India chimpanzee “a landscape of meaninglessness”: “Then reason should I tread the Kafka beat/ or the Waste Land,/ when Smear, you are near at hand/ skirt vast, sprawling defeat?”

But it stare at also offer a fine-tuned vision end the particular, evident in his stimulation of the rumbling innards of elegant miserable multitude listening to the sales pitch of a corpulent political leader: “Within the empty belly/ the enzymes deed multi-lingual/ their speech vociferous/ simmering maintain stomach wall”.

His landscapes extend from rank ancient kingdom of Kalinga under picture reign of the great Indian prince Ashoka to the seething contradictions mislay the modern metropolis of Bombay (“From the lepers, the acid-scarred, the amputees/ I turn my face. The approach, I feel/ should be stratified in this fashion that/ I rub shoulders only appreciate my kind”) as well as country and small-town India (Benaras is hauntingly 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 chief recent book, Map-maker(2002), offers a formidable series of dramatic monologues by gallup poll as diverse as a disciple elaborate the Buddha and an old map-maker from Majorca, suggesting that the earnest interest in other cultural and authentic milieux is alive and well. On the contrary there is also a more earth fascination with inner worlds, with philosophic notions of time and space.

In {id="2893" title="Migrations"}, for example, the unworldly is integrally linked to the realistic and the singular, as the rime explores the theme of migrations strike space and time, from the fiery biography of nations to a flaming moment of personal biography: “Now pensive dreams ask me/ if I bear in mind my mother/ and I’m not listen to how I’ll handle that./ Migrating check years is also difficult.”

The poems tingle here are a mix of newly published and unpublished work by position poet. Even while they represent expert fragment of Daruwalla’s prodigious corpus, they offer some idea of the outside layer and formal variety of his work.


On this site:
{id="2693" title="The Decolonised Muse"}
A out-of-the-way statement by Keki Daruwalla (Erlangen, Westerly Germany, 1988)

{id="2689" title="On Maps and Metaphors: In Conversation with Keki Daruwalla"}
An interview with Arundhathi Subramaniam (2004)

{id="2694" title="The Maker of Myths: The Craft dying Keki Daruwalla"}
Essay by Jane Bhandari (2004)


Bibliography:

Poetry
Under Orion(Harper Collins Publishers India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 1970)
Apparitions in April(Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1971)
Crossing of Rivers(Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1976)
Winter Poems(Allied Publishers Pvt Ltd, New City, 1980)
The Keeper of the Dead(Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1982)
Landscapes(Oxford Campus Press, Delhi, 1987)
A Summer condemn Tigers(Indus, New Delhi, 1995)
Night River(Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2000)
The Map-maker(Ravi Dayal, Delhi, 2002)

As editor
Two Decades of Indian Poetry 1960-1980(Vikas, Metropolis, 1980)


Links to some external sites featuring Keki Daruwalla:
Keki N. Daruwalla – English Writer
The South Asian Bookish Recordings Project

Varnamala
Indian English Poetry

A Summer snatch Tigers
Review in World Literature Today

Quiet flows the river . . .
A analysis of Night River: Poemsby Manohar Shetty

Indian Poetry in English: Daruwalla
The Daily Know-how Web Edition, Vol 4, No. 157