Punjab: One of India’s finest poets writing in English and Sahitya Akademi Award winner Keki N. Daruwalla died on Friday. He was 87. Born in 1937 in Lahore to a Parsi family, Daruwalla studied at Government College, Ludhiana in Punjab. His family moved to Junagadh and then Rampur before Partition. In 1958, he joined the Indian Police Service (Uttar Pradesh cadre). He became the Prime Minister’s Special Assistant on International Affairs. However, it was his role as a poet as well as a writer that brought him national and international fame. His first book of poems ‘Under Orion’ came in 1970. Written in 18 months, “it contained the seeds of my later writing, raucous poems on riots, poems steeped in myth”, in his own words. His first novel ‘For Paper and Christ’ was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2010. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014.
“My poetry moves with history,” he once said, admitting he sounded too arrogant, but that is what defines his work. For instance, during the Emergency, he wrote ‘Winter Poems’, recording his inner agony over the exercise of state power. In 1984, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of poems ‘The Keeper of the Dead’. However, three decades later, amid rising intolerance, Daruwalla did not think twice before returning that award. “…Sadly, in recent months it (the Akademi) has not stood up as boldly as it should have for the values that any literature stands for, such as freedom of expression against threats, upholding the rights of the marginalised, speaking out against superstition and intolerance of any kind. He wrote to the President of the Academy, “The Academy has also not distinguished itself in supporting writers who are under political pressure.”
