Keki N Daruwalla

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A brief biography

Avijit Ghosh, Sep 28, 2024: The Times of India

New Delhi : Keki N Daruwalla was one of the foremost poets of post-independent India, who also donned the mantle of a cop and intelligence officer with equal felicity.


Born in Lahore to a Parsi family, Daruwalla’s collections of poems include, "Under Orion" and "The Keeper of the Dead", which earned him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984. In 2015, he returned the award as a protest against the Akademi’s inability to stand up boldly against rising intolerance against writers. His "Landscapes" received the Commonwealth Poetry Award, Asia, in 1987. In a press release on Friday, the Sahitya Akademi described him as “one of the greatest poets of modern India”


Poet and professor Ashwani Kumar said that Daruwalla enjoyed an “edge over his contemporaries like Nissim Ezekiel, A K Ramanujan, and Jayanta Mahapatra in social awareness of history and the mastery over emotional immediacy of language. He redefined the land and landscape of Indian poetry in English.”


A recipient of Padma Shri in 2014, Daruwalla’s work was translated into various languages ranging including Spanish, Swedish, German and Russian. Sahitya Akademi recipient writer Mridula Garg said that the poet loved life and history with equal passion. “Both combined to give his poetry a special cadence and a sense of adventure. The present and the past were intermixed in a way that enthralled the reader as a participant in the history of even those he did not know intimately,” she said.


Harish Trivedi, former professor of English in Delhi University, said that as a poet, Daruwalla was as deeply engaged with current political and social issues as he was with the ancient civilisations of Persia and Greece. “He also had a fine sense of metre and rhythm which is now so rare,” he said.
Daruwalla’s demise drew tributes from a wide spectrum of prominent people. In a post on social media, Congress politician Jairam Ramesh pointed out that the poet was also “a distinguished IPS officer of the 1958 batch and had spent much time in India's intelligence establishment, including R&AW…Tremendously witty and always with a smile, he spoke truth to power at all times. A man of great compassion and empathy, he reflected all that is noble in our syncretic culture.”