Keki N.Daruwalla: An Assessment

Keki N.Daruwalla is a poet of some hard heart just like Ted Hughes and his is poetry wherein he draws and derives from animal imagery, animals and birds, one whose landscape is of the hilly, mountainous U.P., leaving no room for loose emotions. And to read him is to read about disease, death and food, unrest, commotion and riot, flood and cholera. As a poet, his heart dwells it in Lahore and its beyond, but circumstances and situations bring him to Punjab, Gujarat and Delhi. A Parsi poet, he is verbose and bombastic, the exterior taking us to the interior revealing meaning, thought and content. Apart from animal imagery he inducts in, he is drawn towards his ethos and heritage which we find in his references to the Tower of Silence, Fire Hymns, Zarathushtra, Ahirman and Ahurmazda cutting the ice of the Parsi psyche. There is a quest for identity in him which one can feel and mark it, a sense belonging, an assertion of heritage and lineage stuff, even going beyond Iran and its beyond.