Keki Daruwalla (1937-2024): The police officer turned poet
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The 87-year-old poet and former IPS officer Keki N. Daruwalla passed away on the night of 26 September at a Delhi hospital after a prolonged period of illness.
The author of over a dozen works of poetry and fiction from the 1970s onwards, Daruwalla was considered one of the greatest English-language poets of India. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1987 and the Padma Shri (India’s fourth-highest civilian honour) in 2014. Following a stint as an intelligence officer at R&AW in the early 1990s, Daruwalla retired from the police force and later served as a member of the National Commission for Minorities between 2011 and 2014.
From the beginning of his literary career, Daruwalla’s poems depicted death, destruction and atrocities. This bleak subject matter was rendered in a malleable style that used irony, satire and dark humour frequently. Elemental and animal metaphors were something of a stylistic signature for him.
One of his early poems, ‘Ruminations’ from the collection Under Orion (1970), includes the following lines: “I can smell violence in the air / like the lash of coming rain / mass hatreds drifting grey across the moon / It hovers brooding, poised like a cobra / as I go prodding rat-holes and sounding caverns / looking for a fang that darts, / a hood that sways and eyes that squirt a reptile hate." Another poem in the same collection, ‘Death by Burial’, used farce and tragicomedy to depict the madness of communal riots. The hapless, cornered man at the heart of the poem contemplates a cruel choice: ‘death by fire’ (Hindu funerary rites) or ‘death by burial’ (Muslim funerary rites). His 1971 collection Apparition in April feature
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