"The Conversation was organised and hosted by the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL), Kolkata, on July 1, 2020, under the Series “Indian Poetry: Past Present and Future”. I am grateful to Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta, President, and Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha, Secretary, for making the recording available to me. Extracts are selected and modified from the recording."

The Conversation was organised and hosted by the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL), Kolkata, on July 1, 2020, under the Series “Indian Poetry: Past Present and Future”.

 

(I am grateful to Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta, President, and Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha, Secretary, for making the recording available to me. Extracts are selected and modified from the recording.)

 

Malashri Lal: A pleasure, Keki Daruwalla, to ask you about a few aspects of your large oeuvre of poetry. Since the session is hosted in IPPL, let me begin with your early links in Kolkata. Your first book of poetry Under Orion (1970) was published by Prof. P. Lal, the creator of the Writers Workshop.  Do you have any vivid remembrances?

 

Keki N. Daruwalla:  Professor P. Lal wrote me a letter offering to publish a book as he had read three of my poems in The Illustrated Weekly. The manuscript was written in Barabanki, of all places, over a year and a half. I met Professor P. Lal only once, in Kolkata, and that hour with him was an education. In those days  Nissim Ezekiel  commanded the western seaboard and P. Lal, the eastern. They were the great men who gave direction to the poetry being written and published.

 

ML: I've had the privilege of knowing you for several decades. There’s a public intellectual in you and also the privacy-seeking poet.  In a recent piece in The Tribune you have said that in difficult times “we need to burrow inwards”. Your short story collection Islands is about loneliness and isolation. During the Covid period “lockdown” you wrote several poems. Do tells us more about them. 

 

KD. During the Corona years we are perforce isolated, confined, and  we were turning inwards.  The subject of isolation is an old one but it had acquired a new meaning.  The lockdown phase took me back to the Black Death and I started reading Dante's Inferno.  What I wrote was a clutch of sonnets on the Black Death which had parallels with tragedies of the Covid experience.

 

ML: Your latest collection, Naishapur and Babylon: Poems (2005-2017), published in 2018, is prefaced by lines from  Omar Khayam : "The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one." Why?  

 

KD: One has to respect one's age and I really thought this was my last poetry book and now it is different. I am almost halfway through another book!

 

ML: Your lifelong interest in history, mythology and social truth speaks through this volume of poems.  Arundhathi Subramaniam's ‘Introduction’ is eloquent about your writing, “The birds may be migrating towards newer myths. But their gaze remains keen, their wing span formidable. Vigorous and powerful, the poems of Keki Daruwalla continue to take wing.” Two significant poems come to my mind:

 

Migrations are always difficult

ask any drought

ask any plague;

ask the year 1947.

 

Mapmaker

Perhaps I’ll wake up on some alien shore

In the shimmer of am aluminium dawn.

 

You have several political poems too. Can you recall the one on Gandhi ?

 

KD: We have programmes on 2nd October and 30th January. Gandhi is described with  his "round bald head" and "rondures of his spectacles". His transformation from a "nondescript lawyer" to a living legend is remarkable. He challenged the might of the British Empire. I say finally that I would "rather read you than the Iliad."

 

ML: You received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987, and the Padma Shri in 2014. Nissim Ezekiel had once commented, “Daruwalla has the energy of the lion.” In what way has your poetry changed over the years? 

​

KD: The poetry has to change if you've been writing for 50 years. I referred  mostly to poems written recently because the lockdown affected us all. As I continued my journey, I wrote on more things, I explored other cultures… Wrote on the Middle East,  wrote on history, myth.  Yet,  you can't completely change yourself. I used to keep a dream log for a few months and Night River was almost a book on dreams. And then I made a decision with myself that don't be too bleak.

 

ML Though best known as a poet, you have a parallel output as a fiction writer—short stories as well as novels. In fact, your third novel Swerving to Solitude: Letters to Mama was published the same year as your latest poetry collection in 2018.

 

KD: I’ve been a social critic and an analyst so you see the world with critical faculties.  Don't forget that I am a fiction writer and so one has to be observant. A novelist has to see the foibles and the ironies existent in life, in people. Of course, a writer must not choose between fiction and poetry as modes of expression but in India, there are very few people in English who actually write fiction as well as poetry. I can't think of too many people. The person who comes to mind is Vikram Seth.

 

ML: I have a question about senior writers mentoring younger poets. Is it

desirable?

 

KD: I don't wish to mentor people on what they should be writing. I think there are more writers of poetry than readers of poetry. The readers of serious poetry are getting fewer and fewer which is regrettable.

 

ML. Finally, let me take you back to Kolkata. I am quoting you, “People have a mistaken view that you have to be born in Calcutta or Trinidad to be reckoned a novelist. I never heard that misti doi and sandesh helped to trigger the imagination.”

 

KD: That is a very naughty comment by me. I think I had a nice dig at some novelists. One enjoys these lively interviews!

 

ML. Thanks, Keki, for this informative and candid conversation.