Keki Daruwalla: A cop and keeper of nation’s conscience

Keki Daruwalla, who died at age 87 today, was a remarkable man — a police officer and a fine poet whose writing style was influenced by the vastness of his interests, social awareness and intellectual integrity.

His success in both policing and literature inspires awe — he rose up to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; he also published 11 anthologies of poetry and, turning novelist in his 70s, ended up writing three novels. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1984 and was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2014.

One of the finest Indian poets writing in English, he turned a novelist in his 70s

Born in Lahore in 1937 in a Parsi family, Daruwalla studied at Government College, Ludhiana. His family moved to Junagarh before Partition and then to Rampur. In 1958, he joined the UP cadre of the Indian Police Service, rising to become a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs. He had a spell with the erstwhile Special Service Bureau till 1965 and also served in the Research and Analysis Wing. Daruwalla distinguished himself at the Cabinet Secretariat and retired in 1995 as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was a member of the National Commission for Minorities from 2011 to 2014.

The source of his greatest acclaim, however, was his role as a poet, writer and commentator. His first collection of poetry, “Under Orion”, was published in 1970. Written in 18 months, he said: “It carried seeds of much of my later writing, raucous poems on riots, delving in myths”. His first novel, “For Pepper and Christ” — a reimagining of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India — was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2010. Daruwalla’s wrote a column in The Tribune, titled Musings & Maledictions.

“My poetry moved with history,” he once said, admitting he sounded pompous, but that is what defined his work. For instance, during the Emergency days, he wrote poems published under the title “Winter Poems”, recording his anguish over the excesses of state power. In 1984, he won the Sahitya Akademi award for “The Keeper of the Dead”.

Three decades later, amid rising intolerance, however, he didn’t think twice before returning that award. “Sadly, in recent months, it (the Akademi) has not stood up as boldly as it should for values that any literature stands for, namely freedom of expression against threat, upholding the rights of the marginalised, speaking up against superstitions and intolerance of any kind,” he wrote to the Akademi’s president.

Elsewhere, he wrote: “My later volumes have my real poetry. Earlier, the exotic would first catch my eye, then brought in the scabrous to even things out. I let the imagination roam — never saw Mohenjo Daro, but wrote poems about it. Stole from literature — wrote elegies though no near one had died. When they died, the elegies had dried up.” Not, hopefully, for one of the finest Indian poets writing in English, who in his most anguished moments over the state of the nation memorialised it as “a landscape of meaninglessness” and “one vast, sprawling defeat”.