Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla was born in Lahore to a Parsi family in 1937. His father, N.C. Daruwalla, was an eminent professor, who taught in Government College Lahore. Before the Partition of India, his family left undivided India in 1945 and moved to Junagarh and then to Rampur in India. As a result, he grew up studying in various schools and in various languages. He obtained his master's degree in English Literature from Government College, Ludhiana, University of Punjab spent a year at Oxford as a Queen Elizabeth House Fellow in 1980–81 He joined the Police Service in 1958. His work as a police officer offered him various opportunities to work in different party of the country and to face the harsh realities of life from which he drew the substance for his poetry. He has written 12 books and his first novel for Pepper and Christ was published in 2009.He received Commonwealth Poetry for his collection of poems, Landscape in the year 1987.
Career
He joined the Indian Police Service in 1958, and was eventually appointed as a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs. He subsequently was in the Cabinet Secretariat until his retirement. His first book of poetry was Under Orion, which was published by Writers Workshop, India in 1970. He then went on to publish his second collection Apparition in April in 1971 for which he was given the Uttar Pradesh State Award in 1972. His poems appeared in many poetry anthologies such as Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry edited by Menka Shivdasani, and The Dance of the Peacock edited by Dr Vivekanand Jha. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award, given by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, in 1984 and returned the same award in October, 2015 in protest and with a statement that "The organisation Sahitya Akademi has failed to speak out against ideological collectives that have used physical violence against authors". Daruwalla did not take back his award even after Sahitya Akademi passed a resolution condemning the attacks on rational thinkers. In an interview to The Statesman, Daruwalla expanded on why he did not take back his award, saying "what you do, you do once and you can’t be seen as giving back an award and then taking it back." He received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987. Nissim Ezekiel comments "Daruwalla has the energy of the lion".
Books
The Professor Condoles is a tragic poem by Keki N. Daruwalla. This poem is a professor's response to the death of an eleven-year-boy in an accident. In this poem the poet addresses to the brother of dead child. An accident is an unexpected occurrence and without design. It results into the death of an innocent child. It is a tragedy which encompasses a culture involving sin, guilt and hamartia. Today Accidents occure every where. This is the horrible cause of death of innocent people. The poem describes the tragic reality of the human life in the world. The poet uses the expressions like the blood clotting on the tarmac and a crowd thrombosed. The imagery of horizons awash with light and the canal dry as the udder of an old cow are evocative phrases. This poem is a fine blend of modern and post modern English Poetry.
Swerving to Solitude: Letters to Mama.. New Delhi: Simon & Schuster India, 2018.
In popular culture
's Bollywood film Refugee is attributed to have been inspired by the story of Keki N. Daruwalla based around the Great Rann of Kutch titled "Love Across the Salt Desert" which is also included as one of the short stories in the School Standard XII syllabus English textbook of NCERT in India.
