Edited by Usha Akella
Published by Sahitya Akademi
Review by Shabnam Mirchandani
A House of Words FESTSCHRIFT In Honor of Keki Daruwalla edited by Usha Akella is a polyphonic odyssey, a sonic cartography of writerly gestures, and a re-imagining of the literary gathering place as a convergence of affective intentionality and discursive depth. Usha Akella’s editorial stance is inclusive, expansive, as well as deeply personal. Her quest has manifested in a multi-timbred homage to Keki Daruwalla, sharing with readers the epigenetic echoes of his expansive oeuvre.
The voices featured in the book reveal how the man’s mesmeric radar has sheltered so many over the years, as they sought his counsel, his friendship, and his inspiration. This collection resists the gilded categories we have created through our cultural fictions and ontological entrapments. Instead, it goes to the heart of the anecdote, the epistolary bonding, and a range of readerly responses to Daruwalla’s sweeping vision, his penetrating lens, his cerebral humor, and subtle lyrical tenor. Friends, colleagues, and commentators come together as spiritual siblings in their resounding salutation, creating a dynamic mosaic of tributes which reflect prismatic sparkle of Daruwalla’s utterances.
The offerings unfold in sections entitled Reflections, Festschrift, Interviews, Imagery, and Aphorisms which delve into a vault of Daruwalla’s enduring forcefields, which continue to fuel a spectrum of aesthetic legacies. They reveal how this poet’s candor and groundedness is made more powerfully impactful by his unrelenting forays into metaphysical voids, existential gloom, epistemic stutters, and murky grief. They dwell on his intrepid embrace of eternities within ephemera in the form of taut yet fluid poetry, which acquires layers of resonance with every fresh reading.
Tracing his artistic lineage and creative legacy through the emotional codes of memory, review, and shared experience, the contributors to this endeavor have bestowed upon this collection a kind of hyper-sentience, imbuing in the essays a sense of the present-continuous. Readers will welcome the spiritual warmth of Daruwalla as a savant of grace as seen through the eyes of inspired witnesses, and by the end of the book, will know how that this man truly is (to use Anne Lammott’s phrase) “love with skin.”
Basudhara Roy details the various facets of Daruwalla’s lived truths, as she heralds a “collective toast” to him in the first section. As an “inveterate satirist and unerring realist” whose linguistic versatility and peripatetic career configured his unique sensibility, she demonstrates his seminal impact on the Indian literary scene. Daruwalla, described by Harish Trivedi as a “trans- civilizational poet” has indeed given readers of various generations a kind of mobile linguistic home, enabling them to travel with him through a “wider arc of the earth.” The ecotones reverberating in a 2018 poetry collection are eloquently described in the gestalt of wingspan, oceanscape, mythical voyage, and polyvocal gesture in Arundhathi Subramaniam’s preface, giving them a poignant immediacy. His prowess as a storyteller is described by Malashri Lal who details the ways he covered the gamut of India coming into its own in his “recapitulation of significant history and problems of identity, violence, exploitation, love and loss.” These commentaries are soul threads woven through time. Their dynamic interplay of energies are hermetic carriers of Daruwalla’s charisma, warm authenticity, astute social pulse, ecosatvic leanings, and dazzling array of creative expression.
The astringent grandeur of Daruwalla’s poems is captured in Rupin Desai’s account where he ruminates on his dialogic encounters with the poet and his verses which endure in the mind’s recesses like mercurial whispers. He notes Daruwalla’s relentless exposure of law and order’s savage underbelly in searing documentations of distressingly familiar atavism and injustice. A.J. Thomas speaks of his raw lucidity, his “acerbic wit” as well as astonishing mastery of various forms including the lyric, sonnet, ode and ghazal. Urna Bose focuses on his legendary wit, incisive craft, and sensual fusions of linguistic nuances, as she gives a kaleidoscopic view of his multitudinous poeisis where the local and global are vividly at play, as are the psychological, political, and socio-economic forces which animate his formscape.
A dialogic spectrum of reminiscences follows in the next section of the book which, forms its own symphonic pattern. The auditory experience of a Daruwalla poem has “staying power” in Adil Jussawalla’s words, and this feature’s various facets are covered in the narratives that unfold. Anita Nahal’s recollects of his unassuming demeanor despite his stature, Arundhathi Subramaniam shares his imaginative leaps in time and love of ginger pudding, Basudhara Roy speaks of his unrelenting honesty and delights in the “adventure” of their affectionate acquaintance, Kashiana Singh presents a serenade “distilled in vignettes,” while Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca recalls warmly pleasant virtual encounters. Laksmisree Banerjee highlights the “oblique craft” and “masterly sculpting” of his imagism which vibrates with a “human-centric cosmic energy.” Malashri Lal refers to him as “the evergreen cosmopolitan” and Meenakshi Mohan lauds his depiction of the “multi-ethnicity of Indian experiences.” Menka Shivdasani tells of his blend of political savvy, unabashed directness, and remarkable ability to imbue personal interactions with gentleness and subtlety. All these thoughts are presented like undulating arpeggios as they sound the inner chord of Daruwalla’s creative impulses.
As a man who could hear the naked wail of pain embedded in silences and broken places, and who honored the buried lament sedimented in the past, Daruwalla by his plain-speaking diction has strummed a piercing tune that has managed to ignite operatic fire as well as primal disquiet. As the sharings continue to demonstrate, his proclivities have touched so many hearts. Namita Gokhale’s walk down memory lane evokes the sweep of Daruwalla’s gaze which has encompassed the ancient spice trade, the partition of India, along with contemporary issues, and as she astutely points out, has offered a counternarrative to the “distorted mirror” that history has become. In Narender Nath Vohra’s heartfelt salute to Daruwalla’s “matchless pen” we hear his response to a friend’s journey: the myriad rhythms of Daruwalla’s habitation of different locales in India, his intimate knowledge of their bureaucracies, the reading culture he passionately maintained, and of his personal losses and experiential vicissitudes.
Pramila Venkateswaran offers anecdotes about his twinkling caprice and aphoristic expertise during her time with him at the 2015 Matwaala fest. Priya Sarukkai Chabria reverently addresses him as “The Gentleman’s Poet,” expressing her awe at his editorial prowess, and literary laurels, sharing her experience of his refreshing approachability towards aspiring writers who like herself, had often wrestled with uncertainty in their vocational initiations. Rachna Joshi provides an insider’s view Daruwalla’s systemic congeniality which stems from a deep engagement with the philosophical tensions rising from physical and figurative sojourns. She shows us archetypal openings that are subliminal presences in Daruwalla’s quiet habitation within a gaping wound – the void left by his wife’s death. This is a regular feature of his deep attunement with his writerly pursuit, and in the way he crossed disciplinary boundaries with such attentive astuteness and finesse.
Radha Chakravarty quotes Daruwalla’s line, “A poem is an island in itself” to capture the essence of Daruwalla’s imagistic assemblages which reflect his recognition of voice as artifact. Rukmini Bhaya Nair alludes to the “barbet and Peacock” hidden Daruwalla’s narrative identity, which live on in winged whispers, as his vintage ripens into luminous reverberations in the contemporary reader’s mindscape. Saleem Peeradina credits Daruwalla with infusion of freshness into the Indian literary milieu in the late 60’s, and of initiating the process of generous mentoring to younger aspirants. Sanjukta Dasgupta reveals the macro domains that comprise Daruwalla’s imaginative poetic settings and the way he imbues them with a “timeless veracity,” as they demonstrate a sensibility that “binds transcendence and materiality.”
The testimonials continue like a mantra that vibrates with color with each rendition. Shanta Acharya celebrates the privilege of her long friendship with Daruwalla and touches movingly upon the shadowlands of grief she experienced along with him which shaped his becomings in so many ways. Sridala Swami shares the supportive gestures of Daruwalla that helped her cross a personal threshold to the realm of publishing and making her poetry public. Sukrita Paul Kumar reflects on the sparkling alchemy of Daruwalla’s creativity which blends the succinct and the subtle like no other. A.J. Thomas admires his unvarnished targeting of political folly, counterbalanced by his gentle magnanimity towards the writing community. Usha Akella sings of his “spacious imagination” and his unique status in her world as the “keeper of dreams” as she ruminates on their special bond. Yezad Kapadia remembers his “outstanding work” as a trustee for the Delhi Parsi Anjuman.
All the accounts above carry the invisible map of a spirit’s rhizomatic journey into the affections of so many. Encounters with Daruwalla have resulted in transformations that cannot be examined forensically in the form of essays alone. Even the vicarious experience of him recorded in responses to his poetry and life story cannot quite capture the immensity of his hospitable spirit. These nuances are nevertheless perfectly reflected in his exhilaratingly thoughtful interviews with Firdaus Gandavia and Usha Akella. In their conversational explorations of Daruwalla’s prose and poetry, they reveal the topography of his creative landscape which spans centuries and geographies. His frankness in these exchanges bespeaks his generative deliberations with himself throughout his life, as he wrought an oeuvre from walking the talk, and seeing an invitation in the smallest of shifts, whether they happened in an obscure past or in real time. The writing that emerged from this engagement with the human spirit reflects the gritty awareness of a seasoned traveler who is not looking for something at the end of the road, but instead opens his eyes to the myriad wonderments of his path, while walking.
The concluding sections lighting up the splendid imaginative canvas of Daruwalla’s poetry are a lush cascade of imagistic metaphors followed by pithily expressive aphorisms lovingly put together by Usha Akella. Visuals like “The procession snaking like a turban unwound” or an utterance such as “The word is great, / yet there was light before the word” hover on those frontiers that transcend semantic superficialities and provoke into existence an immersion in the anatomy of being, a visceral sense of connection, and the affirming beneficence of such discovery.
In this era of transnational digital culture, we have become inherently diasporic in our quest for belonging, navigating cartographies beyond our physical places of domicile, our familiar epistemologies, our stable hermeneutic traditions, and the received infrastructure of thought itself. Amid this chaotic flux, we often seek anchor in words that inspire deep listening, and in conversational affect that feels so intimate that it dissolves the contours of our souls, and lights up the music of our collective archetypal memory. This is the domain where Daruwalla has etched his home address, its emotional coordinates illuminating a sparkling coherence which feels welcoming. It is a house of words with its doors wide open: a sheltering grace.
Shabnam Mirchandani is a follower of her own questing spirit which finds expression in an epistolary network of fellow writers, spiritual aspirants, birders, artists, naturalists, musicians, and other souls lost and found. She enjoys exploratory delving into palimpsests which host stories, journeys, histories and silences. Mutual mentoring, deep listening, and affective reinforcement have yielded a richly interactive space between creators and their creations within her adventurous platform of long form letters. Shabnam’s approach to her essayistic reviews of literary works is often haptic in its flavor, involving pottery, painting, singing, and writing.
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