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Sunday, March 18, 2001
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Quiet flows the river...
IT is a depressing anomaly of Indian publishing that the
Collected Poems of Keki N. Daruwalla has not yet been brought
out. Since his outstanding debut with Under Orion, in 1970,
Daruwalla has published seven more individual collections. He has
been shuttled back and forth between five different publishers.
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, has published three of his
books. But after OUP's stunningly boorish decision to shut its
doors on poetry worldwide, the avenues for poets has dwindled
even further. The situation is so bleak now that young poets in
Mumbai, in a state of siege, have returned to the days of self-
publication, a throwback to those grim years in the late 1970s
and early 1980s when virtually no publisher touched a poetry
manuscript.
But Daruwalla is not a young poet. He has been a proficient
practitioner of the art for over 30 years and has enhanced his
reputation with each passing book. Night River, is his eighth
book. Though lacking the honed-down beauty and steely grace of
his previous work, A Summer of Tigers, published five years ago,
there are moments of brilliance in this book that surpass much of
the earlier work. The masterly quality of the poems towards the
end of the book may not wholly obliterate some of the
surprisingly slipshod craftsmanship evident in the early part of
the book, but it does serve as a palliative.
To fully appreciate this collection, it would be wise to start
reading it about two-thirds of the way down, beginning with the
section, "Stalking Mandelstam". Though stalking isn't quite the
right word, the set of seven superbly sustained and heart-felt
poems is a unique tribute to the great Russian poet, Osip
Mandelstam, who suffered deprivation, humiliation and exile after
his denouncement of Stalin in the early 1930s. Mandelstam
eventually died in penury and icy desolation in a transit prison
camp near Vladivostok in December, 1938. In "Through a Row of
Doors", Daruwalla, in unconditional empathy with the poet, and
with considerable skill, brings back that era of brutal
repression:
They go through his poems looking for those bullets disguised as
words.
Later, in the same poem, Daruwalla writes:
These are not rhetorical questions: in the stark simplicity of
these lines is the profound truth of the lasting endurance of
Mandelstam's poetry and of the heroism and courage of the man
himself whose death questioned the conscience and integrity of
the Soviet intelligentsia in the Stalinist era.
As Daruwalla puts it memorably in the last line of the set of
poems: "History, lamp in hand, looks out for you." Darulla even
has his own straight translation, of Mandelstam's famous poem,
"The Stalin Epigram". Savagely sardonic, the poem led to
Mandelstam's first arrest in 1934.
In the following, final section, "Island Poems", the Andaman
Islands setting is a stage for Daruwalla to enter into a more
reflective mood, though there are echoes of the previous poems in
the very first lines of Prologue,:
A poem is an island in itself.
Heartburn and frostburn lie outside the page.
The power and immediacy of Daruwalla, hallmarks of most of his
work, has been replaced here by a detached, ruminative style. The
language is supple and the eye unerringly keen. But philosophical
urges rest uneasily in Daruwalla. And a tendency towards an
inappropriate and all too easy levity reduces some of the poems
in the early part of the book to the level of pastiche or at
best, mediocre satire. On occasion the lines are pedestrian, as
in "Going Down the Night River":
These are inexplicable blemishes from a poet who can rise to the
illuminating heights of "Stalking Mandelstam". But there are some
other fine poems too, most notably "Exile and the Chinese Poets",
and "Contradictory You", in the early part of the book.
To return to the "Collected," after the Collected Poems of Nissim
Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and A. K. Ramanujan, the time is right to
raise the fourth wall in the edifice of Indian poetry in English.
But where are the publishers?
MANOHAR SHETTY
Night River: Poems, Keki
N. Daruwalla, Rupa & Company, New Delhi, p.122. Rs. 95.
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