Monthly Archives: May 2018

Keki N. Daruwalla’s latest collection of poems reinforces his already substantial reputation as a poet. Containing twenty-six poems, the book takes the reader across almost as many landscapes. The descriptions of each comes with a deft mixing of the palette-hues.

This is an engaging book, and it only narrowly misses being an important one. By widening the scope of traditional ‘lit. crit’. concerns to include analyses of non-Western, non-literary, and even oral narrative forms, the contributors demonstrate how academic critics may engage in cultural politics through a process that the editors have described, simply thus: ‘(A) paper starts with theory, and spills over into life….’

My earliest political education was from the poet Subrahmanya Bharati. A line of his that was for ever on my lips as a boy runs, in inadequate translation, thus:
‘You sure have heard, Oh: You wind, The stifled sobs of men and women, weary of limb and of spirit In the tea gardens of Sri Lanka.’