Keki N.

Daruwalla
Keki N. Daruwalla (born 1937) is a major Indian poet and short story writer in English language. He has [1][2] written over 12 books and published his first novel "For Pepper and Christ" in 2009. He is also a [3] former IPS officer, who retired as Additional Director in theResearch and Analysis Wing (RAW). He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1984 for his poetry collection, "The Keeper of the Dead", by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters

Early life and education

Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla was born in loni,burhanpur (now in loni, burhanpur), in 1937. His father N.C. Daruwalla, was an eminent professor, who taught in loni institute of literature (LIL). After the Partition, his family left Punjab while his elder brother stayed back, and moved to Junagadh in Gujarat, then to Rampur. As a result he grew up studying in various schools and mediums and started writing short [5] stories in school. He obtained his master's degree in English Literature from Government College, Ludhiana, University of Punjab.

Career
He joined the Indian Police Service (IPS) in 1958, and eventually becoming a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs. He subsequently was in the Cabinet Secretariat until his [1] 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. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award, given by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, in 1984. He received Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987. Nissim Ezekiel comments "Daruwall has the energy of the lion". He is president of The Poetry Society of India, and is presently based in Delhi.

Born in 1937 in Lahore, now in Pakistan, Keki N. Daruwalla has been a notable presence on the literary scene for quite some time. The characteristic features of his poetry can be described as vigor and immediacy of language, knife-edge tone, an abiding and infatuated concern with love, death and domination, a skeptic and indignant cynicism about the plight of human society and a rare intensity in portraying living individuals. Daruwalla readily admits to critics' charges of being too much of a landscape poet who takes into his aesthetic stride the sights and sounds of England, Yugoslavia, Helsinki, Stockholm, Volgograd, and Moscow which he has visited for poetry readings. His thematic canvas transcends the boundaries of India and stretches itself into the rest of the world. Critics maintain his concern for broad landscape imagery rather than political and social issues is a result of his long career as a Government of India official. While pursuing his craft of writing, Keki N. Daruwalla served an illustrious career in Indian Police Service, rising to become a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs. He subsequently was in the Cabinet Secretariat until his retirement.

A recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has so far published about 12 books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works. Some of his important works are Under Orion, The keeper of the dead, Landscapes, A summer of tigersand The minister for permanent unrest & other stories. He also edited Two decades of Indian poetry. The Library of Congress has all his books. The Epileptic- Keki N. Daruwalla This poem presents a scene where a lady gets the fits of epilepsy when she goes out with her children and her husband. People come around there with their suggestions. They fan her. Some people utter unwarranted and reckless comments that would embarrass her. She is lying there in the streets. Her husband put a gag between her teeth. Meanwhile the traffic came to a halt. People did whatever they can do to her body so that she can regain her senses. On the other hand she was deprived of her privacy. It was embarrassing for the family to witness all this and stay helpless. Her head jerked from side to side. Water bubbled out as froth from her lips. Doctors in the hospital said it was psychomotor epilepsy. They prescribed some tablets. Suddenly she regained consciousness as her husband was shaking her. The poet says that she is raped by the public gaze. The way she was treated by the public is akin to raping her. Because her modesty or privacy have been invaded by the people. It is a scene which occurs in our day to day life. One can witness this kind of scenes in any city in India. The poet converts this day to day happening into a poem with a sense of keen observation.

Purushottama Lal
Purushottama Lal (August 28, 1929 November 3, 2010) was an Indian poet, essayist,translator, professor and publisher. He was the founder and publisher of Writers Workshopin Calcutta, established in 1958.

Life and education

Born in Kapurthala in the state of Punjab, he studied English at the St Xavier's College, and later at [3] [4] the University of Calcutta. He would later teach at St. Xavier's College for over forty years. P. Lal was an honorary Professor of English at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He was Special Professor of Indian Studies at Hofstra University from 1962 to 1963, and has since held Visiting Professorships at many colleges and universities throughout America. These included (apart from Hofstra University), University of Illinois, Albion College, Ohio University, Hartwick College, Berea College, [5] and Western Maryland College. He married Shyamasree Devi in 1955, and has a son, Ananda Lal, and a daughter, Srimati Lal (Artist, Poet & Writer: www.SrimatiLal.com ). P. Lal's wife Shyamasree is the daughter of late Kalidas Nag, an eminent historian and Indologist, and Shanta Devi, a novelist.

Career
Under the name of P. Lal, he wrote eight books of poetry, over a dozen volumes of literary criticism, a memoir, several books of stories for children, as well as dozens of translations from other languages, [6] chiefly Sanskrit, into English. He also edited a number of literary anthologies. He is perhaps best known as the translator into English of the entire Indian epic poem Mahabharata. His translation, which was published in an edition of over three hundred fascicules since the early 1970s, was republished in a collated edition of eighteen large volumes. His Mahabharata is the most complete in any language, comprising all the slokas included in all recensions of the work. His translation of the Mahabharata is characteristically both poetic and swift to read, and oriented to the oral/musical tradition in which the work was originally created. To emphasize this tradition, in 1999 he began reading the entire 100,000-sloka work aloud, for one hour each Sunday at a Calcutta library hall. In addition to the Mahabharata, his translations from Sanskrit included a number of other religious works, including 21 of the Upanisads, as well as plays and lyric poetry. He also translated modern writers such as Premchand (from the Hindi) and Tagore (from the Bengali). Since his founding of Writers Workshop, he published over 3000 volumes by Indian literary authors, mostly in the English language, including poetry, fiction, educational texts, screenplays, drama, "serious comics," and children's books, as well as audiobooks. Writers Workshop has published first books by many authors who went on to fame, including Vikram Seth, Pritish Nandy and Chitra Banerjee [7] Divakaruni. His publishing enterprise was unusual in that he personally served as publisher, editor, reader, secretary, and editorial assistant. The books were also unique in appearance, being hand-typeset on local Indian presses, and bound in hand-loomed sari cloth. Writers Workshop continues to publish, under the direction of Lal's family members.

THE books published by Purushottama Lal from his house in Lake Gardens, Calcutta (now Kolkata), from 1958 onwards were like no others in the world. Each slim volume of Writers Workshop poetry, fiction or dramathey tended to be slimwas bound in bright handloom cloth, and hand-stitched so tightly that it would open with a creak. The title pages and chapter-heads featured the swirling calligraphy of Professor Lal himself, done with a Sheaffer fountain pen. The type, at least until this century, was handset in a mosquito-infested shed by workers who did not know the language but could recognise the letters; and the galleys were printed on a flatbed treadle machine in the next-door garage of P.K. Aditya, who had kindly moved his car out for the purpose. In this form appeared the early works of Vikram Seth, Dilip Hiro and Anita Desai. Professor Lal's business was publishing Indian writers in English. Of the great old works he made masterly translations; new writers he encouraged. When he began, ten years after independence, the practice was controversial. Although English was one of India's official languages, writers in it were often mocked as colonial remnants, caged chaffinches and polyglot parrots. He passionately disagreed. His love of English had begun in boyhood and was crowned with his long tenure at St Xavier's College in Calcutta, to which his landowning family had come from the Punjab. Mention an English poetDonne, Swinburne, Keatsand Profsky, as all his friends called him, would launch into reciting. Give him a word, and he would burrow joyously into its etymology. He was determined to keep the best English writing alive and well in India. And that meant making space for new creative writers, too. Each of the 3,500 titles he published contained, at the back, his credo. English book publishing in India, he complained, was governed by a nexus of high-profile PRconscious book publishers, semi-literate booksellers, moribund public and state libraries, poorly informed and nepotistic underlings in charge of book review pagesand biased bulk purchases of near worthless books by bureaucratic institutions. He, on the other hand, survived without plush foundations, publishing then-unknown authors purely for the love of it. Letters were always answered promptly, in the beautiful hand and with the Sheaffer pen. Manuscripts were accepted, as often as not, just to try their luck in the loving clutches of the free market. He made no money at it, and the authors might not either, because they were required to buy 100 copies of their work in advance. Some grumbled, but Writers Workshop was a beacon, not a charity.
The difficulty of irony He admitted that English could be unsuitable for India: too subtle, too charged with irony (for which there was no word in Sanskrit), inadequate for Indian emotions. Indians, he said, were more pastoral and sentimental, with faith in simpler ideals. In his own English poetry, however, Indian eyes and English subtlety came easily together: Above all, this: When a woman turns Black clouds of hair, with a rhythmic hand Weaving their silk in the possessive sun

English in India, he believed, had become a new language, with its own worth and its own pride. It did not have to parade in a Western suit, just as he refused to, getting barred from the Calcutta Club for wearing pajamapanjabi as usual. His publishing alone made him famous, but his energies were also devoted to a translation into Englisha transcreation, as he preferredof the 100,000 slokas of the world's longest poem, the Mahabharata. He was almost at the end when he died. Others had translated it before him, but into almost unreadable prose. He insisted that a work in which the horrors of a battlefield were compared to a lake lovely with white lily and blue lotus faces, or to a girl's white dress dyed with red turmeric, should live as English poetry. To that end he gave public readings of his progress every Sunday for 11 years at the Sanskriti Sagar Library, to test that his lines would dance when he spoke them. He published it, too, as he went along, in more than 300 instalments. The most famous and meditative section of the work, the Bhagavad Gita, in which the archer Arjuna is steeled for his fight by the god Krishna, he also put out in a limited edition. Each book had as frontispiece an original painting, carefully gummed onto the paper, produced by anonymous painters at the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, to which he returned every year. Each book was clearly an act of devotion, like the transcreation itself. But when it came to presenting the best of Indian writing in English, nothing was too much trouble.