My poems are rooted in landscape, which anchors the poem.

The landscape is not

merely there set to the sense but to lead to an illumination, it should be the eye of
the spiral, I try that poetry relates to the landscape, both on physical, and on the
plane of the spirit... Keki Daruwalla

Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla is one of the greatest poets of Indian English

Literature. His poetry consists of picturesque description, allusion to various places,
analogies, nature and landscape with Indian ethos and sensibility. Keki N. Daruwalla
is the author of several books, including twelve volumes of poetry, five collections of
short stories, and the novel, For Pepper and Christ (2009). With the publication of his
very first book, Under Orion in 1970, Daruwalla established himself as a name to
reckon with in Indian poetry. Senior Indian poet and critic Nissim Ezekiel applauded
his work as impressive evidence not only of mature poetic talent but of literary
stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness. He was conferred the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 1984 for his poetry collection, The Keeper of the Dead, the
Commonwealth Poetry Award (Asia) in 1987, and the Padma Shri in 2014.
Keki N. Daruwalla is famous for the vigour and immediacy of language and his
indignant cynicism about the predicament of human society. Pestilence in Nineteenth
Century Calcutta is about a tragic event, an outbreak of Cholera which occurred in
the history of Bengal. He takes us through the responses of the different communities
to the horror of painful death. According to Bijay Kumar Das , "Social satire , an
awareness of the contemporary situations , the illusion about myths seem to be
some of the favourite themes of Daruwalla". In this poem the poet speaks about the
tragic suffering of the people in Calcutta when it was stricken with cholera during the
19 th century,
In the first stanza the poet introduces us to the tragic situation in which the
people were painfully dying due to cholera. The poem begins with a barbers
comment to his white Sahib 'Black fellow die, much' which is totally ironic. The line
sarcastically reminds us of the servile attitude of the colonized to the white colonizer.
The people in the ghettoes died a horrible painful death and the funeral pyres burnt
incessantly. The poet ironically uses the phrase callisthenics of cholera to express
the effectiveness of the pestilence. Again the meaninglessness of the life of the
common people is highlighted in this simile:
The dead went up/ like fragment of liturgies
Lost in a great wind.
In the second stanza the poet paints the picture of a typical colonizer who is
equally trapped along with the natives in suffering the ravages of the epidemic. The
sahib is totally shocked. The whole land he felt was pregnant with the germs of
cholera. What terrified him was the way it affected the whites. They died like
skittles, and were buried in the same strange land in which the natives were buried.
In the third stanza the poet tells us how nature had also turned against humans
and abetted their death. The hot climate gave way to sudden rains and the
exhalation of the earth rapidly spread the fever and the fluxes which were soon
followed by death. What was tragic was that the deaths were sudden and
unpredictable. One may lunch with a person in the afternoon by evening the news
would arrive that he had died. Again it brings out the horror of the epidemic which
killed without any distinction.
The poet tells us how the epidemic affected the whites and how they reacted
against it. The epidemic affected the white colonizers more than the natives as they
were so frightened that they carried the fear of death like a slipped disc through
their lives. They tried all sorts of medicines and treatments to protect themselves
from the epidemic. The poet sarcastically draws up a list of the remedies they
sought. They paid one mohur for a visit to the surgeon; pay one rupee for an ounce
of salts, two rupees for an ounce of bark; They had to pay extra for being leeched
and to be blistered with hot irons, They also fed on opium and mercurous chloride to
prevent themselves from cholera. This shows the depth of panic in which they were
living at these times.
 In the fifth stanza the poet takes us back to the sahib. The sahib reflects about
the long years he had spent in India working in the John Company. All those years he
had never thought of death. He had always felt that Death came with his scythe only
in the ghettoes where the natives lived. He had never thought that such horrible
diseases could also affect the whites until the barber told him that day about the
ravages of cholera and how it was affecting the natives. Ten days later he went to
Hooghly for his winter tour. That day he learnt that the Sardar who had served him
during the bara hazri was stricken with cholera. By evening he died. The White sahib
was moved and as a gesture of kindness offered to meet the funeral expenses of the
Sardar. Next day along with his breakfast he received a bill which made him blink
It read,/"Five rupees for roasted Sardar
The poem delineates in a tone tinged with sarcasm, humour and pathos the fate of
the people who were killed without discrimination by the ravaging pestilence, cholera
during the British Raj. The poem is written from the point of view of the sahib who
feels himself trapped in a worse situation and still unable to do anything. The poor
natives are devastated by the lethal epidemic and yet they are unaffected by the
deaths of these people. It is only when they realize that they can also be the victim
of this horror that they become afraid of it.
Keki Daruwalla has always presented the stark truths in language surcharged
with irony and sarcasm and with imagery that is at once real and poetic. His choice of
metaphors and similes are such which creates a very appealing visual for the
readers. This poem is no exception as it describes one of the very gross picture of
epidemic death with all its horror and brutality.