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Unlike a number of his contemporaries, especially from Bombay, Keki Daruwalla is neither a “city” nor an “urban” poet, but a traveler across various landscapes, real as well as historical or mythological, although critical attempts to cast him as a “landscape poet” have been largely reductive if not misleading.

Born Keki N(asserwanji) Daruwalla in the Burhanpur District of Madhya Pradesh in 1937, the son of a Parsi school teacher who studied and worked in England during the First World War, he attended various schools and was instructed in a number of languages (English, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu) because of his father's teaching appointments around the country. After obtaining a master's degree in English Literature from Government College, Ludhiana, he joined the Indian Police and served for a decade in various locations, mainly in northern India, before moving permanently to Delhi, where he worked for the government until his retirement. Simultaneously, his was one of the longest and most productive literary careers in contemporary India, comprising twelve collections of poetry, four books of short stories, two novels, one travel book, and an influential poetry anthology.

With Under Orion (1970) Daruwalla enters the stage of Indian poetry in a fiercely original way, as shown by the very first poem in the collection, “Curfew in a Riot-torn City.” The setting (a town under curfew, presumably as a consequence of communal riots), the situation (a police unit patrolling the streets at dawn), the suspense and the action (real or, worse, feared), and the protagonist (a commanding officer on edge), although unprecedented in Indian poetry, English or otherwise, was quite familiar to the poet because of his experiences in the police. Yet the act of “policing” in the poem, like its underlying rhetorical alignment of medical disease and military intervention, is also a pretext to explore an engagement of a different and more original kind. The juxtaposition of contrasting elements, which sets the scene and the tone of the poem from the very beginning, reveals a possible network of more intimate and disturbing relationships: