Keki Daruwalla is one of India's greatest poets, known for poems rooted in landscape and descriptions of nature. This poem depicts a cholera outbreak in 19th century Calcutta, which killed people indiscriminately through painful death. It describes the horror through the eyes of a British sahib, initially unaffected by the native deaths until he learns even the whites can be impacted. The sahib is shocked to receive a bill for the funeral of his servant reading "Five rupees for roasted Sardar," highlighting the epidemic's tragic toll through dark humor.
Keki Daruwalla is one of India's greatest poets, known for poems rooted in landscape and descriptions of nature. This poem depicts a cholera outbreak in 19th century Calcutta, which killed people indiscriminately through painful death. It describes the horror through the eyes of a British sahib, initially unaffected by the native deaths until he learns even the whites can be impacted. The sahib is shocked to receive a bill for the funeral of his servant reading "Five rupees for roasted Sardar," highlighting the epidemic's tragic toll through dark humor.
Keki Daruwalla is one of India's greatest poets, known for poems rooted in landscape and descriptions of nature. This poem depicts a cholera outbreak in 19th century Calcutta, which killed people indiscriminately through painful death. It describes the horror through the eyes of a British sahib, initially unaffected by the native deaths until he learns even the whites can be impacted. The sahib is shocked to receive a bill for the funeral of his servant reading "Five rupees for roasted Sardar," highlighting the epidemic's tragic toll through dark humor.
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.