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K N Daruwalla
K N Daruwalla
K.N.Daruwalla
Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla was born in Lahore in January 24, 1937. His father, N.C. Daruwalla
was professor in Government College Lahore. Keki completed his masters in English Literature
from Punjab University. While pursuing his craft of writing, he kept on serving the Indian police
Service industriously.
His first book of poetry was “Under Orion”, which was published in 1970 and his “Apparition
in April” published in 1971 for which he was given the Uttar Pradesh State Award in 1972.
Subsequently, his third book of poetry “Crossing of Rivers” was published by the Oxford
University Press in 1976. His poems appeared in many poetry anthologies. Even, he has himself
edited an anthology of modern Indian poetry under the title “Two Decades of Indian Poetry” in
English — 1960 – 1980. He was awarded Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984., Many other
eloquent books of poetry are such as “The Keeper of the Dead” “A Summer of Tigers”, “ The
Map-maker” etc.
In October, 2015, Keki Daruwalla returned the Sahitya Akademy Award. Basically, it was a
token of protest against physical violence against authors. He also contended that Sahitya
Akademi as an organization remained silent over the issue of violence.
Hawk: A Summary
Hawk’ has been taken from The Keeper of the Dead published in 1982. The poem explains how
hawk is trained as a hunting bird. It is describing human behaviour. Throughout the poem the
poet has used ‘he’ for the hawk giving it a kind of human identity. This bird of prey projects an
image of violence that is a common pattern of behaviour in human society. The hawk portrayed
as a symbol of the destructive instinct in man.
The opening section catches the hawk at an intense moment of killing. The wild hawk, a
powerful bird of prey, is seen hunting other birds in the morning. It has speed. When it flies up in
the sky it seems to drill a hole into it. To him the land seems covered with a thin film of salt. If
there is too much salt in the soil, no vegetation will grow there. Similarly, when the hawk is
prowling about in the sky, no ‘grass-seed, insect, bird’ can thrive. This hawk is driven by hatred
which is like the burning fuse of a bomb ready to go off.
In the evening too, the hawk hovers above ‘the groves’ looking for prey. From the ground he
looks like a speck but he is a speck of ‘barbed passion’, always ready to kill. Birds like crows,
mynahs or pigeons are roosting below. When a parakeet becomes aware of the hawk’s presence
it flies away ‘raucously’. By hinting at the silence of the roosting birds and describing the noise
made by a flying parakeet, the poet creates a sense of lurking danger in the form of the hawk. At
any moment, the hawk may swoop down on the birds. He has been compared to a rapist in the
harem of the sky. He picks up birds at will. As he holds a pigeon in his talons, he scans the other
birds and tries to decide which bird he will pick up next. The wild, predatory hawk is burning
with hatred which is like a cup in which the smaller birds are the ‘dregs’ that he scoops up.
The second section describes how a hawk is tamed. Such a hawk is much more destructive
because he has been ‘touched by the hand of man’. The poem then describes how a hawk is
trained to hunt. The training is a painful and frustrating experience for the hawk. His eyes are
covered: ‘his eyelids are sewn with silk’. The word ‘sewn’ suggests the pain that the young hawk
has to go through. You must have come across the expression ‘eagle-eyed’. The hawk’s most
precious possession is his remarkable eyesight but that is taken away from him temporarily so
that he can be trained. The next few lines describe how the hawk is given back his sense of sight
bit by bit. The poet uses the metaphor of food when he says that ‘morsels of vision are fed to his
eyes’. When the hawk can see again, he is fully trained to kill at the command of his master. The
hawk’s destructiveness is suggested when his eye is described as ‘the eye of the storm’.
The hawk then begins to hunt. He is described as leaping up into the sky, hovering on ‘splayed
wings’ and then suddenly plummeting ‘like a flair’ and striking the quarry in a ‘gust of feathers’.
The word ‘storm’ with which the previous movement ended appears to anticipate ‘gust’ in this
movement. Man has made hawking a fine art and a ritual. The section ends with the image of a
hawk being fed morsels of meat from the body of the bird he has killed.
The third section describes how a pair of trained hawks, ‘the mother hawk and son’, hunts a hare.
They attack it repeatedly, and its death is slow. This section also suggests how the hunted hare
feels. Its heart is pounding with fear; it is like a stable full of whinnying horses. The last two
lines describe pictorially how the hare’s blood can be seen scattered on the grass where it was
killed. The final section the hawk himself is telling his story. He begins by saying that he has no
memory of the time when he was ‘stolen from the eyrie’. The only thing he remembers is the
leather disc that was put on his eyes. He mentions the painful stitching of his eyelids.
But now the hawk is trained. He is learning how to spot the birds he has to kill. Like the young
hawk when he was captured, these birds too have a right to live and to procreate. But the hawk
has been trained to take that right away. In the closing lines of the poem, the hawk tells us how
he feels when he hunts other birds. His presence in the sky means certain death of a bird. There
are a number of expressions here that suggest it. You immediately think of ‘black
prophecy’,‘moth-soft cocoon of death’ and eyes focussed like ‘the sights of a gun.’In the
concluding two lines the point of view changes from that of a hawk to a dove’s. There will be a
drought and instead of rain the doves will find hawks raining down on them.