Satire and Irony in the Poems of Keki N. Daruwalla

His Wielding the Weapon of Irony Most Effectively:

Daruwalla is a great master of the weapon of irony; and he has written a large number of poems which are satirical and which are intended to expose the evils and the malpractices prevalent in our country. Irony is a powerful weapon which a great satirist can use with a devastating effect. And we must say to the credit of Daruwalla that he has written masterly satires in which he has wielded the weapon of irony most effectively. When we speak of irony in relation to satire, we always mean comic irony because there is also such a thing as tragic irony which is as important and effective in the writing of tragedies as comic irony is in the writing of satire. Irony makes a substantial contribution to the effect of a satire; and such indeed is the case in Daruwalla poetry. Leaving aside a few of the poems which are serious, sombre, grim, or too melancholy, almost every poem by Daruwalla shows his use of irony.

Irony in “The Epileptic”: 

The last but one stanza of The Epileptic is wholly ironical. On seeing the large numbers of cholera-patients arriving at the hospital, the doctors "frown with thought" and use light terms like petit mal in combination with heavy words such as "psychomotor epilepsy". A physician explains, with pride, the disease as spike-and-wave electrical activity, and prescribes belladonna and paraldehyde. But the irony becomes more piercing when the woman recovers from her fit just when the doctor has said that her condition is getting worse. In this case Daruwalla has tried to depict the contrast between how the doctors speak about a case and what the actual situation is. The doctors pretend that the case is one of extraordinary gravity and seriousness while, in actual fact, the case may be one of a disease with which almost everybody is acquainted and for which there is no real treatment or remedy.

Irony in "Rumination" and in "Routine":

In the extract from Rumination, we have irony in the last seven lines or so. After a heavy rainfall, the hedge and the leaves of trees look fresh because of the wash which they have had. In such an atmosphere the poet too expects to experience a feeling of freshness; but he fails to find a "cleansed feeling even though he looked around for it. He wanted to have the kind of feeling which a man has while walking into a temple after a river-bath. But he could not experience that feeling. He had "misplaced" it somewhere in the caverns of his past. What the poet is here saying ironically is that there was so much impurity and pollution (in the moral sense) in the air that even a spell of torrential rain could not wash them away. "A cleansed feeling" he simply could not find. Such a feeling had been swamped, or perhaps altogether destroyed, by the evil around him. In the last two lines of the poem Routine we have another example of pungent irony when the speaker in the poem says that, after having dealt with the agitating mob, they all returned to the Police Lines, feeling depressed and weary, and that in the evening they all heard a leader of those agitators speaking on the radio and saying: “We are marching forward." Here Daruwalla is having a laugh at the leader's idea of marching forward.

Pungent Irony in “Graft”:

The poem entitled Graft is wholly ironical and satirical. "Black-cowled he sits, is he Notary or Scribe?" asks the poet in the opening line of the poem. Subsequently we have satire, using the weapon of irony, in such lines as the following: 

(1) the right buck at the right time tips the scales 
(2) To legalize a bastard you've to bribe the priest... 
      he'll wed you to a Turk or a Rabbi's daughter 
      even though you may be uncircumcised: 

In the closing lines of the poem, Daruwalla ironically says that palm-lines are impervious to change, that fate shows Saturn as being in the ascendant, that Jupiter indicates a very long life for the corrupt man, so much so that his life-line extends to the elbow almost, and that this (corrupt) man would beget as many as nine children. "God be praised!" says Daruwalla in conclusion, ironically of course.

Irony in the Poem Entitled “In the Tarai”: 

Irony is evident in the poem entitled In the Tarai, particularly in the middle stanza in which the poet speaks about the bandits working havoc in the villages. The bandits set fire to the mud-and-straw homes of the villagers; they chop off fingers which are afflicted with gout or elephantiasis because there is no other way of removing the women's rings. And then Daruwalla adds that a perverse thought has occurred to him. How can a bandit, after all, remove a gold necklace from the goitered neck of a village woman (except by snatching it off in a brutal manner and inflicting an agonizingly painful wound on the already miserable woman)?

Satire and Irony in “Collage I”: 

The poem Collage I is again wholly ironical. The leaders claim that they have achieved a lot; they say that they have abolished Zamindari (meaning landlordism), that they have banned drinking, that they have disallowed the use of English for all (official) purposes, and that they have driven out the prostitutes from the G.B. Road where they used to ply their trade legally. Now, here Daruwalla is mocking at the claims of the government spokesmen because all these claims are either false or misrepresent the situation completely. Banning liquor, for instance, has led to the manufacture of spurious liquor which is even more dangerous than the evil of drinking. Drinking can never be banned; but our successive, pious-minded governments fail to recognize this simple truth. Prostitutes may be driven out from their legalized premises, but they would then disperse over all the localities of a city, thus spreading the evil everywhere. This poem concludes with a devastating irony. In the final stanza Daruwalla says that, if plague were to break out and if the medical researchers needed rats to perform experiments in order to find an anti-plague vaccine, rats would begin to be sold in the black market.

Irony in “Pestilence”: 

In the poem entitled Pestilence, there are some ironical lines with reference to the opinion which the doctors express when cholera has broken out in a city and when patients, who have been infected by this disease, are carried in large numbers to the hospital. The doctors simply ask: "Who says they have cholera”? And they themselves supply the answer to this rhetorical question by saying: "They are down with diarrhea." Or, their reply is: "It is gastro-enteritis. Who says they have cholera?" Thus the medical authorities try to throw dust into the eyes of the people in order to cover up the inefficiency of the government departments whose duty it is to ensure by hygienic conditions in the city in order to prevent the outbreak of epidemics.