Daruwalla is a word painter. He has sketched vivid, sensuous and impressionistic pictures of riverscape, mountainscape, skyscape, nightscape and mudscape. He has used colour words to picturise. In this respect his place is unrivalled in Indian English poetry. Daruwalla's landscape generally covers the vast countryside of North India, with its widespread network of rivers, hills, plains and pastures. It provides a background for his poems. The terrible aspect of landscape, especially of the riverscape, is described in The Ghagra in Spate. Ghagra changing its course every year assumes various shades and colours as various times of day. How graphically the poet paints the changing moods and colours of the river:
“In the afternoon she is a grey smudgeexploring a grey canvasWhen dusk reaches herthrough an overhang of cloudshe is overstewed coffeeAt night under a red moon in mensesshe is a red wealacross the spine of the land.”
In the darkness of night Ghagra in full spate brings havoc and "half a street goes churning in the river-belly", "thatch and dung-cakes turn to river scum", "a buffalo floats over to the roof-top/where the men are standard." When the flood recedes, it leaves behind the signs of death and destruction, of suffering and agony.
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“Behind her the land sinks,houses sag on to their kneesin a farewell obeisance.”
“Poems from the Tarai in Under the Orion” picturesquely describes the landscape of Tarai. The old man of the sea is a graphic picture of seascape. Boat-ride along the Ganga combines various landscape- riverscape, nightscape, ghostscape and mudscape. As the motor-boat at dusk reaches the water upstream:
“Slowly the ghat-ampitheatre unfoldslike a diseased nocturnal flower in a dreamthat opens its petals only at dust.”
The turning corpses in nocturnal darkness present a ghastly spectacle:
“and once more the pyres, against a mahogany skythe flames look like a hedge of spear blades heated red for a ritual that hodes no good.The mourners are a cave painting, primitive, grotesquedone with chared woods.”
The Parijat Tree depicts the mild and meditative aspect of nature. The green branches of the Parijat tree invite the visitors to perform Yoga and asans under "the shade of its fleshy branches." Pilgrimage to Badrinath offers an interesting account of the mountains cape en route Badrinath:
“Stony eyes turn northward towards stone and the grey austerity in the stance of hills; the snow-hush under the granite skies and the wind hiding like a dentist's drill, whipping the mist into a horizon.”
Nightscape Vignettes I, II, III, The River Silt, Harang, Crossing of Rivers, and many other poems describe various aspects of landscape.
Landscape is an integral part in Daruwalla's poetry. He himself remarks: "My poems are rooted in landscape which anchors the poem. The landscape is not merely there to set the scene but to lead to an illumination. It should be the eye of the spiral. I try that poetry relates to the landscape, both on the physical, and the plane of the spirit. For me a riot stricken town is landscape. So is tragedy with its Thespian trappings, as shown in the poem The Tragedy Talk."
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Daruwalla's thematic variety is permeated with Indianness. Whatever he writes about has an inherent presentation of Indian sensibility. His famous poems Crossing of Rivers, The Parijat Tree, Winter Poems, The Ghagra in Spate, The Mazars of Amroha, Aag Matam etc. are suffused with Indian sensibility. In poem after poem he refers to Hindu rituals such as punddan, mantra, Gyatri, yoga, asan etc.
