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Planning to get married in Goa? www.weddingsetcgoa.com Making your 'dream wedding' possible ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keki Daruwalla weaves words around history in *For Pepper & Christ* *Madhusree Chatterjee<http://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/Madhusree-Chatterjee.aspx>, Indo-Asian News Service* New Delhi, May 11, 2009 First Published: 21:43 IST(11/5/2009) Last Updated: 16:09 IST(15/5/2009) <http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=document.location.href> <http://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle-news/authorprofiles/New-Release-For-Pepper-amp-Christ/Article1-409777.aspx#> t <http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/409777.aspx> <http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php> *Keki Daruwalla weaves words around history* History has its own magic. Novels that build themselves on a historical canvas, especially woven around events during the end of the 15th century and the 16th century, are more compelling because that was the time the world was truly becoming global, feels award-winning poet and short story writer Keki N. Daruwalla. "The 17th and the 18th centuries were not that great, but the 15th and 16th centuries were full of interesting anecdotes. The spice trade was booming. The Mamluks, slave soldiers of the Muslim sultans who were converted to Islam and trained as a crack force, fought the Mongols and even defeated the crusaders. Historically, Asia and Europe were in a ferment and it was an exciting period in world history," Daruwalla, a former Indian Police Service officer, told IANS in the capital. His new book, "For Pepper and Christ", a historical novel, was released in the capital Friday by veteran journalist Mark Tully. Daruwalla's first novel - based on Vasco da Gama's voyage to India for the spice trade and touching on the hunt of the Portuguese for the legendary Prester John - is set in the 15th century, when the Portuguese scoured the seas, collecting maps and sending spies along the Red Sea to find out how the Arabs carried on their spice trade with India. "I decided on this period because someone told me an incident - a legend that is at the end of the book - sowing the seeds in my mind," Daruwalla said. The writer brings alive a world of tumultuous voyaging during the time of da Gama - an era when the search for spices triggered a passion for exploration. The meat butchered in autumn and eaten in winter stank and Europe was in desperate need of Asian spices to make their meals aromatic and "give the meat a new flavour". Legends of a magnificent Christian dominion nestled in the heart of the east and ruled by the fabled Prester John also generated intense curiosity about lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Brother Figuero, a missionary, Taufiq, a sailor, Ehtesham, an artist, and three men of power, a Muhtasib, a Zamorin and an Abbott, go on a journey of discovery as the conflicts between Islam and Christianity intensify. Individual destinies of the voyagers collide and change in the process. While the missionary and the sailor are part of da Gama's fleet searching "elusive spices and a legend", the three men in power play out their parts in areas that they control - the souks of Cairo, Calicut under the Zamorin and in the Christian shrines. The book, says Daruwalla, took him over 10 years to complete. "I started writing in 1996 and then left it midway because of a family bereavement. But I decided to complete in 2006 when Penguin Books India signed me up for it after publishing a volume of my poetry. I finished the manuscript in 2007," the writer said. The amount of research that went into collating the data was enormous. "Bulk of it was done in Egypt. I went to Cairo for a month and visited the American University where I found the translations of the 15th century Arabian navigator Ibn Majid. Majid is known to have guided Vasco da Gama to India. I went through the works, culling material for my book," Daruwalla said. The book is also a travelogue, describing ancient navigation systems and places along the Cape of Good Hope in detail. "But I have never sailed," says Daruwalla. "The only time I have visited Africa is when I spent six weeks in Zimbabwe." The writer, who was conferred the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987, has written two plays. "I plan to work on a book of short stories called 'Long Story', as soon as I finish revising my plays," he said. *(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at **[email protected]*<[email protected]> Review: *For Pepper and Christ* *Vijay Jung Thapa<http://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/Vijay-Jung-Thapa.aspx>, Hindustan Times* <http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=document.location.href> <http://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle-news/books/Review-For-Pepper-and-Christ/Article1-423647.aspx#> <http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php> *For Pepper and Christ* *Author*: Keki Daruwalla Publisher: Penguin India Price: Rs 399| History is known to have its ‘big bang’ moments, when a small stray incident spurs momentous changes. The 15th century witnessed two such incidents separated by a span of six years: the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama’s journey via the Cape of Good Hope to India. Both incidents ushered in a brand new world of maritime exploration and finally led many centuries later to Western imperialism. Keki Daruwalla’s lyrical novel sets out to capture the mood of the 15th century when Portuguese traders are stealthily watching Arabs carry out their spice trade with India. The scope of the book is magnificent as it captures the intrigues of maritime trade through the souks and lanes of Cairo, Mombasa and Calicut. The narration, conducted through various protagonists, captures the stark ambition of the Vasco Da Gama journey amid pressure to cut out traders from Venice and Genoa who sold spices almost at the price of golf. But pepper wasn’t the only motivation. There was also Christianity and the search for the kingdom of the mythical Christian King called Prester John. The Portuguese, in fact, had never heard of Hindus – and for them a kingdom, if it wasn’t Muslim, had to be Christian. So strong was the belief that when they landed in Calicut, they mistook the local goddess for the Virgin Mary and thought that Krishna was a colloquialism for Christ. Interestingly, it was an Arab navigator who leads Vasco da Gama to India — the East being far superior in global trade and maritime navigation at that time. Daruwalla skillfully contrasts Eastern sophistication with Western ambition. The Portuguese, then a poor country of just about a million, come across as country boors — mean and bloodthirsty — their driving ambition leading them to desperation. The Indians (in the kingdoms of Calicut and Cochin), on the other hand, lived in sophisticated societies dealing with the luxury items of the time, silk, spices and ceramics. In fact, Vasco Da Gama’s gifts for the Calicut king — hats, corals and four wash basins — provoked much laughter, and finally weren’t given at all. The flip side to this, of course, is that Eastern arrogance towards Europeans and a failure to see them as powers to be reckoned with. If there’s one thing in the book that was irksome, it was the multiple narratives, which work well to move the story forward, but often distract the reader from Daruwalla’s elegant prose. But that said, *For Pepper and Christ*, is a book woven into history and ultimately a good read. *For Pepper And Christ* *Keki N. Daruwalla* Penguin Books,Rs 399 The story of Vasco Da Gama’s landing on the coast of Kerala has been told elegantly as straight history. The encounter between a ruthless Portuguese captain and the short-sighted Zamorin of Calicut signally failed to bridge the gulfs between two civilisations, and the argument was ultimately silenced by the conqueror’s cannonballs. For those who like their history leavened with fiction, a novel that centres on this event and the Portuguese quest for India’s riches would be fascinating. Three main narrators speak in For Pepper and Christ: the priest who travels on Vasco da Gama’s ship, the young Egyptian pilot who guides them to the western coast of India, and the pilot’s friend, who is a painter. Swelling around them are intriguing and richly drawn characters enough to people the streets of Cairo, where the story opens, as well as every halt on the journey to India, as the narrative breaks into the open sea. Taufiq, the pilot, witnesses the stomach-churning brutalities of the Portuguese, but also comes to foresee how their greed will erode the prosperity of Arabia, Africa and India. As he leads them on voyage after voyage, the blood on his own hands thickens, and his urge to expiate his sin ends in this novel’s terrible final act. Strangely, the writer’s artistry in handling the subject falls short. Daruwalla is a poet, and one expects better-crafted prose from him. Readers are tediously reminded that Farangs are Franks and Purtugalis are Portuguese but, more importantly, the chronicle fails to achieve an organic unity. It stumbles from one voice to the next. History is spouted, in the manner of Dan Brown, by the cartographer Ibn Majid, the historian Abu Khalil, and others. In talking of maps, Asturlabi says a map is not just a chart: “Tied up in that piece of parchment is a vision.” Readers seek a similar vision in a book, and this novel leaves them seeking. *—Latha Anantharaman* ** ** *Spaces of encounter * ANANTH KRISHNAN A rich and different perspective into an era of voyages and ‘discoveries’. *For Pepper and Christ, *Keki N. Daruwalla, Penguin India, 2009, p.354, Rs. 399. The small kingdom of Portugal was busy in the 15th century. Under the nose of the rest of Europe, the Portuguese were searching the seas for map-makers and sailors, obsessed with the task of plotting a route to India. Portugal then was rather insigni ficant to the rest of Europe; what it was up to didn’t really matter to the Continent. The relatively poor kingdom was at the time being held to ransom by the traders of Venice and Genoa who charged exorbitant prices for the spices they bought on the cheap from India. When Vasco da Gama left Lisbon in July of 1497, heading east in search of “pepper and Christ” — the Portuguese believed a Christian kingdom under the mythic Christian king Prester John inhabited the East — that would all change. These events of the 15th century set the backdrop for the accomplished poet Keki Daruwalla’s first published novel *For Pepper and Christ*. While Gama’s voyage is at the heart of the novel, Daruwalla’s work tells a much wider story — starting off in the narrow streets of Cairo, visiting the thriving port of Mombasa in East Africa and alighting in Calicut, Daruwalla recreates, through a cast of rich characters, the 15th century world that set the context for Gama’s journey. It is impossible to understand Gama’s voyage — and its significance — without getting a sense of this world. *For Pepper and Christ* first takes us into the heart of 15th century Cairo, where we are introduced to a perfume-seller who goes door to door selling his wares and has a lust for the ladies that even saints can’t cure, a religious leader who is concerned by his sons’ extreme views, and the young artist Ehtesham who defies convention and threats to his life to paint. Lessons from history There are historical lessons in Daruwalla’s fiction. Gama’s voyage to India was marked by a series of conflicts, often borne out of cultural misunderstandings. The Portuguese’s unfamiliarity with the culture and customs of East Africa — and also of those of the Malabar — was often at the root of this. The Portuguese arrived at the Malabar to customs and intricate political relationships that they couldn’t comprehend. The kingdoms of Kerala had complex political and commercial relationships with each other, and also with the Muslim traders who had dominated Indian Ocean trade up until the arrival of the Portuguese. Their coming drastically changed these equations, and also shaped future colonial experiences of India. Their negative experiences in Africa gave the Portuguese a distrust of the “Moors” (as they called the Muslims). As Daruwalla’s story shows, their ignorance didn’t help either — they assumed Calicut’s temples dedicated to Goddess Kali were churches of the Virgin Mary. The arrival of the Portuguese also brought a scale of violence that the Indian Ocean hadn’t seen before. Daruwalla’s novel ends with Vasco da Gama’s brutal attack on the Miri, a ship mostly carrying women and children, in his second voyage, presumably to extract revenge for the attacks on his compatriot Cabral’s voyage in 1501. But there was, also, some humour in these cultural interactions, as Daruwalla tries to show in his story. Asked by the Arab navigator Ibn Majid what the objective of their mission was, the Portuguese Captain-Major of Gama’s fleet naively declares his grand mission “to discover India.” “Have the Indians discovered you,” Majid retorts. Daruwalla says he tried to stay true to history in telling his story. Historical accounts, such as the well-known anonymous account of Gama’s journey told by one of the companions on his fleet, do inform his narrative, but are no more than props to his story. It is, in the end, the story of Ehtesham, the imagined conversations between the religious Portuguese Brother Figuero and Ibn Majid in a Mombasa café and the snapshots of life under the Zamorin in Calicut that make his story so engaging and give us a very different and rich perspective into the fascinating world of the 15th century — one that you certainly won’t find in a history textbook. *Anyone who really lambasts India easily gets published in the West’ * Veteran poet Keki Daruwalla, whose first novel *For Pepper and Christ *will be published soon, tells *Rahul Jayaram* that it’s the manner of expression that makes any writing count Tête à tête We had asked the poet, “When can we meet you?” And little did we know it would be just the right day to be calling on Keki Daruwalla. It’s the Parsi celebratory day of Navroze — and the phone keeps ringing to wish the poet-writer on the New Year. We are sitting in his airy drawing room, happily sipping coffee and eating his *sevaian*. The room, bordered with bookshelves, makes for a comfy nook to babble and quaff. The New Year may just be apt cause for merriment for the genial 71-year-old, who looks like he could be in his mid-50s. After decades of writing verse and short fiction, he is coming out with his first novel — *For Pepper and Christ*, published by Penguin. “I never had the time to write a novel. I started novels and they died on me. I once started work on a novel on the 1857 Mutiny which led me nowhere. The other thing about a novel is that if you get deep into research you end up with nothing,” says a chatty Daruwalla, who has already published nine collections of verse, three works of short fiction, a novella and two verse collections for children. His novel, set in the medieval era, aims to portray how some of the powerful forces of human history of the time impacted individual lives. Work and research on the book took him from Calicut to Cairo. His life and work engagingly mirror each other. As a member of the Indian Police Service, Daruwalla, who won the Commonwealth poetry prize for Asia in 1987, has seen the world. “For 20 years I dealt with Pakistan and West Asia,” he now says, talking about his long stint in the Cabinet Secretariat which he joined in 1974. “Can there be anything more important? Am I right?” he asks rhetorically, but keeps from divulging more. Later he joined the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and retired as its chairman in 1995. Work with JIC took him to the North East and beyond. He gushes about his experience of Myanmar. “The Burmese are such fine people, it’s a pity what state it is in and the junta is an albatross around their neck. I discovered one morning that in Yangon women would be standing out of their doors to contribute to the *bhikshus*. They consider it an honour to give alms. ‘*Itne acche log hain*’,” he says, slipping into Punjabi-accented Hindi. His accent is not surprising, for the Parsi poet was born in Lahore and raised in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad in Pakistan). Daruwalla remembers growing up with books as his father was a teacher, an alumnus of both Cambridge and Oxford. Little Keki got an in-house initiation into literature, drama, elocution and the arts. But childhood also saw a lot of movement. “My father retired and was drawing a pension of Rs 200 when he shifted to Junagadh where he took up an assignment. Later we spent five years in Rampur in UP and then I did my college and postgraduate years in Ludhiana.” Poetry and the sound, beauty and power of words caught him early. “Father also had a beautiful voice and I loved rhymed verse. There are still poems that I can recite by heart such as *The Highwayman*,” he says. In January 1964, Khushwant Singh published his first poem in the long-defunct literary magazine *Quest*. But there were naysayers too. He recounts meeting a very senior Indian poet in English then. “I was told, ‘As far as your poetry is concerned, there is nothing much to say.’” The same poet was willing later to publish him out of his own money, something Daruwalla wasn’t inclined to take up. But how did he keep connected to the urban-centric world of literature while posted in the interiors? “I kept carrying my books everywhere I went and even subscribed to serious literary publications like *Encounter* and *Poetry Chicago*,” he recalls. By 1970, Daruwalla emerged with his first collection of verse *Under Orion*, and has kept producing verse and prose since. Later he rubbed shoulders on and off with his contemporaries in the poetry firmament such as Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, Nissim Ezekiel and company. Moraes is still his pick among poets, though in the newer crop he likes the verse of women poets. “Imtiaz Dharker, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Priya Sarukkai Chabria… there are too many to name,” he says. However, he reckons poets in English in India have been given “short shrift” by publishers and particularly critics. “Many critics tend to think you can write fiction in English. But you can write poetry only in a language you imbibed with mother’s milk — which is rubbish!” Indeed, Daruwalla went on to write an essay called *The Decolonized Muse*, detailing the travails and anxieties of writing poetry in English in India. His list of favourite prose writers is an endless one too — he likes them all, from Amitav Ghosh and Mukul Kesavan to Vikram Chandra. But Salman Rushdie comes in for special praise. “He has flashes that no one has. The only trouble is he writes too much!” His views on Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner *The White Tiger* are mixed. “Craft-wise it holds. It’s a very well-constructed novel. But it suffers from what I consider a bad theory,” he says. “Anyone who really lambasts the country gets easily published in the West,” he says after a pause. I can say this out of my own experience, I have one poem on pestilence and another on epilepsy, and they have got into so many international anthologies it’s not funny!” As a senior cop, Daruwalla’s experiences have been rich and colourful — though a bit dangerous on occasion. He was twice placed in what was called the anti-dacoity and robbery cell in Uttar Pradesh in the Sixties. “During those days, I just took a jeep and a driver and went inspecting through the hills, which was risky. That was challenging and also pleasant as I trekked a lot in the hills. That’s how my much later book *Riding The Himalayas*(2006) came about.” But he loved his job — and never thought his profession and passion could be in conflict. “I’m not one of those totally disillusioned types. I loved work and worked 12 hours a day,” he declares. Clearly, Daruwalla is happy with the turns his life has taken. He has a son who is a chartered accountant in London, and two daughters — one is in Dubai and the other in Seattle. “Family life was wonderful and that has contributed to my writing too,” he muses. “Obviously there was some * shikayat* too.” As we prepare to leave, we throw a real tough one at him. What makes a good poem? He breathes deep. “I don’t know how to put it. I need an absolute session. I’ll take 40 minutes to explain,” he says. “Formally, I want a whole. The poem should have good last lines. The first five-six lines should come to my mind when I’m driving. That dictates the poem,” he explains while making an arc-like shape with his hands. “But now more and more, it’s an electrifying line or image that knocks me out. Everything that has to be said about the world has been said, and it’s only the manner of expression that makes the writing stick,” he mutters while walking us to the door. A lifetime of working with words, summed up.
