Fire Altar: Poems on the Persians and the Greeks

By Keki N. Daruwalla

A new collection from the celebrated Keki Daruwala Written between 1991 and 1993, Daruwala's collection celebrates the histories and legends of the grand Persian empire, a phase of history barely glanced at in contemporary literature. In these verses, Daruwala explores the histories of Darius, Cyrus, Xerxes and their courts, their battles, their triumphs and their losses. He ties in the narrative of the Persian empire, with its history of tolerance and its significance as the birthplace of Zoroastrianism, with the more well-known stories of Alexander the Great and his Greek cohorts. A journey for roots, meaning and religious and social understanding, Fire Altar is a collection that will resound with readers for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9789351160809

Keki N. Daruwalla

One of India's best known writers, 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). 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.

Book preview

Introduction

Time? What is time?

Centuries can rust in one dark rumination.

This is not necessarily a ‘dark’ rumination. They were uncluttered times, and certainly heroic. We can only try and imagine what the past was like—slow turn of the Persian wheel, slow tramp of soldiers in keeping with the unhurried pace of time, tilting of empires as they collided with each other, empires crashing but plough and peasantry remaining unaffected, the pomp and heraldry that accompanied kings, the first coins being struck, victors praying at the altar of gods whose followers had been vanquished, as Cyrus prayed to Marduk, the god of the defeated Lydians. Darius the Great getting a canal dug from the Nile to the Suez. Above all, peace spreading like water over a desert. And across the Persian Empire, the first world empire in history, peace reigned for centuries. Different tribes and people were at liberty to worship their own gods, practise their rituals and light fires at their own altars.

Only a nut would think of turning this bit of hoary past into verse. Embarking on such a project had never crossed my mind earlier, and the whole book, written between 1991 and 1993, was a bit of an accident. In 1986, I was approached by Manjulika Dubey on behalf of a publishing firm to write a book on the Parsis. It was supposed to be a glossy, with a Parsi photographer doing the camerawork. I was moving to England on a posting. Driving past a second-hand book shop in the middle circle of Connaught Place (it was fortunately not named Rajiv Chowk then), I saw a volume of Herodotus and bought it for ten rupees. Never was money better spent.

The past, history shall we say, has often attracted me and I think I wrote about twenty pages in London before realizing that I was no scholar and writing on the Parsis was beyond me. Fortunately, the lady photographer known for her camerawork in the film Masala Bombay or Bombay Masala (I was not lucky enough to see the movie) met me in London and stated she wasn’t going ahead with the project. I felt relieved.

But I kept reading Herodotus and that took me on to Xenophon. I asked the MI 6 to kindly get me Plutarch’s The Malice of Herodotus. They very kindly obliged—no one else could have got it for me, the book is pretty rare. I kept reading. However bad my writing may be, I am a solid reader. My father had dinned enough of the Shahnama (or Shahnameh as the Persians call it) in my head when I was a kid. That had stayed with me, as had Mathew Arnold’s ‘Rustam and Sohrab’—a good poem that one could hold up as a model of narrative verse. I toyed with the idea of turning the past into poetry. Time turns the past into myth just as vats turn liquor into vintage scotch. On my return in August 1990 (I was waylaid at Mahipalpur by the anti-Mandal agitation), the pressure to write became strong. A trip to Iran and of course to Persepolis and Pasargadae clinched matters and provided the inspiration. I wrote these poems in two years (1991-1993).

Obviously this is not history or myth turned to verse. Nor is it narrative verse in the old sense of the term— telling a story in verse. These are poems placed and slotted in a certain era. The terrain being exotic (anything to do with Persia or Babylon becomes exotic) and the times reaching back two thousand years and more, footnotes and explanations become necessary. That the poem ‘Barbarians’ is a riposte to Cavafy’s famous poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is too obvious to mention. Why Cavafy’s poem became so famous, beats me though.

Today, Pasargadae, the capital city of Cyrus the Great, is almost bereft of any vestige of a ruined building or wall. Historians tell us that all the Pasargadae columns were of white stone. The palaces were ‘exquisitely proportioned’, they were ‘full of light but bare of decorative detail’, while those of Persepolis ‘were oppressively large, clumsy, drab and overloaded with ornament; that Pasargadae charmed while Persepolis oppressed’ (Roger Stevens). The sonnets are a takeoff on the fact that there is hardly anything there now to aid your imagination as you try and telescope into the past. Alexander came to the grave of Cyrus and wept. Historians tell us that the words, ‘Here I lie, Cyrus, King of the Persians etc’ were written on the tomb, though they are no longer discernible.

The Euphrates sonnets talk about an event mentioned in the Bible (where Cyrus is known as ‘anointed of God’). Within a year of his conquest of Babylon, Cyrus sent back to Jerusalem the 40,000 captive Israelites, who till then had lived in misery ‘by the waters of Babylon’ (Psalm 137). They were held captive since 589 BC. Their silver and gold treasures which Nebuchadnezzar had brought were returned to Canaan and Jerusalem. The Hebrews had had it bad, paying tributes at one time or another to the Egyptians, Assyrians, Akkadians, and eventually the Babylonians, all fairly cruel masters.

The Letters from Tomyris, Queen of the Messegetae, are mentioned by Herodotus, who was quite capable of weaving fable into his ‘historic’ narratives. Cyrus died in 530 BC. His successor Cambyses (Kumbuzia in Persian, just as Cyrus is Kurush) has left a chequered history of cruelty, conquest (Egypt),