The Mistress: A Parsi Poem
TISS-PARZOR Culture and Civilisation: A Zoroastrian Perspective — Parsi Literature Course 2026 Essay Submission. The Mistress speaks to my writerly heart.
Essay Topic: With reference to the poems of Keki Daruwalla and Gieve Patel, critically review ONE or TWO poems of your choice. Comment on the theme, tone, structure and the deeper meaning of the poem/poems.
The Mistress by Keki N. Daruwalla inflames, entices, attracts, elicits curiosity, and surprises with a final twist on the final line that demands: reread me so now you’ll understand.
With each rereading, I savour this poem more and more. Its theme, tone, and structure comprise the scaffold on which meaning layers like flesh on bone. The Mistress’s theme focuses on Daruwalla’s experience of writing in Indian English and being vilified for it; the poem is his counterattack to nativists who demand that he write his post-colonial poems in the native language they designate as true. A person’s language is their truth, their identity. Yet it contains a hidden aspect: it’s a hook for others to affix you on. Memories surface of my own English resistance.
English in its various forms reflects identity.
Long ago, my ex-mother-in-law, an eighth-generation Acadian who traced her ancestry back to the 1755 British deportation of the French in the North American colonies, launched into a tirade against me, for, in her eyes, I was one of the English who had subjugated and discriminated against her people. It didn’t matter that I was an immigrant who had no ancestral history nor any personal part in oppressing French Canada. The only thing that mattered was that I spoke English, seemingly my first language. She affixed me with English-as-oppressor identity as my truth, just as in the eyes of those who criticized Daruwalla, Indian English was his true identity of betrayer, of sympathizing with the colonizers against the oppressed colonized long after India had achieved independence.
The poem’s theme of language as identity also contrasts his perception of Indian English as reflecting himself, and he uses an ironic tone to emphasize that.
Does your primary language reflect your identity? Does your identity change, depending on which language you use, if you’re able to speak more than one?
Irony functions as self-reflection on his relationship with this hybrid, adaptable, marginalized language. Love snakes through his words; yet it’s not the sentimental love of Romantic poetry nor the ringing cadences of a sonnet. It’s harsh; bitter; lustful; passionate; lovesick; and loyal. By using the metaphor of a mistress, Daruwalla endows his relationship with Indian English with both illicit and insatiable tones. The reader cannot doubt the depth of his love for Indian English, the language of his poetry. Yet he also admits he uses it, like a man uses a mistress (or any woman, for that matter). Most societies marginalize women’s language, and Daruwalla admits to the misogyny of his society by casting Indian English as a woman. His self-perception as marginalized is only the first course of his self-reflective feast.
Reflecting the liminal space Parsis inhabit, Daruwalla wrestles with his origins. By using a hybrid form of English, he asks himself whether he writes in his mother tongue or father tongue? He has lost his own ancestors’ language; so where does his identity lie? Yet he’s steadfast in not giving up Indian English, no matter how reviled he is for using it and for rejecting nativism.
In a similar way, I resisted my ex-mother-in-law’s diatribe. English is not my first language, but it’s my sole language today. Yet my hybrid Canadian-British English doesn’t represent my attitude to French Canada, nor does it lump me in with her culture’s oppressor. Like the nativists in Daruwalla’s poem, she conflates the language we use with cultural denial and eradication and misrepresents our self-perceived identity. These critics remain stuck in the past while the colonized become independent, language grows and adapts, and our societies change from modern to post-modern, their changes reflected in our literature.
Structurally, The Mistress is post-modern. It’s free-form with seemingly random breaks, yet upon closer study, the breaks signal points of emphasis: for example, being hissed at and flashing herself. Through these two short stanzas, Daruwalla reveals how his mistress metamorphoses the curses raining down on her into a flamboyant covering.
Ferrum College, Stanley Library, writes that post-modern poetry “can be difficult to read and understand, and this is often done on purpose as a way of reflecting the poem back toward the reader.” Daruwalla’s poem does that. EBSCO notes that post-modernism arose out of several events, including post-colonialism. While modernism celebrated individualism, post-modernism explored individuality to an extreme. Daruwalla saturates this poem with his personal experience. Yet a reader who sits in the liminal space of a Parsi, or of any two or more language cultures, can identify with the poet.
The penultimate stanza is structured in such a way as to emphasize the hybridization of Indian culture with Great Britain’s within Indian English. The metaphors change from jewellery to food, as if to note the cultures that Indian English has ingested. Like a curry, it has mixed various ingredients from different lands into a unique dish of words and usage. The last paragraph fattens this idea.
Personally, for dramatic effect, I would have placed the last two lines on their own separate lines with a line space in between. But perhaps Daruwalla felt that keeping them together in the last stanza heightened the surprise of the twist by sliding it into one’s consciousness with no forewarning.
The Mistress is a singularly exclusive poem that only a post-British-India Parsi writer could’ve written.
Although any reader can lap up its rich visuals, sounds, and scents, only those who’ve encountered attacks against their choice of language can grasp its meaning fully.
That is both its strength and its weakness.
I loved The Mistress the most of the five Daruwalla poems we studied because of my personal experience with language. With my ex-in-laws, it was being lumped in with their historical oppressors; in my growing up, it was being ripped out of one culture and plunked into another; with my family, it was being denied being taught my grandparents’ language; in my education, it was being criticized for mixing British and Canadian idiomatic English, a no-no. (“Says who?” I thought.) Just as no-one can tame a wild mistress, neither can one tame Indian English nor a Parsi who uses that language. This poem plays in one’s mind, inviting deeper insight into the poet and oneself with each luscious rereading.
Further Reading and References
TISS-PARZOR Parsi Literature in English: Poetry
Prof. Coomi Vevaina, a vivacious, caring teacher, runs this module. We’ll have many guest lecturers, but she taught the first class and interacted with us for the two hours. Coomi is very much a teacher who likes discussion with her students. She likes how virtual classes allow anyone from anywhere on the planet to si…
References
The Keeper of the Dead. Keki N. Daruwalla. 1982. Internet Archive. Google Books. WorldCat: World Catalogue of Libraries.
Ferrum College, Stanley Library. National Poetry Month: Postmodernism Poetry. https://libguides.ferrum.edu/nationalpoetrymonth/postmodernism
EBSCO. Postmodernism (Literary Period). https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/postmodernism-literary-period