ABSTRACT
Keki N. Daruwalla and Adil Jussawalla, two of our contemporary twentieth-century poets who have contributed significantly to the growth and development of Indian English poetry in the recent decades, have dealt at length with the urban-metropolitan culture of our contemporary social life and its natural infiltration into the poetic arena with characteristic uniqueness. Whereas the poetry of Daruwalla is marked with an all-pervasive nostalgia for nature and a nature-bound way of life, Jussawalla has often been termed a city poet writing against the backdrop of the steady march of human civilisation towards a compact global-digital village but never failing to raise issues of identity, individuality, and isolation. Writing across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, both Daruwalla and Jussawalla appear to be predominantly concerned with the growing isolation of the city-bred man on planet earth and the gradual withdrawal of the individual from community living, of the agents of nature from the world of man. Revolt in Daruwalla’s poetry takes the form of the silent withdrawal of nature, of its unobtrusive shrinking back from the glamour and glitz, the insecurity and violence of the life in a metropolis. Revolt in Jussawalla’s poetry, however, takes the form of introspection and self-analysis.
