Environmentalism and Eco-Criticism in the Poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla

In modern Indian English Poetry, the description of Environment marks a worth mentioning presence in spite of present-day socio cultural and political issues rising alongside highly capitalist, technical world. Writers of this period deliberately portrayed environment in their work to make the humankind sensitive about the nature. It emerges as a major concern in the poetry of so called environment sensitive writers who concentrate on the depletion and destruction of nature. Environment and literature are strongly connected with each other .We find honest Environmental concerns in the works of numerous poets and writers in almost all culture of the humankind. Today this close association between the environment and humanity is being analyzed and emphasized ubiquitously. The various literary critics try to learn how this close association between environment and society has been textualized by the writers in their works. In this framework two terms have turn into very important nowadays – Environmentalism and ecocriticism. Over time, these ecosystems are increasingly affected by expansion of population and human intervention. In this case relationships are so dependent on each other that any disruption of one‘s own disturbs the other. Ecocriticism is the relationship between literature and nature, about how nature appears in literature. Environmentalism concern about action aimed at protecting the Environment. The paper seeks to explore Keki N Daruwallas poetry in Indian English literature and his work from an ecocritical perspective. The paper presents an environmental examination of Daruwala‘s English poems to present the general depletion of the earth‘s environment. Nature has been the subject of various forms of art and its management, especially in poetry. Poets such as William Wordsworth, PB Shelley, Robert Frost and many others have celebrated different aspects of nature with different purposes and different perspectives. Their treatment of environment points out how environment acquires dissimilar understanding and connotation. Occasionally it is considered as a divine spirit, a holy mother and friend of man and the other hand; it plays the role of an aggressive power that acts as a supernatural entity to penalize human beings for their wrong conducts. In any affair, nature creates an outstanding part of the thematic and artistic elements in poetic discourses. Various elements of Environment including the river, sky, plants, animals, and creatures often find symbolic value that rewards the complexity of the creation of poetry and enhances its texture. Current Indian English Poetry

devastation of nature.

―Mandwa,‖ is an outstanding poem on landscape and seascape. Through diverse metaphors and symbols, he depicts the scenery. The season in the coastal region was summer, the sun was boiling and it was like ―an egg-yolk frying in the sky.‖ And the coastal area was arrayed with fish-scales, ―The beach white with fish-scales.‖ Daruwalla puts the entire these things very wonderfully in his poem,

“Boat-Ride along the Ganga” is a poem on the earlier side of the actuality of the river Ganges. For the Hindus, Ganga is a mother, divinity, life giver, and river of salvation. On the other hand, the Zoroastrian poet, Daruwalla, observes it in a different way and states the sad reality of the river. On the banks of the river, he finds death, disease and mouldiness. Through the lines of the poem, he sheers his discomfiture to see stuffs in the river and its banks, as he is moving

He articulated his lack of sympathy with the language of panda and the things which he happens to observe as rowing, ―I listen avidly to his legend-talk/ striving to forget what I changed to see: / the sewer-mouth trained like a cannon / on the river‟s flank‖ (97). These lines show his sense of awkwardness and disappointment. It might be due to his spiritual backdrop, or misapprehension of Hindu philosophy and rituals or his lack of knowledge. Daruwalla's poems reflect nature with its bright color as well movements and human passions. About this M.K. Naik writes, ―The Daruwalla concept is busy continuously developing meaningful relationships between Nature and Man, in different ways and in different forms and open the effectiveness of this relationship is the success and failure of this the relationship that the success and failure of these poems seem to depend so much ‖. His poems evoke emotions in a natural sense. R. N. Sinha calls,―His poems are the true answer and as a result of that transaction between the nature and mind of the poet. Through the poems, he carried out the present authenticity of natural world and explains how the present man has manipulated it. The imagery he uses is incredibly ordinary but the ideas, which the images contain are very logical, intellectual and evocative. These poems hold an extensive thematic nucleus, lucid visualisation of scene, dense and impressive presentation of occasion, suggestive descriptions and an extraordinary harmony of tone and outcome.

Daruwalla, K. (2006). Collected Poems: 1970-2005. Penguin UK. Greg, G. (2004). Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge. Gokak, V. K. (Ed.). (1970). The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, 1828-1965. Sahitya Akademi. Victor, P. E., & Lavanya, K. An Oikopoetic Study from the Selected Poems of Keki N Daruwalla. Dichotomy in between Ecocentrism & Anthropocentrism: An Ecocritical Rendering of Two Indian English Poets. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 6(3), PP. 15-23. Karmakar, G. (2017). The Poetic Cosmos and Craftsmanship of a Bureaucrat Turned Poet: An Interview with Keki N. Daruwalla. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 11(1). Steven, S. Ecological Concern in Indian English Poetry. Vaz, V. Eco-criticism in Indian Contemporary Poetry: A Few Aspects to Synthesise in the Direction towards Socio-economic and Ecological Development.