The feeling of alienation and rootlessness is a modern experience that has been given poetic expression by many of the major Indian poets writing in English. An English education in India and elsewhere, prolonged visits abroad, and more importantly, the choice of English as a medium of poetic creation have intensified this feeling and have provided the necessary tension for their poetry.
Though the poetry of Jussawalla has been labelled as ‘poetry of exile’ (G.S. Amur) it would be more appropriate to include his poetry with Parthasarathy’s in the ‘poetry of exile and return’ (Bruce King) Jussawalla, another Parsi voice of Indian poetry in English, was born in Bombay, in 1940. Though raised in the Zoroastrian faith, he was educated in an Anglican School which gave him a Christian vision, evident in his first volume of poems Land’s End (1962).
His ‘exile’ in England from 1957 to 1969 (with visits to India in 1961 and 1966) first for his B.A. from University College, Oxford and then for a stint in teaching at the International Language Centre, London, occasioned the poems of Land’s End, which, Jussawalla says, “tried to show the effect of living in lands I can never leave nor love properly, or belong to”.
image source: montrealprize.com
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His disillusionment abroad has been recorded in “Indifference”, an essay from the collection “Disappointed Guests: Essays by African, Asian and West Indian Students (1965). He returned to India in 1970 and has been living in Bombay since then. He was a member of the International Writing Program, Iowa, in 1977. Jussawalla has edited an anthology New Writing in India for Penguin (1974).
Jussawalla’s poetic output has been small and selective. After an interval of 14 years he brought out his second volume Missing Person (1976) which is concerned with the need to find coherence in the Indian experience. But, unlike Parthasarathy (in his Homecoming poems) Jussawalla does not muse over lost tradition or the bygone childhood, but is concerned with the present problems viewed from a Fanonite – Marxist perspective, rejecting the upper-middle-class Parsi upbringing and seeking an identity through the revolutionary process of creating a Third World new order.
“If Ezekiel speaks of the ‘Unfinished. Man’ and Nandy of the ‘Nowhere Маn’, Jussawalla would sketch the ‘Missing Person’ (Prema Nandakumar). The post-modernist technique of extreme fragmentation, along with collage, montage and such cinematographic techniques and a diction borrowed from pop culture make the title poem “Missing Person” strikingly original. A confessional element can also be detected in Jussawalla. Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage and Jussawalla’s Missing Person can be fruitfully compared to note how the problem and crisis of ‘exile and return’ in the Indian English poetic context can be resolved poetically with different strategies.
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There is a conspicuous note of lyricism and humanism in the early poems, expressed through sharp images.