Nissim Ezekiel; poet & critic (Indian Jew)
Hyfler/Rosner
Nissim Ezekiel
Guru of Indian writers writing in English
26 March 2004
Nissim Ezekiel, poet and critic: born Bombay, India 24
December 1924; married 1952 Daisy Dandekar (one son, two
daughters); died Bombay 9 January 2004.
Often described as a "poet's poet", Nissim Ezekiel inspired
young poets writing in English in India for over four
decades. He was a powerful and original literary critic and
cultural commentator. He acquired the status of a guru and
his influence spread wide on the literary map, as he
nurtured poets like A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, Adil
Jussawala, Ranjit Hoskote and Gieve Patel.
It was with Ezekiel that modern English poetry took roots in
India. He enriched the style and the content of Indian
English poetry, enabling it to reflect the 20th-century
Indian reality. As a poet writing about urban alienation, he
expressed the angst of many an educated, middle-class
Indian.
Nissim Ezekiel was born in Bombay in 1924 to
Marathi-speaking Bene-Israeli Jewish parents. It is not
known when the Bene-Israelis first came to India. They were
believed to have been shipwrecked off the Goan coast and
settled in Bombay. They claim to have descended from Jews
who escaped persecution in Galilee around 150BC. Today they
are a minority in India numbering about 5,000.
Ezekiel was educated at Antonio D'Souza High School, in
Bombay and at Bombay University where he took an MA in
English Literature with distinction in 1947. From 1948 to
1952, he lived in Britain, studying philosophy at Birkbeck
College, London, and writing poetry. His first book of
poems, A Time to Change, was published in London by the
Fortune Press in 1952.
This book marked a departure from the poetry that had been
written in India in the 1930s and 1940s. Poets like Sorojini
Naidu, Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore had produced work
that reflected the style and sensibility of Victorian poets
like Tennyson and the Rossettis. Ezekiel wrote in the idiom
of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden and the Movement
poets, affirming his identity, his alienation and his search
for home.
In 1961 he became Professor of English in Mithibai College,
Bombay, and later in Bombay University. He was also a
Visiting Professor at Leeds University, where in 1964 he
lectured on Indian literature in English. In 1967 he was
invited to deliver lectures in the University of Chicago.
His reputation as a poet and teacher led to another
invitation to visit America, this time by the US government
under its International Visitors Program in 1974, and the
following year he went on a lecture tour to Australia as a
Cultural Award Visitor.
In 1954 he was made the editor of a newly founded literary
magazine, Quest. He also served as an associate editor of
Imprint, 1961-67, writing articles and reviewing books in a
style that can only be described as Ezekielian. Through a
stint as editor of Poetry India, a quarterly (1964-67), he
was able to introduce a number of young poets writing in
English. In 1964 he became art critic of the Times of India
and also edited the Pen journal for several years. He won
the Sahitya Akademi Award, the highest Indian literary
recognition, in 1983 and the Padmashree, India's highest
civilian honour, in 1988.
Ezekiel's poetical works include Sixty Poems (1953), The
Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name
(1965), Snakeskin and Other Poems (translations of the
Marathi poet Indira Sant, 1974), Hymns in Darkness (1976)
and Latter-Day Psalms (1982). His Collected Poems 1952-88
appeared in 1989. A keen student of American literature, he
edited two excellent, very readable books, An Emerson Reader
(1965) and A Martin Luther King Reader (1969), and an
anthology of fiction and poetry called Another India (1990).
He produced two brilliant essays, "Poetry and Philosophy"
(1966) and "Poetry as Knowledge" (1972) in Quest, in which
he expounded his ideas on poetry. According to him, "poetry
must move from the purely personal plane to a plane at once
intensely individual and universal". One of his best-loved
poems is "Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher", where the poet's quest
for love and the word is revealed. There is the desire to
move towards a kind of resignation, an acceptance of change:
To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill.
In Sixty Poems and in his most important collections, The
Unfinished Man and The Exact Name, Ezekiel once again
displayed qualities that were to change the course of
English poetry in India. A gritty urban realism dominates
these poems. He talks about the city, politics, loneliness,
love, sexuality and human situations. As Moraes put it:
"Ezekiel displayed a wry, drily mischievous sense of humour
and an eye that was observant and sympathetic at once." Even
as a student, in 1945, he had expressed his poetic aim in a
letter to a friend: "By now it is quite obvious to me that
my poetry must express a certain totality of human
experience."
In many of his poems, the city of Bombay figures as a
central image. And the very fact that it is his home enables
him to cope with its heat and dust:
This is the place
Where I was born, I
Know it
Well. It is home,
Which I recognise at last
As a kind of hell
To be made tolerable.
And Bombay is symbolic of India. It is this sense of
belonging to the country which brings Ezekiel to attack V.S.
Naipaul's indictment of India in An Area of Darkness (1964).
In a powerful review for Imprint entitled "Naipaul's India
and Mine", Ezekiel writes, "Rubbish Mr Naipaul", and goes on
to examine not only the novelist's reckless generalisation
of India but also his own situation:
Mr Naipaul writes exclusively from the point of view of his
own dilemma, his temperamental alienation from his mixed
background, his choice and his escape. That temperament is
not universal . . . the escape for most is not from the
community but into it.
I am incurably critical and sceptical. In this sense only I
love India. I expect nothing in return because critical and
sceptical love does not beget love. It performs another more
objective function. In a very small even negligible way,
this objective function may bring results which have eluded
the prophets and reformers of India. Mice may gnaw through
the ropes of bondage where the roaring of lions makes no
impression.
Not being Hindu I cannot identify myself with India's past
as a comprehensive heritage or reject it as if it were mine
to reject . . . I can identify myself only with modern
India, a place with more things in it than are dreamt of in
Mr Naipaul's philosophy.
Ezekiel is a poet of the ordinariness of things. He writes
about cities, ordinary people, personal stories, marriage,
love affairs, being at home and away. It is the bare-bone
stuff - this time and this place - that comes movingly alive
in his poetry. Not for him the exploration of the unknown,
not for him the sublimity of poetic truth. For him, the
mystery of things is here and now.
Early in his career, he came under the influence of M.N.
Roy, a freedom fighter in the pre- Independent India, who
formed the Radical Democratic Party in the 1940s and
advocated both humanism and rationalism. This enabled
Ezekiel to have a kind of perspective on life that is at
once radical and humane.
Perhaps the most enduring quality of Ezekiel's poetry is his
utter artistic detachment and a profound sense of human
sympathy. Though an outsider by his Jewish race, he was
never alienated from the Indian milieu; though an academic
and at times a recluse, he was never ensconced in the ivory
tower. His private world was always in harmony with the
public world.
When he died, Dom Moraes said: "He had the gift, given only
to a few people, of being happy with small and humble things
. . . He possessed a true and pure quality of innocence."
Jai Kumar