Cite this Essay
MLA:
Krätli, Graziano, “Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004).” Indian Writing In English Online, 26 Dec 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ezekiel-bio/ .
Chicago:
Krätli, Graziano, “Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004).” Indian Writing In English Online. December 26, 2022. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ezekiel-bio/ .
For more than three decades, from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s, Nissim Ezekiel was a pivotal figure in the cultural life of Bombay/Mumbai, as his work as poet, editor, critic, and teacher influenced and inspired younger writers and artists, helping shape the canon of Indian poetry in English along the way.
Born on December 16, 1924, in Bombay, Nissim was the third of five children, three boys and two girls. His parents, Diana and Moses Ezekiel Talkar, were both members of the Bene Israel (“Children of Israel”), the oldest and largest of the three Jewish communities in India. They were also part of the first generation who moved to the city from their ancestral homeland near Alibag, in the coastal region south of Mumbai. (Talkar, the additional toponymic which Moses Ezekiel added to, and eventually dropped from, his surname, refers to the native village of Tar, in the Raigad district). Both parents were teachers: Moses a lecturer in Botany and Zoology at Wilson College, and Diana a schoolteacher before starting her own nursery school. Liberal and progressive in their religious beliefs and practices, they held evening prayers (in Hebrew or English) and visited the synagogue on Yom Kippur. At home they spoke Marathi, a language Nissim never mastered enough to be able to write poetry in it, as some of his Maharashtrian contemporaries, such as Arun Kolatkar (1932‒2004) and Dilip Chitre (1938‒2009), did. (His only book of translations of Marathi poetry was done in collaboration with a university colleague.) Nissim’s formal education started at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, continued at the Antonio De Souza High School (both Roman Catholic), and was capped with a bachelor’s (1945) followed by a master’s (1947) in English Literature at Wilson College. Around this time, he published his first poems in the college magazine and elsewhere. After graduation, he taught for a year at Khalsa College, freelanced for various newspapers and magazines, and worked for M.N. Roy’s Radical Democratic Party, eventually distancing himself from politics to focus on poetry and the arts. The change was partly due to the influence of a new friend, Ebrahim Alkazi, a student at St. Xavier’s College and a member of Sultan Padamsee’s Theatre Group. Upon graduation, Alkazi decided to continue his studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and convinced Nissim to join him by offering to pay his fare.
In London, where he arrived in November 1948, Nissim spent much of his time reading in the library of India House, the headquarters of India’s diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom, until the High Commissioner, V.K. Krishna Menon (a close friend of Nehru and a future Union Minister for Defence), offered him a job in the Internal Affairs Department. At the same time, Nissim enrolled in evening courses (Chinese, Western Philosophy, Art Appreciation, etc.) at the City Literary Institute, an adult education college nearby, and attended philosophy classes at Birkbeck College, University of London, without completing the BA program. A couple of visits to Paris, in late December 1949 and August 1951, resulted in a strong desire to move there. (Incidentally, Srinivas Rayaprol, an almost contemporary of Ezekiel, had the same impulse after visiting the City of Light in 1951, following a three-year residence in the United States. We may wonder whether either of them would have been a different poet, or a different author altogether, had he followed this impulse and settled in the French capital. (Just like we may wonder what kind of poet and scholar would have been Ramanujan, had he pursued his academic career at Cambridge or Oxford rather than Chicago; or what would have become of Dom Moraes, as a poet and journalist, had ne never left India). But we can only speculate. What we know is that, early on, London brought out Ezekiel’s vocation to be a poet, and he acted upon it with determination and perseverance. After one year at India House, he quit his job to devote all his time to reading and writing, living frugally and supporting himself with menial jobs and money occasionally sent from home. As he would characterize this period in “Background, Casually,” one of his most autobiographical (and anthologized) poems, “Philosophy, / Poverty and Poetry, three / Companions shared my basement room”. The result of this self-imposed, creative confinement was a manuscript which Reginald Ashley Caton, founder of the Fortune Press, accepted for a ten-pound publishing fee. (The house had previously published other South Asian poets living in England, among them Fredoon Kabraji and M.J. Tambimuttu, as well as British and American authors such as Kingsley Amis, Cecil-Day Lewis, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Penn Warren, in addition to French, Greek, and Latin classics). Ezekiel then turned his efforts to planning his trip back to India, and eventually found a way to pay his fare by working on a cargo ship that was carrying ammunition to French Indo-China. The return trip took more than two months, from March to May 1952, as the ship made several stops; but at one of them, in Marseilles, the impromptu deckhand found copies of A Time to Change waiting for him.
Soon after his arrival in Bombay, Ezekiel was offered a job as sub-editor for The Illustrated Weekly of India. In the same year, he also began a long association with the P.E.N. All-India Centre and its founder, the Colombian-born Indian theosophist Sophia Wadia, initially assisting with the editing of The Indian P.E.N. and The Aryan Path, then, after Wadia’s death in 1986, editing the former newsletter and running the Centre from its offices in Theosophy Hall, Churchgate, a dual position he held until his failing health forced him to quit in 1998. As pointed out by one scholar, it was Ezekiel’s influence that eventually “helped transform the PEN All-India Centre from a formal institution which functioned primarily as a mediator, into a more flexible meeting place for new and established poets” (Bird 213). Before the year ended, Ezekiel married a member of the Bene Israel community, Daisy Jacob Dandekar. The couple will have two daughters (Kalpana and Kavita) and one son (Elkana). In May 1954, Ezekiel resigned from the Weekly to work for the Shilpi advertising agency, first as copywriter and then in a managerial position that allowed him to spend six months in New York for professional development. This gave him the opportunity to visit California and to attend poetry readings and other cultural events in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (Although the 1956 poetry scene in the Bay Area did not impress him as much as it did Rayaprol, who had experienced it only a few years before while a student at Stanford University.)
Not long after this trip, Ezekiel left Shilpi for a job at the Chemould Frames company, where his duties as factory manager did not prevent him from developing a lasting relationship with his employer, the art entrepreneur Kekoo Gandhy. This helped the young poet and critic to expand his links to the Bombay art world, and in turn prompted Gandhy to open Gallery Chemould in 1963, one of only two commercial galleries at the time, which Ezekiel would manage for a while.
With his appointment as lecturer and head of the English Department at Mithibai College, in 1961, Ezekiel eventually settled in the teaching profession of his parents, thus embarking on an academic career that would continue at the University of Bombay and include visiting professorships at the University of Leeds (1964) and the University of Chicago (1967), and a three-month residency at the National University of Singapore (1988‒89). However, if teaching represented the backbone of Ezekiel’s professional life for two decades and a half, it was through the correlated activities of literary editor, critic, book reviewer, and cultural organizer that the he acquired the reputation and exercised the influence which would grant him a foundational (if not patriarchal) status within the canon of postcolonial Indian poetry in English.
Sometime in the early 1950s, Ezekiel became involved with the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF), an affiliate of the Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose various activities, focused on literature and the arts (and secretly funded by the CIA), were meant to counter Soviet influence in western Europe, Africa and Asia. In India, two of the initiatives sponsored by the ICCF were the monthly newsletter Freedom First (1952‒2015) and the bi-monthly of arts and ideas Quest (1955‒76). Ezekiel was the first editor of Quest (August 1955‒February 1958) and subsequently served as its reviews editor (1961‒67). He also contributed articles and book reviews to both publications, and in 1980‒83 served as editor of Freedom First, his focus then being on current events and political issues, consistent with the ideology of the journal. (Another Bombay periodical funded—in this case directly—by the CIA was Imprint, which published mainly condensed versions of Western bestsellers. Run by a couple of American expatriates, it was edited by the Australian journalist Philip Knightley with Ezekiel as associate editor from 1961‒67.) Under Ezekiel’s editorship, Quest was a significant venue for the new poetry, publishing such emerging authors as Kersey Katrak, Arun Kolatkar, Dom Moraes, R. Parthasarathy, Gieve Patel, Srinivas Rayaprol and others, and paving the way for the special issue on contemporary Indian poetry in English (January‒February 1972), guest edited by Saleem Peeradina and subsequently published as a book, which was one of the earliest and remains one of the most influential postcolonial anthologies of its kind. Even more innovative, if short-lived, was the quarterly Poetry India, which featured poems written in English or translated from the main regional languages, plus an international section represented by British and North American authors (but also including translations from the Hebrew). Ezekiel edited all six issues (January‒March 1966 through April‒June 1967), and, with the second, took over the ownership and management of the publication from the Bombay-based Parichay Trust (The original plan included a series of books, but the only one which Ezekiel was able to publish, under his own name, was Gieve Patel’s first collection, Poems, in 1966).
A few years later, the model adopted by Ezekiel in Poetry India (in which English served as both creative and target language) inspired another little magazine, Vagartha, founded and edited by the scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee with the financial support of the Joshi Foundation. In the course of twenty-five quarterly issues published over six years (1973‒79), Vagartha featured contemporary poetry as well as short fiction, critical essays, discussions and interviews, either in English or translated from other Indian languages, namely Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu. Ezekiel contributed a total of six poems (five of his and one translated from the Marathi with Vrinda Nabar), as well as the translator’s note to Snake-skin and Other Poems of Indira Sant (1975). A decade after the magazine closed down, Ezekiel was behind the idea of “[p]reserving the best of Vagartha in book form” (Ezekiel and Mukherjee, 13), which resulted in Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry (1990), co-edited with Mukherjee (ironically, the title was suggested to Mukherjee by Naipaul, during a “casual encounter” in Delhi in early 1989).
Overall, the 1960s were Ezekiel’s most productive decade. In addition to his academic and editorial responsibilities, his art and literary criticism for various publications, and his involvement in conferences and seminars (especially those organized by P.E.N. India and the ICCF), he managed to publish two collections of poetry (The Unfinished Man, 1960, and The Exact Name, 1965) and one of plays (Three Plays, 1969), in addition to five edited books: Indian Writers in Conference: Proceedings of the Sixth P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Mysore, 1962 (1964), Writing in India: Proceedings of the Seventh P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Lucknow, 1964 (1965), An Emerson Reader (1965), A Martin Luther King Reader (1969), and Poetry from India (co-edited with Howard Sergeant, 1970).
In 1972 Ezekiel joined the English Department at the University of Bombay as reader in American Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1984. The subject was as new to the Indian universities as the Poet was new to the subject, but his appointment, like his rapid promotion to the rank of full professor, disregarded his lack of a doctoral degree or other scholarly credentials and considered instead his reputation as a poet and critic, his recent volumes on Emerson and Dr. King, and his visits to the United States, especially the second, in 1967, when among other things he was invited to give a talk at the Thoreau Festival at Nassau Community College, in Garden City, New York. Another significant change, and a step forward in the process of canonization, was Ezekiel’s moving from Writers Workshop (recently founded by the poet, critic and translator P. Lal, who had been one of the first reviewers of A Time to Change) to the more established and prestigious (as a colonial legacy) Oxford University Press, which would publish his next four books, namely the poetry collections Hymns in Darkness (1976) and Latter-Day Psalms (1982), a volume of Collected Poems: 1952-1988 (1989), and one of Selected Prose (1992). The first two books appeared in the New Poetry in India series, launched in 1976 and also featuring Keki Daruwalla’s Crossing of Rivers, Shiv K. Kumar’s Subterfuges, R. Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage, A.K. Ramanujan’s Selected Poems, and Parthasarathy’s anthology, Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. (Parthasarathy, in his role as OUP editor, was probably the link between his former colleague at Mithibai College and the publisher). Ezekiel’s growing reputation as the standard-bearer for Indian poetry in English is further evidenced by the frequent interviews he gave to literary journals and popular magazines (making him probably the most interviewed poet in the canon); by the many lecture tours and conference he attended over the next two decades, both in India and abroad; by his editorial consultancies for publishers and poetry series; by the Sahitya Akademi Award (1983) for Latter-Day Psalms and the Padma Shri (1988) for his contribution to Indian literature in English; and by the growing number of periodical issues (Journal of South Asian Literature 1976, The Journal of Indian Writing in English 1986) and monographs (Karnani 1974, Rahman 1981, Raizada 1992, Das 1995, Sharma 1995, etc.) devoted to him.
In Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987), the first comprehensive and detailed overview of the field, the American scholar Bruce King presented Ezekiel as a watershed in the evolution of Indian poetry in English; the poet who “brought a sense of discipline, self-criticism and mastery to Indian English poetry”, separating poetry as a “hobby, something done in spare moments” from poetry as a vocation, to be pursued with “craftsmanship and purposefulness”. In King’s lapidary statement, “Other wrote poems, he wrote poetry” (91). A few years later, King included Dom Moraes and A.K. Ramanujan in his study of the Three Indian Poets (1991) who “may be considered the founders of modern poetry in English” (2005, 1). A genealogy was thus created, with Ezekiel as the oldest of the three, as well as the one with the longest and strongest connection to India. (Moraes, it should be remembered, first acquired literary fame in England and was considered a British poet until he returned to India, as a “stranger”, in the 1970s; while Ramanujan lived in the United States since the 1960s).
But canonization is a double-edged sword, and by the early 1990s Ezekiel’s stature as the founding father and doyen of Indian poetry in English was being questioned and scaled back, as some anthologists (Vilas Sarang and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in particular) expressed reservations about his achievement. Likewise, his critical authority and judgment came occasionally under scrutiny when, as a consultant, his advice resulted in the publication of some younger poets to the exclusion of others; or also in relation to the ban imposed on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in India (1988) and Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja in Bangladesh (1994), decisions which Ezekiel supported (as did the Indian P.E.N. and many other Indian intellectuals and writers).
While continuing to publish articles and book reviews, and to write poetry (often in response to requests from magazine editors, and as yet uncollected), most if not all of this late work is more a testimony to Ezekiel’s reputation and influence than a proof of his enduring strength and relevance as a poet or critic.
During the four-year period (1994‒98) when the writer and academic R. Raj Rao (a former student of Ezekiel’s at the University of Bombay) met regularly with him to gather information for an authorized biography, the poet’s memory and living conditions progressively deteriorated, until he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and admitted to a nursing home, where he died on 9 January 2004. His passing marked the beginning of what has been called the annus horribilis of Indian poetry in English, which also claimed the lives of Moraes and Kolatkar, on June 2nd and September 25th, respectively.
Spanning more than four decades, Ezekiel’s eight poetry collections represent a remarkable achievement per se, let alone when considered along with the poet’s concomitant activities as teacher and mentor, editor, reviewer, cultural organizer and public intellectual at large.
If A Time to Change passed virtually unnoticed in England, in India the reviews were more than a few and generally appreciative. Not surprisingly, the twenty-eight-year old’s inquiring, self-analytical and quintessentially urban poetic persona, combined with a conscious disregard for the nationalistic, spiritualistic, or folkloric themes characteristic of most Indian poetry written before and after the Independence (most notably by such prominent figures as Sarojini Naidu and Sri Aurobindo), and a corresponding indifference to India’s past or present history, archeological landscape, and current events appealed immediately to a younger generation of urban, college educated, anglophone readers and emerging writers, some of whom were about to study abroad themselves (Jussawalla, Moraes, Ramanujan), or had recently returned (Rayaprol), while others simply shared Ezekiel’s connection to Bombay’s vibrant cultural scene (Eunice de Souza, Katrak, Kolatkar, Patel, etc.). The book begins with a secular hymn and ends with five examples of prose poetry (a genre which Ezekiel, regrettably, did not follow up), their increasingly religious overtones culminating in the visionary call of “Encounter” (“Within the pandemonium of the street I felt his voice, like a command”). The voice’s imperative advice (to “Simplify,” to “Move in living images”) provides a programmatic answer to the question raised at the beginning, in the Eliotian call for renewal, regeneration and redemption: “How shall we return?” The introspective, questioning approach of “A Time to Change”, and its underlying preoccupation with the conflict between reason and emotion (the “passion of mind or heart”, in which the intellect struggles to comprehend and therefore control the relentless power of bodily desires), set the tone for the entire book and, to some extent, define Ezekiel’s poetic quest throughout his career. If this quest has a religious dimension, it is initially the modern man’s coming to terms with a state of godlessness, and the consequent need—liberating and terrifying at the same time—to make his own laws and fashion his own creed. (A patent masculine attitude toward religion, rooted in the Old Testament and defined by oedipal impulses and anxiety). The title poem provides a crescendo of Ezekiel’s concerns: “The pure invention or the perfect poem, / Precise communication of a thought, / Love reciprocated to a quiver, / Flawless doctrines, certainty of God” (the word “god”, either capitalized or not, singular or plural, recurs eighteen times in the thirty-one poems that make up A Time to Change), ending with a realization that is also a course of action (“These are merely dreams; but I am human / And must testify to what they mean”). Not to discard or disregard these “dreams” but “testify to what they mean” (that is, to use them as evidence of their fallacy); and not a mere possibility but the only possible way, which for a poet means “To own a singing voice and a talking voice”. This double ownership (involving technical mastership as well as control over its results) is indeed what makes a poet and defines his art and belief; therefore “Practising a singing and a talking voice / Is all the creed a man of God requires”—a simple yet genuine profession of faith that simultaneously prefigures Ezekiel’s career as poet and critic.
Life in the English metropolis helped Ezekiel view his hometown of Bombay as a metropolitan space to be lived, experienced and described not only as a physical and social environment, made of “markets and courts of justice, / Slums, football grounds, entertainment halls, / Residential flats, palaces of art and business houses, / Harlots, basement poets, princes and fools” (“Something to Pursue”), but also as a projection and a reflection of the poet’s Geistesleben, or life of the mind. As such, it may be alternately oppressive, menacing, unnerving, enticing or liberating. It may combine the sense of being “continually/ Reduced to something less than human by the crowd” (“The Double Horror”) with the contrasting feelings (desire and deceit, excitement and dissatisfaction) that are the inevitable outcome of clandestine love affairs for which a big city, with its variety of anonymous public spaces, provides an opportunity as well as a backdrop. The “primeval jungle” evoked in the ekphrastic “On an African Mask” becomes the metaphoric urban jungle of poems such as “The Double Horror” and “Commitment”, where the strong imagery seems to draw on German Expressionist cinema, as
vast organised
Futilities suck the marrow from my bones
And put a fever there for cash and fame.
Huge posters dwarf my thoughts, I am reduced
To appetites and godlessness. I wear
A human face but prowl about the streets
Of towns with murderous claws and anxious ears,
Recognising all the jungle sounds of fear
And hunger, wise in tracking down my prey
And wise in taking refuge when the stronger roam.
(“Commitment”)
One of the distinguishing features of A Time to Change (and most of Ezekiel’s poetry until the mid 1960s) is a formal awareness that manifests itself in the consistent (and occasionally self-conscious) adherence to simple metrical structures. It features both stanzaic and free verse poems (the former typically consisting of three or four heroic quatrains rhyming ABAB, with variants made of seven or ten unrhymed lines each); and while it stands in obvious contrast to the recycled Victorian and Edwardian models of Ezekiel’s predecessors (and some of his lesser contemporaries), its actual achievement is rather more conservative (and subtly bifronted) than most critical assessments, focused as they are on the break with the past, seem prepared or willing to admit.
Ezekiel’s second collection is titled Sixty Poems (1953), but actually consists of sixty-five: nineteen written since the publication of A Time to Change, thirty-seven dating from the London years (1950‒51), and nine from the period immediately before (1945‒48), starting when Ezekiel was a graduate student at Wilson College. This was followed by The Third (1959), featuring thirty-six poems written over five years (January 1954‒December 1958) and showing a crystallized emphasis on the poet’s main subject so far, namely a sustained effort to scrutinize, analyze, and rationalize his own self from different angles, perspectives and grammatical persons (first as well as second or third). This may be challenging, daunting, intimidating, as the poet himself admits, confessionally, in “What Frightens Me”.
Myself examined frightens me.
(…)
I have long watched myself
Remotely doing what I had to do,
At times ashamed but always
Rationalising all I do.
I have heard the endless silent dialogue
Between the self-protective self
And the self naked.
I have seen the mask
And the secret behind the mask.
Subtly undermined by the ambiguity of “remotely” (does it refer to “watched” or “doing”?), as well as deflated by the hyperbolic “always rationalising all I do”, this self-awareness exercise ultimately leads to the disconcerting realization that the process of identity construction (the “image being formed”) has uncertainty as its end result. Thus the self is always, inevitably (but also salvifically) both a project and a projection of its own self.
If the three collections published in the 1950s document Ezekiel’s poetic development and growing influence, the next two represent the culmination of such a progress, resulting in the establishment of a solid reputation as the foremost representative of the “new poetry” in India.
The Unfinished Man was inscribed with a stanza from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by W.B. Yeats (one of Ezekiel’s early influences) and consists of ten poems written in 1959; while The Exact Name (1965) bears an epigraph from the Spanish poet (and recent Nobel Prize winner) Juan Ramón Jiménez, and features twenty poems written between 1960 and 1964. Thematically, they represent a broadening and sharpening of ongoing or lingering concerns, articulated in a style that is more accomplished and self-confident, but also less spontaneous and more controlled by metrical patterns that are responsible for the overall rhythmic regularity, mannered elegance and emotional detachment of the collection.
The “barbaric city sick with slums”, with its “million purgatorial lanes, / And child-like masses, many-tongued”, may still be grim and overwhelming, but instead of a nightmare it manifests itself as an “old, recurring dream” (“A Morning Walk”, from The Unfinished Man), or a daydream in which the poet indulges as he “moves / In circles tracked within his head” and
dreams of morning walks, alone,
And floating on a wave of sand.
But still his mind its traffic turns
Away from beach and tree and stone
To kindred clamour close at hand.
(“Urban”, from The Unfinished Man)
In either case, it is a less threatening and more accommodating environment, and one that points to a future gesture of acceptance and reconciliation. The Exact Name features some of Ezekiel’s most anthologized and critically discussed poems, most notably “The Night of the Scorpion” and “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher”, but also a few lesser results (“In India”, “Fruit”, “Art Lecture”), and at least one (“Conjugation”) that reads more like an impromptu exercise than anything worthy of publication.
Eventually the watcher and the watched (whose interplay defines much of Ezekiel’s self-analytical verse up to this point) merge in one poetic voice in the more spontaneous and straightforward poems written in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, which in Collected Poems form two sections, “Poems (1965‒1974)” and “Poems Written in 1974”, placed between The Exact Name (1965) and Hymns in Darkness (1976). They are marked by a more direct and confrontational approach to religion, as in “Theological” (“Lord, I am tired / of being wrong … Your truth / is too momentous for man / and not always useful”), but also a more confident and questionable display of sexist attitudes (“My motives are sexual, / aesthetic and friendly / in that order”, from “Motives”), while the unprecedented attention to the lower strata of society (“The Truth about Dhanya”) lacks either empathy or originality. Formally, they show a preference for free verse and, with “The Poet Contemplates His Inaction”, the introduction of the three-line stanza that will characterize much of Ezekiel’s later poetry.
Hymns in Darkness gathers twenty-seven poems written mostly in the early 1970s, including a few that are among the poet’s most significant and popular. Early on in the book, “Background, Casually” and “Island” (respectively Ezekiel’s most directly autobiographical poem and his most eloquent poetic transfiguration of Bombay) stand next to each other to stress a double commitment—“to stay where I am” and to be where I stay (or we could say, more existentially, where I dwell). The background of the title finds a more eloquent and ironic expression in the poet’s admission to “have become a part of [the Indian landscape] / To be observed by foreigners” (like a monument as well as a result of literary canonization). As for the background itself, “Unsuitable for song as well as sense” (a tongue-in-cheek statement, which the poem vividly contradicts), “the island flowers into slums / and skyscrapers, reflecting / precisely the growth of my mind. / I am here to find my way in it”. Thus Ezekiel renews his commitment to both, his birthplace (“I cannot leave the island, / I was born here and belong”) and reason as a way to navigate and find one’s bearings in both, urban sprawl and mind growth.
Overall, Indian subjects are more prominent and diverse in this than in Ezekiel’s previous collections. The often-quoted “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T. S.” and “The Railway Clerk” provide a first taste of an ongoing series called “Very Indian Poems in Indian English”, whose main goal is to render the peculiarities of a demotic idiom that, typically (and perhaps inevitably), has more potential and opportunities in fiction than in poetry. “The Truth about the Floods” and “Rural Suite” are unprecedented excursions in the countryside, the former a found poem based on a newspaper account, the latter apparently derived from a letter; “Guru” and “Entertainment” offer disillusioned portraits of spiritual leadership and street life; while “Ganga” conveys the truth about domestic employment in a way than “The Truth about Dhanya” had not cared to do (to the extent that the closing line, “These people never learn”, may refer to the employee or the employers—or both). A different, more subtle Indian thread running through this collection is represented by Ezekiel’s dialogue with the country’s Vedic and classical Sanskrit literature, as documented by such poems as “Tribute to the Upanishads”, the nine “Poster Poems” (based on Daniel H. H. Ingalls’ 1965 translation of Vidyākara’s Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, a major compilation of Sanskrit love poetry), and especially the sixteen “Hymns in Darkness”, inspired by the Vedic hymns which Ezekiel read, in English translation, in a darkened room of his apartment on Bellasis Road (King 55).
The “Very Indian Poems in Indian English” and the “Poster Poems”, like “The Egoist’s Prayers”, the “Passion Poems”, the “Songs for Nandu Bhende”, the“Postcard Poems”, “Nudes 1978”, “Blessings”, and “Edinburgh Interlude”, are groups of poems which Ezekiel started writing in the 1970s and included, partially, in Hymns in Darkness, Latter-Day Psalms and the final section of Collected Poems, featuring poems from 1983–1988. The “Poster Poems”, “The Egoist’s Prayers” and the “Passion Poems” were originally exhibited on posters, while the “Songs for Nandu Bhende” were written for, and set to music by, Ezekiel’s nephew, resulting in an album the two co-produced. Altogether, these groups of poems are representative of Ezekiel’s later poetry, characterized by a more consistent use of free verse and condensed forms, such as hymnic or aphoristic utterances, often delivered in brief stanzas of variable length. This original style, combining a dialogic approach with an exegetic impulse, has a precedent in “For William Carlos Williams” and a more recent (and complex) manifestation in “Tribute to the Upanishads”; but its most substantial and ambitious formulation is to be found in “Hymns in Darkness” and “Latter-Day Psalms”, each representing Ezekiel’s poetic response to a major text in Hinduism and Judaism, the two religions that are closest to his Indian background and his Jewish ancestry, respectively. Written in June 1978 in a hotel room in Rotterdam, the “Latter-Day Psalms” consist of nine poems corresponding to Psalms 1, 3, 8, 23, 60, 78, 95, 102 and 127 (and “chosen as representative of the 150 Psalms”), followed by a personal commentary on the book as a whole. (Incidentally, the same, nine-plus-one structure reappears in the “Ten Poems in the Greek Anthology Mode,” written between 1983 and 1988 and included in the final section of Collected Poems).
Inevitably, Ezekiel’s poetry and reputation as a poet have somehow detracted scholarly and critical attention from his prose. Although some articles (most notably “Naipaul’s India and Mine” and “Poetry as Knowledge”) have been reprinted more than once, at the time of this writing (2022) Ezekiel’s journalistic work can be sampled in Adil Jussawalla’s 1992 selection and in the 2008 commemorative volume Nissim Ezekiel Remembered. Together, they provide a representative and eloquent if partial view of the poet’s achievement as public intellectual, book reviewer, art critic, editorialist, and newspaper columnist. Indeed, his critical spectrum and adaptability were such that he wrote with equal comfort and acumen for highbrow journals such as Quest, its continuation New Quest, and Freedom First, but also for daily newspapers (Times of India, Sunday Times), and popular magazines (Mid-Day), while his contributions ranged from papers delivered at international conferences and seminars to art and literary criticism, and from reviews of books, exhibitions and theater productions to current events and politics, social commentary (e.g., the “Minding My Business” columns in the Sunday Times of 1980‒82) and even television programs (for The Times of India in the mid-1970s and for Mid-Day a decade later).
As a pathbreaking poet, mentor, editor and critic, Ezekiel played an important, indeed unique, role in the development of a canon for Indian poetry in English. No survey or assessment of the field would be complete without acknowledging his various and substantial contributions to it, just like no such acknowledgment would be fair which did not consider the particular, historical as well as geographical, extent and limitations of Ezekiel’s role and influence. While many Bombay poets who emerged in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s benefited from his mentoring skills, his editorial advice and his overall support, many others looked elsewhere for updated models: to American modernism, the Beat Generation or even more experimental forms such as concrete and minimalist poetry. The same historical perspective is necessary to properly appreciate Ezekiel’s own poetry, its formal adherence to pre- and post-World War Two British models (Yeats, Eliot, Auden, all the way to the Movement), its content-related concerns and its particular cultural context. It may also help explain and understand why Ezekiel’s poetry does not speak to Indian poets and readers today in the same way as does the poetry of some of his contemporaries, such as Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or A.K. Ramanujan, all of whom, unlike Ezekiel, have been the subject of recent and substantial international critical attention.
Poetry
A Time to Change. London: Fortune Press, 1952.
Sixty Poems. Bombay: Ezekiel, 1953.
The Third. Bombay: Strand Bookshop, 1959.
The Unfinished Man. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1960.
The Exact Name. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1965.
Hymns in Darkness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Latter-Day Psalms. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Collected Poems: 1952-1988. Introduction by Gieve Patel. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989 and 2005.
Prose
Selected Prose. Introduction by Adil Jussawalla. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Plays
Three Plays [Nalini – Marriage Poem – The Sleepwalkers]. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1969.
Song of Deprivation. Delhi: Enact, 1969.
Don’t Call It Suicide: A Tragedy. Madras: Macmillan, 1993.
Translations
Snake-skin and Other Poems, s of Indira Sant. Translated from the Marathi by Vrinda Nabar and Nissim Ezekiel. Bombay: Nirmala Sadanand Publishers, 1975.
Edited Books
Indian Writers in Conference: Proceedings of the Sixth P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Mysore, 1962. Bombay: PEN All-India Centre, 1964.
Writing in India: Proceedings of the Seventh P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Lucknow, 1964. Bombay: PEN All-India Centre, 1965.
An Emerson Reader. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1965.
A Martin Luther King Reader. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1969.
Poetry from India. Edited by Nissim Ezekiel and Howard Sergeant. Oxford; New York: Pergamon, 1970.
Artists Today: East-West Visual Arts Encounter. Edited by Ursula Bickelmann and Nissim Ezekiel. Bombay: Marg Publications, 1987.
Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry. Edited by Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.
Secondary Sources
Anklesaria, Havovi, ed. Nissim Ezekiel Remembered. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008.
Balarama Gupta, G.S. Nissim Ezekiel: A Critical Companion. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2010.
Bharucha, Nilufer E., and Vrinda Nabar, eds. Mapping Cultural Spaces: Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Essays in Honour of Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Vision Books, 1998.
Bharvani, Shakuntala. Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008.
Bird, Emma. “A Platform for Poetry: The PEN All-India Centre and a Bombay Poetry Scene.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1-2, 2017, pp. 207-220.
Chaudhuri, Amit. “Nissim Ezekiel: Poet of a Minor Literature.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 205–22.
Chindhade, Shirish. Five Indian English Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, R. Parthasarathy. Atlantic, 1996.
Das, Bijay Kumar. The Horizon of Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry. B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1995.
Dwivedi, Suresh Chandra, ed. Perspectives on Nissim Ezekiel: Essays in Honour of Rosemary C. Wilkinson. Kitab Mahal, 1989.
Karnani, Chetan. Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1974.
King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford University Press, 1987.
King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Moraes, and Ramanujan. Delhi; Oxford University Press, 2005.
Krätli, Graziano. “Crossing Points and Connecting Lines: Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in Bombay and Beyond.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1–2, March 4, 2017, pp. 176–89.
Kurup, P.K.J. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: With Special Reference to the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, and R. Parthasarathy. Atlantic, 1991.
Mahan, Shaila. The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Classic, 2001.
Mishra, Sanjit. The Poetic Art of Nissim Ezekiel. Atlantic, 2001.
Narendra Lall, Emmanuel. Poetry of Encounter: Three Indo-Anglian Poets. Sterling, 1983.
Raghu, A. The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Atlantic, 2002.
Rahman, Anisur. Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Abhinav, 1981.
Raizada, Harish. Nissim Ezekiel, Poet of Human Balance. Vimal Prakashan, 1992.
Rao, R. Raj. Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography. Viking/Penguin Books India, 2000.
Samal, Subrat Kumar. Postcoloniality and Indian English Poetry: A Study of the Poems of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra and A.K. Ramanujan. Partridge, 2015.
Sharma, Tika Ram. Essays on Nissim Ezekiel. Shalabha Prakashan, 1995.
Talat, Qamar and A.A. Khan. Nissim Ezekiel: Poetry as Social Criticism. Adhyayan, 2009.
Thorat, Sandeep K. Indian Ethos and Culture in Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry: A Critical Study. Atlantic, 2018.
Tilak, Raghukul. New Indian English Poets and Poetry: A Study of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A K Ramanujan and Jayanta Mahapatra. Rama Bros., 1982.
