Nissim Ezekiel

                                               Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)

 Nissim Ezekiel, who has been called "the father of post-independence Indian verse in English",  is the foremost among the Indian-English poets. He is the pioneer of modernity in Indian-English poetry. 
The Age of Ezekiel in Indian-English poetry started with his creative oeuvre. He was also an art-critic and playwright. In 1952, Fortune press (London) published his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change.

 He published his book The Unfinished Man in 1960. He co-founded the literary monthly Imprint, in 1961. He functioned as art critic of The Times of India (1964-66) and edited Poetry India (1966-67). From 1961 to 1972, he headed the English Department of Mithibai College, Mumbai. The Exact Name, his fifth book of poetry, was published in 1965. During this period, he had short tenures as visiting professor at University of Leeds (1964) and University of Chicago (1967). 

 In 1969, Writers Workshop, Calcutta published his The Three Plays. A year later, he presented an art series of ten programs for Mumbai television. On the invitation of the US Government, he went on a month-long tour to the US in November, 1974. In 1975 he went as a Cultural Award Visitor to Australia. In 1976, he translated poetry from Marathi, and co-edited a fiction and poetry anthology. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi award in 1983 and the Padma Shri in 1988. 

He was Professor of English at University of Mumbai during the 1990s. He functioned as the Secretary of the Indian branch of the international writers' organization PEN. After a prolonged battle with Alzheimer's disease, Nissim Ezekiel died in Mumbai, on 9 January 2004. His works include A Time To Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), The Three Plays (1969) and Hymns in Darkness (1976).  When he began his creative course of life in the late 1940s, his adoption of formal English was controversial, given its association with colonialism. Yet he "naturalised the language to the Indian situation, and breathed life into the Indian English poetic tradition." Ezekiel's poetry describes love, loneliness, lust, creativity and political pomposity, human foibles and the "kindred clamour" of urban dissonance.

Over the course of his creative years, his attitude changed, too. The young man, "who shopped around for dreams", demanded truth and lambasted corruption. By the 1970s, he accepted "the ordinariness of most events"; laughed at "lofty expectations totally deflated"; and acknowledged that "The darkness has its secrets / Which light does not know." After 1965, he even began embracing India's English vernacular, and teased its idiosyncrasies in Poster Poems and in The Professor.  He acted as a mentor to many younger poets ---  Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and several others. In the last few years of his life, he was deeply involved in helping younger poets, especially those based at Mumbai, his advice being forthright, but seldom blunt. 

Nissim Ezekiel is a poet of self-exploration. He carved out a poetic place for the smallness of the soul. The acute sense of this smallness, the sense of one’s irrelevance to the world, is an important motif in modernist Indian English poetry. In some poets it leads to a sort of self-pity. Not so in Nissim. His poems of a life time display persistent self-scrutiny. From the early works written in traditional metres to the later experimentative poems in ‘poster poems’, psalms, etc the theme spreads itself. It is therefore remarkable that a poet could write about one theme across a period of time so persistently

Not that Nissim wrote only about the theme of self-scrutiny. It colours most of his poems one or the other way. Like the horses in MF Hussain. The theme is cast differently in different poems. Generally the poet-speaker confronts a situation (internal or external), where he is required to learn. Thus the poem becomes a pedagogic process. Some of his poems which appear to have no connection to the ‘self’ motifs also indirectly present this pedagogic course. Take ‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’.

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
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart’s dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.

Some of his poems

Island

Unsuitable for song as well as sense
the island flowers into slums
and skyscrapers, reflecting
precisely the growth of my mind.
I am here to find my way in it.
Sometimes I cry for help
But mostly keep my own counsel.
I hear distorted echoes
Of my own ambigious voice
and of dragons claiming to be human.
Bright and tempting breezes
Flow across the island,
Separating past from the future;
Then the air is still again
As I sleep the fragrance of ignorance.
How delight the soul with absolute
sense of salvation, how
hold to a single willed direction?
I cannot leave the island,
I was born here and belong.
Even now a host of miracles
hurries me a daily business,
minding the ways of the island
as a good native should,
taking calm and clamour in my stride

Soap

Some people are not having manners,
this I am always observing,
For example other day I find
I am needing soap
For ordinary washing myself purposes.
So I'm going to one small shop
nearby in my lane and I'm asking
for well-known brand soap.

That shopman he's giving me soap
but I'm finding it defective version.
So I'm saying very politely — -
though in Hindi I'm saying it,
and my Hindi is not so good as my English,
Please to excuse me
but this is defective version of well-known brand soap.

That shopman is saying
and very rudely he is saying it,
What is wrong with soap?
Still I am keeping my temper
and repeating very smilingly
Please to note this defect in soap,
and still he is denying the truth.

So I'm getting very angry that time
and with loud voice I am saying
YOU ARE BLIND OR WHAT?
Now he is shouting
YOU ARE CALLING ME BLIND OR WHAT?
Come outside and I will show you
Then I am shouting
What you will show me
Which I haven't got already?
It is vulgar thing to say
but I am saying it.

Now small crowd is collecting
and shopman is much bigger than me,
and I am not caring so much
for small defect in well-known brand soap.
So I'm saying
Alright OK Alright OK
this time I will take
but not next time.

The Hill

This normative hill
like all others
is transparently accessible,
out there
and in the mind,
not to be missed
except in peril of one's life.

Do not muse on it
from a distance:
it's not remote
for the view only,
it's for the sport
of climbing.

What the hill demands
is a man
with forces flowering
as from the crevices
of rocks and rough surfaces
wild flowers
force themselves towards the sun
and burn
for a moment.

How often must I
say to myself
what I say to others:
trust your nerves—
in conversation or in bed
the rhythm comes.

And once you begin
hang on for life.
What is survival?
What is existence?
I am not talking about
poetry. I am
talking about
perishing
outrageously
and calling it
activity.
I say: be done with it.
I say:
you've got to love that hill.

Be wrathful, be impatient
that you are not
on the hill. Do not forgive
yourself or other,
though charity
is all very well.
Do not rest
in irony or acceptance.
Man should not laugh
when he is dying.
In decent death
you flow into another kind of time
which is the hill
you always thought you knew.

The Patriot

I am standing for peace and non-violence.
Why world is fighting fighting
Why all people of world
Are not following Mahatma Gandhi,
I am simply not understanding.
Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,
I should say even 200% correct,
But modern generation is neglecting -
Too much going for fashion and foreign thing.
Other day I'm reading newspaper
(Every day I'm reading Times of India
To improve my English Language)
How one goonda fellow
Threw stone at Indirabehn.
Must be student unrest fellow, I am thinking.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I am saying (to myself)
Lend me the ears.
Everything is coming -
Regeneration, Remuneration, Contraception.
Be patiently, brothers and sisters.
You want one glass lassi?
Very good for digestion.
With little salt, lovely drink,
Better than wine;
Not that I am ever tasting the wine.
I'm the total teetotaller, completely total,
But I say
Wine is for the drunkards only.
What you think of prospects of world peace?
Pakistan behaving like this,
China behaving like that,
It is making me really sad, I am telling you.
Really, most harassing me.
All men are brothers, no?
In India also
Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Hindiwallahs
All brothers -
Though some are having funny habits.
Still, you tolerate me,
I tolerate you,
One day Ram Rajya is surely coming.
You are going?
But you will visit again
Any time, any day,
I am not believing in ceremony
Always I am enjoying your company.