2

Nissim Ezekiel is one of the foremost Indian poets writing in English.

He is a jew by birth and has made Mumbai his home. He has written poetry,

plays and has edited several books. He has also published several literary

essays and articles, and essays on art criticism in reputed magazines and

journals. Modern Indian English poetry could not have been what it is

today without Nissim Ezekiel. He has attracted considerable critical

attention from scholoars both in India and abroad. He has influenced and

encouraged other Indian English poets including Jayanta Mahaparta and

espoused the cause of Indian English poetry. He won the central Sahitya

Akademi Award for Latter Dan Psalms in 1983. He is the only Indian

English poet who is competent to handle both metrical verse and (Vee verse.

The greatness of Ezekiel lies in the fact that in his poetry he is constantly

bringing together opposite concepts and tries to reconcile and harmonise

them.

Ezekiel’s poetry is the battle field for the clash Of opposites. There arc

two opposite poles in his poetry—life as pilgrimage away from home and the

actual milieu. He believes that grace is to be found only at home. ‘Home’ is

a metaphor for the ‘self’. So one could achieve redemption through one’s

‘psyche’ or mind. Both these realms—nuter and inner are essential to

human growth and fulfilment. Such a pilgrimage leads one from the outer

to the inner, from the physical to the spiritual, from the intellectual discus

Sion to the inner illumination and from the disintegration and chaos to

order, discipline and self-control.

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The end of shivery is the beginning of the freedom. The sudden

departure of flic British from Indian mode Indian confront a variety of

anomalies, conflicts, contradictions and paradoxes and redefinition of their

roles and commitments in the changed context of the times : It was lelt more

keenly in the field of literature, specially in Indian poetry in English. The

most important dilemma the poets felt was one of ‘alienness’ in their own

land and therefore the paradox of ‘belonging.’ The long association with the

west had truned them into ‘exiles’ looking for roots. In short, they had to

discover themselves anew charting their relationship with themselves and

the people, culture and to which they belonged.

The first major Indian English poet to emerge as a force on the scene

after independence was Nissim Ezekiel. In ‘A Biographical sketch’ he states

his position in clear terms — “I am not a Hindu and my background makes

me a natural outsider ! Circumstances and decisions relate me to India/”

1

Obviously his efforts are guided toward coming to terms with himself and

his predicament : And his art a personal pursuit to self-discovery. The first

problem he has to contend with is his feeling of being a permanent

expatriate on the Indian scene with more complex issues added-a liberal

Jew using a non-Jew, non-Indian language disconnected from living

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context. The situation creates both tension and a gap between himselt and

his environment. Strange as it may seem, as an artist he takes recourse to

poetry to see his way through both as man and a poet. It is in his eilort to

write poetry that he confronts himself and his situation to arrive at (

commitments proper to harmony and growth. It thus becomes an inner

struggle and a grappling with his psyche and his poetry a record of this

conflict and life’s growth. The way he approaches the situation involves him

as a man and the way he expresses himself involves his as a poet. What, is at

stake here is not his jewishness but his ‘alienness’ and his efforts to come lo

terms with the milieu, in which process he discovers his own inadequacies

and incompleteness and the substance of life and poetry itself poetry offers

; him access not only to self-analysis but an etenal discourse with the milieu

around.

It is in his very young age that he sees the prospects of A Time To

Change :

Subsidized by dreams alone

The stubborn workman breaks the stone, loosens

Soil, allows the seed to die in it, waits

patiently for grapes or figs and even

Finds on a lucky day, a metaphor

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Leaping form the Sod,

It is in poetry that all contraries can exist side by side ami nil

dichotomies resolve. This is what Ezkiel has to say in the poem “Poetry” :

It is the why

The how, the what, the flow

From which the savage and the singular,

The gentle, familiar,

Are all dissolved, the residue

It what you read, as a poem, the rest

Flows and is poetry.

But the poet finds his sensibilities corrupted by the trivialities of mass

culture :

I am corrupted by the world, continually

Reduced to something less than human by the crowd.

It is not merely the crowd but also The Female which leaves him

desolate as do the physical positions. Then, is he to find his resolution in

religion ? But this is what Ezekiel has to say to V.A. Shahane on the issue :

“I am not a religious or even a moral person in any conventional sense.

Yet I’ve always felt myself to be religious and moral in some sense. The gap

between these two statements is the existential sphere written for persona),
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“therapeutic purposes’.

So, in Sixty Poems he sees the assert ion of his self and ident ify through

speech or dialogue :

All speech is to oneself, others

Overhear and miss the meaning.

And yet to speak is good, a man

. Is purified through speech alone,

Asserting his identity

In all that people say and do.1 2

And then this assertion is to be sought not in isolation but. in

sympathetic bonds with humanity :

I do not want the yogi’s concentration

I do not want the perfect charity

of saints nor the tyrant’s endless power

I want a human balance humanly

2
Acquired, fruitful in the common hour,

in an attempt to achieve this “human balance humanly” Ezekiel shifts

through several of his stanes towards love and life and longs for unhypocriticnl

1. Nissim Ezekiel, Sixty Poems (1953)

2. Ibid
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1
acceptance of things and knowing of thing :

This longing is for nakedness :

Soul nbaked, body naked-why ?

1
Is every encounter strange, unknown ?

Setting the institutionalized relgion, morality and goal he embarks

upon creating substitutes of his own :

At last I have reconciled

To simple nothingness, and catch myself hour by hour

2
Free from any need to live at all —

We may thus note the presence of a deeply felt paradox and

Contradiction between the philosophic and the sensual, morality and

sensations and heart and intellect, projected in the next, volume The 'fluid :

With anxious alien heart 1 saw

The mixed affix its eyes

Upon a circuit of the stars

But roots were sprawled in lies

The rational pursuit petrified

Beneath intemperate skies.

1. Nissim Ezekiel, Sixty Poems (1953)

2. Ibid
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For nothing can be hidden long

From heart or intellect

To each other’s phantasy

Is plain in retrospect.

But welded they could seem and be

1
A single architect.

all the above examples reveal to us the element of ambivalence

i

ambiguity, uncertainty and lack of urgency prevailing his poetry and

personality. The world outside and the “seen” weighs too much on his senses.

From his forth volume onwards— The Unfinished Man, the poet comes upon

greater objectivity in assessing the role of the ‘seer’ from the ‘seen’, thereby

accommodating the ‘urban’ with the ‘ordinary’, the natural with the

conscious and unpoetic subject matter with poetry. Ezekiel notices I In

helplessness of the urbanite who can neither love his city nor leave it. He

describes his predicament as follows :

He welcomes neither sun nor rain

His landscape has no depth or height.

The morning breeze

Released no secret: to his cars

1. The Third (1959)

] _ ,
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The more he started the less he saw.

The city wakes, where fame is cheap

And he belongs, and active fool

The poet knows the tragedy of the city dweller very well :

Driven from his bed by troubled sleep

in which he dreamt of being lost

upon a hill too high for him. *

Ezekiel therefore tries to compromise with the sterotype nature of the

city and arrive upon some kind of redemption through “Commitment” :

When with sudden smile, the visions come

Inviting us to sweet disaster,

We envy saints their martyrdom

And press the accelerator.

2
At once we know that must leap.~

1. The Unfinished Man

2. Ibid
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With this certainty obtained the poet, lias no diiiieult.y in delining Un­

moral function of art :

Whatever the enigma,

The passion of the blood

Grant me the metaphor

1
To mnke il human good.

In “Enterprise” he lays it down in very unambiguous terms :

2
Home is where we have together grace.

. The word ‘home’ is used here as a metaphor for teh ‘the self in I Ik

very act of living reaching out to the inner center of being through

“simplicity” and understanding of the “common things” in their

“ordinariness”. In the poem “Philosophy” he makes it clear :

The mundance language of l.lie senses sings

Its own interpretations. Common things

Become, by virtue of their commonness,

An arrangement against the nakedness

3
That dies of cold to find the truth its brings.

1. Momqinq Prayer

2. Enterprise

3. Unfinished Man (Philosophy)

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Once the poet comes upon this enlightenment his whole attitude to

women, sex, dream and reality turn to one of 'sympathy’, ‘understanding’

and ‘modesty’. Hence in Exact Name the visionary in the poet comes to Uu

fore :

I see how wrong I was

Not to foresee precisely this :

Outside the miracles of mind

The figure in the carpet blazing

Ebb flow of sex and seasons,

The ordinariness of most events. ^

This progress leads to solving the more intricate problem of poetic

creation, method and process working its way through waiting, praying and

surrender :

The hunt is not 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

1. Exact Name (19651

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Such a kidn of love and poetry is achieved :

In silence near the source, or by a share

1
Remote and thorny like the heart’s dark floor.

And when :

.... the women slowly turn around

Not only flesh and bone but myths of light

2
With darkness at the core.... ’

This is how art and life are united in peace, contraries reconciled and

release obtained from alienation but not from the feeling of existence :

He’s still a puny self

hoping to manipulate the universe and all

its. manifest powers for his own advancement

advantages.*3 2

The poet in Ezekiel discovers his limitations in his search for God’s

truth or cosmic intelligence :

1• Exact Name (1965)

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.
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We grope among

The signs and symbols'

for the source

1
of signs and symbols

And bewildered he addresseees :

Lord, I am tired

. ' of being wrong

I’ve stripped off a hundred veils

and still there are more

that cover your creation.

2
Why are you so elusive ?

With all efforts to carry the cross of his self through body, people, city,

art and poetry in search of truth, wisdom and peace he discovers himsel

thoroughly disillusioned and unfinished :

Arranged and rearranged,

the room is ahyays the same

1. Exact Name (1965)

2. The Room : Hymns in Darkness

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I Its shadows shift about restlessly

and fall into different patterns:

the light is unsteady, thin and flat,

Yet some events are to happen here

Not of moods only but of visions

1
For this the room is not yet ready.

Not only has he created a body of poetry that can stand comparison

with poetry written in English elsewhere in the world in the second half ol

the twentieth century but he has laid the foundation of Modern Indian

English Poetry. And rightly he has been hailed as ‘the founding father’ of

Modern Indian English Poetry. His poetic career spans over a period of 37

years-starting with A Time to Change and ending with Collected Poems. In

between he has published six volumes of poetry such as Sixty Poems, The

Third, The Unfinished Man, The Exact Name, Hymns in Darkness and

Latter-Day Psalms. Ezekiel is both a modernist and post-modernist poet,

whose two volumes of poetry. A Time to Change and Latter-Day Psalms

herald modernism and post-modernism respectively in Indian English

Poetiy. No discussion of post-Independence Indian English Poetry can be­

gin without making reference to Ezekiel’s poetry. There are two distinct

1. The Room ; Hymns in Darkness

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phases in Ezekiel’s poetry : the first phase coinciding with the publication oi

Mumns in Darkness marks Ezekiel’s quest for coming to terms with

contemporary reality and landscape of the place to which he belongs. With

his moving away from modernism to post-modernism, comes the change in

: •
his stance from individualism to humanism.

Ezekiel has shifted emphasis from nationalism to individualism. The

}

question of identity became central to Indian-English Poetry in 1950s and

1960s. Poets like Ezekiel, Ramanujan and Kamala Das made an attempt to

relate themselves to India and asserted their individual right to write poetry

in English.

Ezekiel in a number of his early poems made an attempt to lelal*

himself to India disregarding his past. Poems like “Background, Casualhf

•' |

and “Island’ bear testimony to it. Since “Background, Casually” is a commis­

sioned poem about the life of the poet, Ezekiel tells us swiftly beginning with

his childhood, then school days, his stay abroad and return home and then

his marriage and finally his change of jobs. The song of my experience sung,’

says Ezekiel, and then goes on to personalize his ancestry. In the course o.

an interview with Adil Jussawalla., Ezekiel states emphatically :

I am an Indian national. I was born in India, my. tribe of the

Jewish community has lived in India for 2,000 years. If I had

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rejected my Indiarmess, which some Indian writers obviously

have done, and if I had decided that I am so much ,of an outsider

that I have to settle down in London or New York, and then if I

did write about India, I do not know if I could be regarded as an

1
Indo-Engiisn Writer.

Ezekiel towards the close of “Background, Casually” overcomes his

Jewish heredity and gets reconciled to Indian environment. Hence comes

the resolution :

The Indian landscape sears my eyes.

I have become a part of it

To be observed by foreigners....

I have made my commitments now,

This is one : to stay where I am. 2

What makes a poet belong to a particular country necessarily involves

nationality, and his identity is to be found in being rooted in the soil. A

poet’s response to the landscape of his country, his sense of tradition and

culture of the land of his birth and many factors go together to make him.

assume an identity of his own. Nissim Ezekiel is right when he says that

1. Selected Prose, Pp. 167-168

2. Collected Poems. 1952-88, P. 181

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“There is no single Indian flavour which alone can claim the designation and

that its value too depends on a host of generative factors which should nevei

be simplified for purposes of praise or blame.”1 2 3

Ezekiel is deeply rooted in the Indian soil. His growth of mind’ is

helped by unhabitable condition of the city. If Wordsworth could measure

his life with ‘mountains and valleys,’ and Eliot with ‘coffee spoons,’ then

Ezekiel does so with slums and skycrapers,’ Therein, comes his resolution :

I cannot leave this island .

2
.1 was born here and belong.

Having established his identity and made his mark as an Indian

English Poet, Ezekiel turned to his inner life for inspiration. In “Poster Prayers-

III”, Ezekiel says :

I have to sing
3
The song of my experience.

Ezekiel believes in humanism. In poem after poem he expresses his

concern for humanity and tries to find out what ails mankind and how to get

out of it. Ezekiel being a conscious artist, the centre of poetic interest in

1. Collected Poems. 1952-88, P. 181

2. Ibid,
3. Ibid.
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him, lies in the process of adjustment between the knowledge derived from

experience or personal feelings and the knowledge which imposes a pattern.

That is why, his poetry is a veritable apotheosis and dramatization of

personality through passion and affirmation, his characters Miss Pushpa

T.S., the Railway Clerk, the Professor, the English teacher, Ganga, the mail

servant, Guru, the beggars in the railway station, and a host of others—

appear life-like. He recreates, the characters in their own situations. His

characters like the characters in Chaucer’s The Prologue to Canterbury Tales

j

are both individuals as well as types. That is because* he consciously

cultivated the language of the people and related the people to their

situations. Ezekiel says,

Language

Is our conspicuous gift: the Word

Made flesh, is sought again

We make it as we make our lives.

Ezekiel is aware of the injustice meted out to people at various levels of

I

the society and therefore he uses irony and parody as a mode to expose tin

people who are responsible for this. He knows that, “Life is not as simple/as

morality.’ The agony of a railway clerk who lives in poverty and does not get
promotion is brought out in the following lines :

I am never neglecting my responsibility.

I am discharging it properly.

I am doing my duty

But who is appreciating ?

Nobody, I am telling you.1

The discrimination between man and man on the basis of knowledge

and power in society pains the poet. What is important is not man’s

designation or marital status but humanity to understand people, the poet

seems to say. Whether a man is a professor or a journalist, tall or short,

handsome or ‘Crabbed-looking’ is immaterial as long as ‘he is simply man

and his speech is human.’ In this world both the oppressor and the

oppressed suffer and become victims of different man-made institutions.

Here is an apt observation :

The oppressor who worships God

And the oppressed who worship God

!
Are victims of the Enemy.

They rot in families, in castes,

1. The Railway Clerk

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in community, in clubs

. .1
In political Parties.
*■.

Ezekiel has insight into human nature and is aware of man’s

predicament in the world. He tells us about man’s helplessness and

suggests a way out of it. Ezekiel believes in creating one’s own life and all

human beings should make an effort in the direction.

In a poem titled, “An Atheist Speaks” Ezekiel lays the blame on God

for making man part fool and part wise-a kind of concept that brings him

closer to W.B. Yeats. He wants to do some human good to alleviate man’s

V

condition on earth. Ezekiel, the poet who began his poetic career by trying

to define his own identity, comes to the end of his poetic life by wishing to do

something for mankind. In “At 62,” he makes a Confession :

I want my hands

to learn how to heal

myself and others

I

before I hear
2
my last song. • . -"

This is a kind of conclusion which reminds us of the closing section oi

1. Hymns in Karkness.

2. Ibid,
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Four Quartets in which Eliot wishes manking well, “All shall be well/All

manner of things shall be well.”

Ezekiel will be remembered for three things : one, for bringing

everyday conversational language into the realms of poerty; two, re-creating

characters from all walks of life in their situations; and three, tor giving a

human touch r.o 'his characters—real or imaginary. To read his poetry is to

watch an actor enacting his tragic-comic play on the stage. It is to see him

inside out. That is because, the humanistic note in his poetry is

unmistakable.