An assessment of Nissim Ezekiel’s legacy must take into account his formidable body of work, and his ‘nodal’ functionality as a friend to three generations of poets, including Dom Moraes and Keki Daruwalla
In one of his most personal poems ‘Background, Casually’, Nissim Ezekiel — born one hundred years ago today — sketched his schoolboy years with quick, characteristically deft strokes, unrhymed metrical lines going about their business in a serene manner. “I went to a Roman Catholic school, / A mugging Jew among the wolves. / They told me I had killed the Christ, / That year I won the scripture prize. / A Muslim sportsman boxed my ears. // I grew in terror of the strong / But undernourished Hindu lads, / Their prepositions always wrong, / Repelled me by passivity. / One noisy day I used a knife.”
Self-pity is more literary device than reluctant admission for Ezekiel, as he uses it to describe the rhythms of a multicultural society in a clear-eyed manner. Through Indian society’s constant grapple to craft an unprecedented, composite identity, Ezekiel slyly hints at the “poet-clown-rascal” (as he refers to himself at the beginning of the poem) struggling to arrive at an authentic self. Born on December 16, 1924, to a professor of botany and a school principal from Bombay’s Marathi-speaking Bene Israel Jewish community, Ezekiel went on to become one of the most influential and well-known Indian poets of all time. Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar and Dom Moraes (all of whom died within months of each other in 2004) are usually considered the three poets most representative of modernism in Indian English poetry.
Ezekiel produced eight volumes of poetry between the 1950s and the 1980s, beginning with A Time to Change (1952), all the way up to the Collected Poems (1989). He was also an art critic and a playwright, with a number of his plays performed in Bombay through the 70s and 80s, collected in Three Plays (1969) and Do Not Call it Suicide (1993). At various points of time during this period, he was an academic, an editor, a publisher and also worked in the broadcasting and advertising industries.
First among equals
In the 2022 anthology The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, editor Jeet Thayil places Ezekiel at the very beginning of the volume, underlining his status as a pioneer, someone whose work ushered in modernity in Indian poetry. In his editorial note, Thayil sums up the different phases of Ezekiel’s career.
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“He wrote comic poems in exaggerated Indian English; ‘latter day psalms’ in a language influenced by the Bible; poems that made use of his experiments with spirituality, philosophy and LSD; and a steady number of love poems. He was the face of Indian poetry both within the country and abroad, creating a model for the Bombay school with his urbanity and early use of form, and he became a mentor to four generations of poets with his work as an editor, a reader and a reviewer.”
Thayil rightfully finds humour in Ezekiel’s ‘Indian English’ poems, but there were several other things going on there as well. Ezekiel’s adoption of this register was an endeavour to “bear sympathetic witness to social locations and predicaments distinct from the Eng. Lit. curriculum”, as Ranjit Hoskote wrote in his obituary in 2004. Take one of his most famous ‘Indian English’ poems, ‘Irani Restaurant Instructions’, for example.
“Do not write letter
Without order refreshment
Do not comb
Hair is spoiling floor
Do not make mischiefs in cabin
Our waiter is reporting
Come again
All are welcome whatever caste
If not satisfied tell us
Otherwise tell others
God is great.”
Here, Ezekiel is faithfully reproducing the kind of too-stern, typically Indian tonality found on the walls of a typical Irani restaurant in Bombay. He does not add his own commentary to proceedings, leaving the matter entirely in the reader’s hands. If, as Hoskote pointed out, Ezekiel’s Indian English poems are “often mistaken for snobbish satire”, the mistake probably has something to do with the attitudes and sensibilities of the urbane, westernized Indian reader. The poem, therefore, nudges the reader to interrogate their own positionality vis-à-vis the usage of grammatically awkward Indian English; the sociological implications therein are not hard to surmise. I say this also because when Ezekiel wanted to be funny in a straightforwardly ironic manner, he left no room for doubt. From ‘Ten Poems in the Greek Anthology Mode’, for instance, these lines combine social mores and bureaucratic lethargy in a devastating one-two punch.
“When the female railway clerk / Received an offer of marriage / From her neighbour the customs clerk, / She told him to apply in triplicate, / And he did.”
A little later in life, as Ezekiel entered his 40s and 50s, he travelled across the country and met with a number of mystics, yogis, sadhus, astrologers and the like, exchanging ideas. These experiences made their presence felt in the middle phase of his career, when a number of his poems engaged with the conflict between reason and spirituality. Of these perhaps the most well-known poem was ‘Night of the Scorpion’, which later became a staple of secondary school English curricula across the country (having graduated from a CBSE school, I too came across the poem through that route).
The Bombay school’s centre of gravity
Dom Moraes, Keki Daruwalla, Ranjit Hoskote and many, many others: Ezekiel ended up being a mentor-figure for successive generations of Indian poets. For the Bombay school of poetry, he became a kind of de facto gravitational centre, alongside Kolatkar. Almost a decade ago, when I had interviewed Daruwalla, he told me, “Nissim (Ezekiel) did me a favour by rejecting my poems in 1968. I was not good enough and I was certainly not ready to mount a full-length collection. I went back to the (writing) table and improved myself. For us (writers), where complacency begins, curiosity ends.”
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Hoskote and others have since echoed these sentiments in various interviews. Having Ezekiel as a mentor did not mean mollycoddling or unqualified, uncritical praise and professional validation. He expected you to put in the hard yards yourself, broaden your horizons, decide what to do with the harsh-but-fair criticism Ezekiel directed at their verses.
The halcyon days of Ezekiel and the rest of the Bombay poets have been fictionalised in quite a few novels by now, including Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints and David Davidar’s The Solitude of Emperors. In the latter, there’s a description of 1970s Bombay filtered through the intertwined lives of these poets.
“It was a city of poets and cafés (…) Dom hammering away with one finger at his typewriter in Sargent House, spectacles slipping down his nose as the poems ran wild in his head, Adil holding court in his eyrie on Cuffe Parade, Nissim spinning his demotic verse in coffee houses and poets’ gatherings, Kolatkar with his strange fierce epic about gods of stone (…)”
A hundred years after his birth, therefore, anybody seeking to assess Ezekiel’s legacy has to take into account not only his formidable body of work, but also this ‘nodal’ functionality as a friend to three generations of Indian poets. I think he would, however, bristle against the pigeonholing tendency that we critics tend to fall prey to. Poet, playwright, editor, translator, academic; Ezekiel was all of these things and yet, his sense of purpose wasn’t defined by a singular role. As he put it himself in the poem ‘The Egoist’s Prayers’
“Do not choose me, O Lord,
to carry out thy purposes.
I’m quite worthy, of course,
but I have my own purposes.”
