Assignment on Paper no. 202

Hello readers:) This is a blog on assignment Paper no 202 Indian English Literature-Post Independence and my topic is Nissim Ezekiel as a modern Poet. 

Nissim Ezekiel

Biography

Nissim Ezekiel is an Indian poet who is famous for writing his poetry in English. He had a long career spanning more than forty years, during which he drastically influenced the literary scene in India. Many scholars see his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change, published when he was only 28 years old, as a turning point in postcolonial Indian literature towards modernism.

Ezekiel was born in 1924 in Bombay to a Jewish family. They were part of Mumbai's Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as Bene Israel. His father taught botany at Wilson College, and his mother was the principal of a school. Ezekiel graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1947. In 1948, he moved to England and studied philosophy in London. He stayed for three and a half years until working his way home on a ship.Upon his return, he quickly joined the literary scene in India. He became an assistant editor for Illustrated Weekly in 1953. He founded a monthly literary magazine, Imprint, in 1961. He became an art critic for the Times of India. He also edited Poetry India from 1966-1967. Throughout his career, he published poetry and some plays. He was professor of English and a reader in American literature at Bombay University in the 1990s, and secretary of the Indian branch of the international writer's organization, PEN. Ezekiel was also a mentor for the next generation of poets, including Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi cultural award in 1983. He also received the Padma-Shri, India's highest honor for civilians, in 1988.

Ezekiel died in 2004 after a long battle against Alzheimer's Disease. At the time of his death, he was considered the most famous and influential Indian poet who wrote in English.

Despite the fact that he wrote in English, Ezekiel's poems primarily examine themes associated with daily life in India. Through his career, his poems become more and more situated in India until they can be nothing else but Indian. Ezekiel has been criticized in the past as not being authentically Indian on account of his Jewish background and urban outlook. Ezekiel himself writes about this in a 1976 essay entitled "Naipaul's India and Mine," in which he disagrees with another poet, V.S. Naipaul, about the critical voice with which he writes about India. "While I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider," Ezekiel writes, "circumstances and decisions relate me to India. In other countries I am a foreigner. In India I am an Indian. When I was eighteen, a friend asked me what my ambition was. I said with the naive modesty of youth, 'To do something for India.'" We can see this attitude at work in Ezekiel's poetry—even when his poems are satirical, they come from the voice of a loving insider rather than someone who is looking from the outside. In this way, Ezekiel's poems are quintessentially Indian because they exist there. Ezekiel writes, "India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India."

The critic Vinay Lal argued in 1991 that it is not surprising that a poet like Ezekiel brought about so much literary change in India: "It is perhaps no accident either that the first blossoms of the birth and growth of modern Indian poetry in English should have come from the pen of a poet who, while very much an Indian, belongs to a community that in India was very small to begin with, and has in recent years become almost negligible, a veritable drop in the vast ocean of the Indian population."

As a Poet

Nissim Ezekiel is a great Indo-Anglian poet. Versatility is the outstanding characteristic of his poetry. The Indian contemporary scene, modern urban life, human relationship, love and sex and spiritual values are the major themes of his poetry. He has experimented endlessly with form and craft. Flawless craftsmanship makes his poetry unique.

As a poet of Indian urban life Ezekiel is a poet of city life. In his poem we find the description of Bombay. It is the symbol of any modern city. Through this symbol the poet has presented the ugliness, dirt, wickedness, inhumanity and squalor of life.Ezekiel's poetry shows his philosophical and religious bent of mind. He always stresses the need for commitment, sincerity and integrity. His attitude to religion is rational, logical, secular and humanistic. He believes in the religion of love and charity.poetic style Ezekiel is a great craftsman. He has a rich sense of humour and wit. To attack on absurdities and follies of life, he takes help of irony. He shows a keen sense of form and structure. Words are chosen and used carefully. He frequently uses colloquial English. His conversational tone is interesting. Ezekiel's symbols and images are evocative.Thus Ezekiel is a versatile poet. He has prepared a grand path for the new poets. He has made a valuable contribution to stylistic facilities in Indo- Anglian poetry.

Nissim Ezekiel (b. 1924) happens to be one of the most productive talents and most distinctive poetic personalities of modern India. Having produced seven volumes of poetry to date,1 he is acknowledged by all and sundry as an established Indian-English poet of the post-Independence era.Ever since 1952, when his first verse collection, A Time to Change, appeared in London, he has been writing poems and publishing them in book form or in various national and international periodicals, and hence he may verily be called the perfect barometer of modern India's literary atmosphere. Through his numerous other endeavors - editing, teaching, advertising, anthologizing, and encouraging the younger generation of poets - he has only further strengthened his position in the literary world.

In the recent past Ezekiel has taken his critics by surprise with his two Oxford University Press publications (from New Delhi) Hymns in Darkness (1976) and Latter-Day Psalms (1982) and belied their misconceived predictions about his artistic growth and vitality. In this connection, it may be pointed out that Chetan Karnani's unwarranted commentary on Ezekiel's recent verse - that it shows "a marked decline"2 - is somewhat untenable and unacceptable,keeping in mind the poet's wholehearted devotion to the noble cause of the Muse. William Walsh, a noted English critic of our day, is rather nearer the truth when he remarks that Ezekiel's poetry is "fastidiousp oetry, at once spontaneous and controlled." The austerity of Ezekiel's poetic art, the condensation of his style, the economical precision of his language, the impressiveness of his imagery, the sharpness of his wit and irony, the contemporaneity of his subjectm atter - all these immediately render him a "modern" poet of great relevance and significance. In what follows I attempt to trace modernity in Ezekiel's poetry, with special reference to his 1982 collection. 

 The modernity of Ezekiel's verse is found in his skillful execution of wit and irony. All "modern"poets such as the Sitwells, Pound, Eliot, the confessionals, and the symbolists are prone to "wit" and "irony." Here is a flash from Ezekiel: "She didn't know beggars in India / smile only at white foreigners" ("Poverty Poem," LDP, 13). This excerpt contains an obvious truth as well as an ironic dig at the low begging habits of Indian paupers. The poem"Healers" is also sarcastic in its tone and temper,hitting hard as it does at "the unplanned city" that harbors "a death-wish" in the midst of mercantile people (mark the first two lines in particular for this).In another poem, "Jewish Wedding in Bombay," the poet laughs loudly in an ironic mood at the Jews who are out to enjoy life, mixing up confusedly the sacred ceremony of marriage with beef-eating, pork-relishing, and "betting and swearing and drinking": "Even the most orthodox, it was said, / ate beef because it was cheaper, and some even risked / their souls by relishing pork. // The Sabbath was for betting and swearing and drinking" (LDP, 18). One should not be taken aback in reading these lines highlighting unexpected acts of sacrilege, for it is Ezekiel's habit to juxtapose contrasts and contradictions in his poetry.The cumulative effect of these lines is to be marked in the closing words of the poem, an effect created by the poet's alert ironic vision and witty remarks.Thematically, modernity is usually equated with contemporaneity of a work's content. Ezekiel is quite modern from the viewpoint of his deft handling of current subjects and his masterly treatment of immediate surroundings. 

If his "Poverty Poem" attempts to expose the stark, harsh reality of hunger, starvation, and nakedness in the vast and sprawling subcontinent, his "Jewish Wedding in Bombay" and"Songs for Nandu Bhende" (four in number) and"Latter-Day Psalms" highlight his own social, personal, and religious commitments and predicaments in a busy and crowded metropolis. Even such early poems as "Urban" and "A Morning Walk" from The Unfinished Man (1960) or "Night of the Scorpion"and "In India" from The Exact Name (1965)- the latter volume being somewhat philosophical rather than topical in its content - largely dwell either on the banality of the metropolis of Bombay and its attendant horrors of rootlessness and dehumanization of modern life or on the immediate environment of familial and social estrangement. The poet's anti dowry stance, a crying need of the hour in the Indian context, is quite evident: "There was no dowry because they knew I was 'modern' / and claimed to be modern too" ("Jewish Wedding in Bombay," LDP,18). 

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