You are on page 1of 4

“Discuss the themes in Ezekiel’s poetry with special

reference to how he talks about India.”

Nissim Ezekiel was born in Bombay on December 24th, 1924. He


studied at Wilson College, Bombay, and at Birkbeck College,
London. His stay in England from 1948 to 1952 marked a
watershed in his life and career. He was considered one of the
foremost Indian writers in English of his times. He is often
referred to as a ‘poet of the city’. It is sad, even ironic, that a
man who evinced a razor-sharp mind all through his life had to be
institutionalized for Alzheimer’s in his later years. He passed
away on January 9th, 2004.

His early poetry has close affinities with the work of T.S. Eliot,
W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Rainer Maria Rilke. His poetry
renders contemporary themes of alienation, spiritual emptiness,
isolation and fragmentation with humor, compassion and irony. He
draws his images from the cities he has known intimately, Bombay
and London. He is a path-breaker in the use of modern speech in
the use of modern speech inflections within the framework of
formal verse patterning.

Ezekiel wrote through a period in Indian history marked by


heightened nationalism, heady Nehruvian socialism, Indira
Gandhi’s infamous Emergency and increasing disenchantment with
the system. In the world outside, this was period marked by anti-
War disillusionment and alienation with all the attendant social
and political upheavals.

Eliot is not the only influence. Ezekiel had read Auden and the
other 30’s poets. Some of his poems were offered as social
criticism. Many of them were formally structured with rhyme and
stanzaic schemes. But the poems are a product of a highly
intellectualized metropolitan mind, exercises in cerebration and
arid word arrangements. Occasionally we notice flashes of
modernist irreverence in the same collection: he introduces the
modern idioms, the Americanisms of the beat generation. These
were the new found liberties.

His earlier poems are mostly expressions of his lonely state, his
separateness for his environment, his alienation- real or affected.
But later he threw himself into whatever is around him, Bombay,
India, as evidenced by the appearance of many India poems such
as “In India,” “Poet, Lover, and Bird Watcher.” A member of the
Jewish Bene-Israeli community- a marginal section of the Indian
population, and the son of a secular, rationalist father, Ezekiel
developed a unique ‘Indian-yet-outsider’ voice.

“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,
As others choose to give themselves
In some remote place.
My backward place is where I am.”

Ezekiel brought a whole new dimension to Indian poetry in terms


of issues, metaphors, and target readership. His work is
pioneering because it captures the nuances of the lives and
identities of educated, urban Indians. His poetry touches on the
ordinariness of events and questions social mores and traditions.
“Enterprise” is an autobiographical poem. The pilgrimage
described by Ezekiel in “Enterprise” is perhaps the literary one to
England, closely modeled on Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” The
poet and his friends return home wiser from the “pilgrimage,”
their literary enterprise. The poem thus can be read as a
religious allegorization of a secular enterprise: a rationalization
of the poet’s actual return from England because “home is where
we have to earn our grace.”

“Night of the Scorpion” and “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.”
are two of Ezekiel’s best-known Indian poems, the latter being in
Indian English. The Indian English poems are clearly entertaining
and meant to be funny. But once we accept the legitimacy of the
Pidgin English, all the fun seems to disappear. What remains
perhaps is the spontaneous good feeling that the speaker of the
dramatic monologue conveys. But on closer scrutiny we notice that
the virtues for which “Miss Pushpa” is being extolled spring from
the speaker’s selfishness, with occasional unintentional double
entendres. In trying to speak about Miss Pushpa the speaker
reveals more about himself than about her is as common in a
dramatic monologue. The Indian custom of addressing a woman
colleague with the honorific “sister” and such other small
courtesies, reveal the human face of India, warts and all.

“Night of the Scorpion,” also a much anthologized poem, reveals


an India that is still gripped by superstition and witchcraft but
not without the attendant bond of familial and fellow feeling,
values perhaps unknown to the west. But the poem has more to it
than the sentiment expressed through the punch line at the end:
“Thank God it picked on me and spared the children.”
In “Night of the Scorpion,” the aim is to find poetry in ordinary
reality as observed, known, felt experiences rather than as the
intellect dictates. Also an important point often missed is how
love forces the skeptic, rationalist father to take recourse to
blind faith: “…skeptic, rationalist, trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid…”

CONCLUSION
Hence a comment like R. Parthasarthy’s in Ten Twentieth-Century
Indian Poets, “An important characteristic of Indian verse in
English is that it is Indian in sensibility and content, and English
in language. It is rooted in and stems from the Indian
environment, and reflects its mores, often ironically is something
you can grasp immediately. Ezekiel, from being an Indian-born
poet writing in English has achieved a stature by creating a body
of thought and writing combining the universal, global and home
ground with an élan that justifies his own stand that, “Poetry
translated into English from the modern Indian language does not
constitute English poetry written by Indians.”

You might also like