Nissim Ezekiel: Bijay Kant Dubey

 I took her to a cinema, we saw

The lovers kiss, we saw the jealous man

With subtle comradeship upset their plan

And how their love compelled him to withdraw.

----Nissim Ezekiel in the poem ‘An Affair’ from A Time To Change collection

(Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Third impression, 2007, p. 11)

Between the acts of wedded love

A quieter passion flows,

Which keeps the nuptial pattern firm

As passion comes and goes,

And in the soil of wedded love

Rears a white rose.

----In the poem ‘Marriage Poem’ taken from Sixty Poems collection

(Ibid, p.46)

People have discussed Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) in their own way, taking his poetry from the first modern poet point of view, making his tryst with destiny in the post-independence period, calling him the beginner of modernism, though there is nothing like that as because K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar himself refers to as one of the new poets and Nissim has been included in ‘The New Poets’ chapter of Indian Writing in English, taking together Shahid Suhrawardy, Manjeri S.Isvaran, P.R.Kaikini, Krishan Shungloo and others even before him. In the beginning, he too like Lal and others used to send poems to C.R.Mandy as for giving a breakthrough in the issues of the Illustarted Weekly of India, which the editor reported to Iyengar by saying that he felt corroded with the bad quality of the verses written by the Indians, but had been still hopeful of getting a talent. Even before Nissim there had been Tagore, Aurobindo and Harindrananth to show the traits of modernism. Apart from them, some were there to make us felt their presence. If we go through the texts of the 1960’s, they will themselves speak of the position. Indian English poetry then had been nowhere. Just the people used to read them in the literary essays section and we used to waver between Indo-Anglian or Indo-Anglican. If we turn over the older syllabuses, we shall come to mark. M.K.Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature itself appeared in 1980 and the first prize ever to an Indian English poet went to Jayanta Mahapatra as for Relationship in 1980. Nissim too had been a writer of some middle order, but evolved in due course of time. It is also true side by side that journalism kept him alive and he felt stimulated from time to time as for being a Bomabayan. Even after the Nobel to Tagore, the men on the syllabus committee for English in different universities wavered in prescribing the poems from Gitanjali to M.A. students, barring sporadic and stray instances. Virtually, from the eighties or the nineties, we have started to keep it going. Something it has been done quite under the advice and suggestion given by the UGC, its peer teams and committees.

Several things have gone into the making of Nissim Ezekiel the poet and his growth and development as a writer of Indian verse. The first is he received his education from a convent school which he speaks of and later on moved to England for a brief stay and returned back to as it happened with R.Parthasarathy. Secondly, he had been a modern man, a Bombayan who grew up in the negation of Aurobindo and his trends. Thirdly, he was a teacher of Bombay University. Fourthly, a freelancer he was and an editor of literary journals. But no other poet is questioned, interrogated so much as he is in his delineation, picturisation and perusal of India, Indian scenes, sites and landscapes. This is as because he fails to understand the myth and psyche of mother India, just views her from a distance, like an alien insider with his outsiderish feeling and emotion. The main thing of being aloof or separated from is his being a Maharashtrian Jew. He has nothing to do with Indian philosohy, spirituality, religion, ethics, morality and metaphysics. The poet as a modern man of the city talks of love marriage, tea parties, honeymoon, love affairs, picnics, outings, valedictions and so on. Outwardly, he appears to be modern, frank and free, but is conservative and orthodox.

There were poets even before Nissim Ezekiel and the tradition has been continuing since, not from him. Think of the time when Ezekiel was not. Just suppose it, feel the vacuum. Many used to write definitely, but dared not publish, as an Indian can be a scholar of English but can never be a Shakespeare, similarly an Englishman can be a scholar of Hindi but can never be a Soor or Tulsi, used to hold true. One should write in one’s own mother tongue? Why to choose the foreign language as the medium of expression? An English woman in a sari used to click before. Even Indian English poetry passed through different tests and ordeals, should it be called Anglo-Indian, Indo-Anglican, Indo-Anglian, Indian poetry in English or Indian English poetry? People debated and discussed over, should the Indians write in English? Finally, the theme of Indianness, a term of some larger connotation came to rescue it. Such a thing was asked in connection with Ezekiel as he had had nothing to do with Indian thought, culture, tradition and philosophy; spirituality, metaphysics and theology. Nissim himself refutes the poetry of Aurobindo and calls himself a convent educated boy writing in English.

On finding none around to publish the books, P.Lal and his friends founded the Writers’ Workshop, Calcutta. Nissim too got the support and benefit from the establishment. A poet of the Bombayan circle of critics, he has definitely got the support of the people otherwise he would not have scaled what we we presume it today. Even in Advanced Literary Essays (Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1961) by Prof.J.N.Mundra and Prof.C.L.Sahni and Quintessence of Literary Essays by W.R.Goodman (Doaba House, New Delhi 1968), we do not find the names of Nissim, Kamala, Jayanta, Ramanujan, Adil and Daruwalla. In Mundra’s book, one can see the names of B.Rajan, Krishan Shungloo, Subho Tagore, Sudhindranath Dutt, V.N.Bhushan, Cyril Modak, Nilima Devi and Adi K. Sett as new poets. In the anthology of poetry, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, published from Sahitya Akademi in 1970, Prof. V.K.Gokak presents the poets on a broader scale rather than concentrating on him merely as the harbinger of modernism in Indian English poetry.

Nissim is a poet of the urban space, modern city life and thought-content. A modern hollow man, he can relate to in that way quite easily. Just love and human relationship form the poetic crux of his story. To laugh at, caricature and joke is the job of the poet and he chuckles merely. A faded romantic, he is not so colourful. He has the desire within to fall in love, but draws the steps back too, as societal rigidity and community obligation continue to nourish him otherwise. A Jew he cannot change himself rather than adhering to it, never can imagine of mixing as the ghettos continue to bind him. He beats the band of love-mariage, but consummates it not and he marries as per arranged lines. India too had been in search of modern poets and we got it in their voices. But modernism is not so easy to be delved deep, as because it comes not poetically, but appliances, apparatuses, comforts, experiences, discoveries, inventions, medicines, fashions, designs, spirits and times too have something to say to and to add to. Logic, reason, fact and fiction have dispelled the darkness within. Humanism, liberalism and development too have the stories to tell them. It has definitely taken time in making the people modern one by one.

If one goes through the poems of Nissim Ezekiel, one may come to mark the influences of the English poets which he is so heavily under, as for example the Elizabethan sonneteers and lyric writers, the metaphysicals, the romantics, the Victorians and the moderns may be referred to. Thomas Wyatt, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, etc. are some of them whose influences can be definitely felt and marked upon his poetry. The influence of Andrew Marvell, John Milton, George Herbert, John Donne and others can be marked in his psalms. His conversational style has something to owe to T.S.Eliot and Walt Whitman, but his caricature takes to a different plane. The grammar of poesy is certainly not the chief priority of the poet as he intends it not on dabbling in rhetoric and prosody. He just goes on putting them in a free-flowing verse.

In the fifities, he started to publish, but that could not make a way so easily and he took time in growing up, getting famed. As a poet, he went on evolving and substantiating his stance as because had not been so prolific as we think think of now. Ones or twos added to his poetic corpus. He was definitely not a classicist, scholarly in his write-up, but a modern moving along modern life and culture, city living and urbanity, keeping pace with and this added to his corpus, benefited him in a befitting way. Man and his manners, modern life and society, thought and culture had been the topic of his perusal and he perused that too. Irony was his forte; humour the chief property and he continued to regale with these. The India of rural spaces and scapes, the hamlets dark, thinly populated and scattered across a vast stretch of the land, dotting it with their own solitude and away from being human haunt could not draw his pen towards and he felt helpless in taking to. He was blind to the treasure trove of India, its ancient temples and rich legacy of the land, Indian heritage and culture. We often question with regard to him, how far Indian he is and the quest for identity leaves him not behind. He is no doubt a peculiar type of poet, commemorative of private and personal ethics and reflection.

There is nothing as that to look for sublimity in him. The cinema hall, the theatre, the park, the airport, the dockyard, the picnic spot, the restaurant, the salon, the club and the shopping complex, this is the hub of his city-centric poetry. A poet of Bombay, the ever growing city with the pace of time, the metropolitan to the mega city, engages him. He is a poet of birthday gifts, marriage parties, love letters and goodbye parties. Please, thank you, good morning, good evening, good night, kindly, bye-bye, ta-ta, see you again, etc. are the things of his etiquette and mannerism. The poet as an observer likes to visit the art galleries, put on display and there he may view the pregnant woman seeing the nudes and feeling ashamed of; in the cinema hall, he will like to propose before, but faltering to kiss and at the hotel the semi-nude of the Cuban dancer will come to the rescue of his delight. I love you, I like you, these are the terms recurring in variety and the poet seems to be inclined after. Valentine cards and roses, bouquets of flowers, new year greeting cards, wedding bells jingling and he going with the gifts, all these things lie in muted well. The boyfriend, the girlfriend and the love story, a quest after beauty, an inclination for and infatuation with, the revellings into the realms of fancy and imagination add to his poetic dimension. The best of the hotels and the hostels he seeks to derive from and to give to. An art critic, he can apply modern art to poetry writing.

In the poem, A Woman Obseved, which happens to be in The Exact Name, he pictures a pregnant woman viewing the nudes at the art gallery:

I watch her sadly as

she leaves the place, my eyes

embracing all that sensual

movement bursting through the dress.

(Collected Poems, ibid, p.140)

Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd To His Love, Edmund Spenser’s One Day I Wrote Her Name, Sir Philip Sidney’s Loving in Truth, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus? and Forget Not Yet , Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, John Donne’s The Sun Rising, etc. seem to take the canvas away from him and he dwells far, into the realms of love and its dreams and promises.

Holding the tongue in cheek, Nissim chuckles, never to let them into guffaws, just keeps beaming with joy, discerning it all, really a critical person. Maybe it that he is not scholastic, pedantic, classical and great from the old and medieval point of view, but is definitely a great poet, a classical romantic he is no doubt, if to review that from a different perspective of delving. The things which are easily accessible in the English poets are predominant in him and he excels in assimilating them. A romantic poet he is, but differently, without a deceptive appearance. Outwardly, he appears to be ludicrous, humorous, ironical and satiric, pontifical and hypocritical, but from the inward within of his, he is but highly philosophical and metaphysical. It is difficult to judge a talent like that of Ezekiel as because sometimes he appears to be too much trite and hackneyed, but is not so at all.

Sometimes the ordariness of expression takes us aback, sometimes the irony of conversational English punctuated by a foreign learner’s desire to learn and practice spoken English, which is but ludicrous English, one committing mistakes to be proficient in. Such a thing Somerset Maugham too speaks about in his prose-piece, Learning to Write. Several stenos and clerks too turn into knowledgeable persons in the long run. Many lawyers too without having a base in English learn to pefect it in the end. Too much erring and instead of it, the forcible continuation too teaches us awkwardly to be dextetous. Nissim should also take a note of it that the geography department teacher’s somehow carried on English is just the one side of the picture while on the other many of our English tachers fail to deliver in English, speak hesitatingly, haltingly, who later on may take over as or turn into university heads and good professors of English, guides and resource persons.

Nissim’s poetry is an exercise in spoken English, one practising, taking the tips to learn it, one following how do the people use and apply it and that too where in India. English is used in getting the cases and complaints lodged; the diaries being entered into at the police station and they writing in their own way, whatever pidgin-English coming into the mind, the policemen entering into, erring to perfect it. The school, the college, the court campus and all other offices are the places where it is applied in. Some trying to be oversmart too like to converse in English. To use a few English words once was a matter of pride. Even the illiterate villagers used to appreciate and talk of. Even the illiterate peons of the convent schools too in the long run develop their common sense as for understanding the speech. Just through the patriot and his usage of English, Nissim is caricaturing the monkeyish disciples of the iconic, father-figure, Mahatma Gandhi. The British prisoners, but our freedom fighters, in their aping of Gandhi and Gandhism, sometimes seem to have befooled. Some of them had not been freedom fighters, but turned they into as for pension. Some of them were very blunt and were lathi-wielding. Had they been not aggressive, the English too would not have left, is also the other side of the truth. Specially, the half-wits, the half-learned fellows are the butts of his humour. While discussing Nissim’s poems centring round the half-learned people’s English, it comes to the fore, the little-read fathers-in-law taking the interview of the simple and rural girls, asking them, what’s your father’s name, the composition of tea-making and others to be responded back in broken English. Sometimes even the street roamers and loafers, who do not like to read and write, but go on roaming, passing time and spending father’s money, too like to perform well, starting their career from the profession of a salesman or a business executive, an agent of a company or a medical representative.

While reading the poem, Marriage, several things come to the mind’s plane, as such, what is love, what is marriage and what the workings of these. Perhaps love does not remain the same love started earlier. Sacred and sacrosanct love, promised with never to part ways, gets care-worn, anxiety-ridden in due course of time and its duration. Situations and circumstances perturb and perplex it. Human lust and greed unquenchable and hankering after more, propelled by ever changing Nature, seem to take to its own recourse. Similar is the case with husband and wife, lover and beloved, bride and bridegroom. In the sensual and sensuous pleasures of man, lie in the stories of man’s temptation and fall from heaven and Cain’s mark. For sometime, one may feel blissful, but the things which go on affecting will continue to work for fissure and fission and this is the way of the world and of man. Man will definitely get lured towards Eve; they will take the forbidden fruit and be expelled from the garden of bliss and paradise. What Nissim here seeks to say is the temptation for gold, wine and beauty. Nissim’s poem Marriage is almost like Joyce’s sketch, Araby. Something of the daydreaming of Lamb’s Dream Children is here. Just like a newly modern boy, as Gandhiji once used to copy the English in dress, manner and etiquette, Nissim too tries to do that. There is a fascination for Christian life and love, their attitude and manner. His phraseology actually moves around love affair, honeymoon, birthday party and a visit to the cinema hall. Once upon a time people used to rush in to the cinema halls and many a love-story used to culminate and coincide with thereon. Many a college girl, in a tabooed society of ours, used to meet under the pretext of exchanging books and notes. Nissim as a poet too is a lover of this type who will like to visit the cinema hall to share the unsaid feelings of the heart. He just keeps dreaming about love-affair, but can never consummate it.

In the poem, The Couple, the lover appears wonderful to the beloved and vice versa which is no doubt a novel expression to take us by storm. Both of them remain glued to each other, which is but magnetic attraction. Nissim as a modern age city boy has the idea of all that it happens in love. The co-educational convent schools are the best place to study and experience it. Apart from it, a Bombayan he has experience of making love in the park and the garden. Valentine’s Day is specific in this regard, but who will be the Valentine of Nissim?

The first stanza from The Couple may be quoted to illustrate the point:

Indolence and arrogance

were rooted in her primal will,

a woman to fear, not to love,

yet he made love to her

(who can say he loved her?)

and damn the consequences.

(Vilas Sarang, Edited by, Indian English Poetry Since 1950: An Anthology, Disha Books, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, Reprinted 2007, p.44)

The last stanza of the poem throws the light on the poem:

To love her was impossible,

to abandon her unthinkable.

He had to make love to her,

a charade of passion and possession

in which some truth was found in her.

(Ibid, p.44)

By calling her wonderful, Nissim just wants to make her puff with pride and to look back in amazement when the bird gets netted or trapped. The poet has overpraised her to win over and this none can do but a modern like Nissim himself. Both of them keep saying to each other, the beloved hearing it and smiling, which God knows it, who is actually wonderful? One can learn the tactics of love-making from him. How clever is he!

Nissim is a master poet of spoken English and its nuances, specially Indian English speech and accent is the thing of his delineation and he seeks to derive from it, taking it to be the matter of poetry. It is a mistake with the Indians that they like to master grammar rather than taking exercises in language. Such a tendency has been continuing from Panini and his texts. A strict grammarian cannot be a good literary man.

In the poem, which he is so acclaimed for, namely Night of The Scorpion, the poet recrerates an Indian scene, where his mother stung by a scorpion lies unconscious and writhing in pain and burning sensation. The poet sees her so helpless before together with the coming and going peasants. The village folks with the lamps burning dimly and their shadows cast before and the steady rains continuing in for sometime more picture the canvas of the poem. The incessant rains perhaps have forced the scorpion to crawl beneath a knapsack and taking a chance bit it. People search for the creature, but they fail to trace. This is as usual which takes place in every village home.

After the bite, the exorcists and herbalists make a way into the scene. With the village folks in the background as the audience, the mother at the centre of all activity, the herbalist applies the herbal paste to chill and comfort the bite. The priestly men try to tame the poison through mantric incantation while his father, a sceptic and a rationalist applies the paraffin oil and gives a lit match stick to it. The flames feed upon for a while. In the midst of all this, one can overhear the people talking of bhoga, we mean suffering. Such a thing it had been in her previous karma and now it has got lessened. Someone ends on a note of benediction that it is a harbinger of the lessening of sin if be any in the next birth. There is an Indian calculation of past karma and dharma in Night of The Scorpion poem and here one can find it how he is at home in the use of indirect Indianness.

Nissim as an observer holds a low profile, he goes on marking all this with his mother at the centre of all that hectic activity and the specialists treating in their own way and the well-wishers and neighbours wishing Godspeed and recovery while the villain at large, we mean the wicked scorpion with the diabolic tail, the catalist of all that absconding, whom the curses even cannot curse. Nissim as a Jewish man marks the Indian scene and happening in the aftermath of a scorpion bite in the poem, Night of The Scorpion.

In the poem, Background, Casually, the poet in a funny way tries to introduce himself, by calling, how ‘A poet-rascal-clown was born’, one of lean and thin structure, he makes a way through the diverse majority communities, his being a mugging Jew, whom the Christians will take otherwise, the Hindus in their own. As a boy, he failed to spin a top, nor could he fly the kites so smoothly. This brings enough joy for him to feel, be it the developed or undeveloped place, he is happy to be where he is now.

One from from Shanwar Teli caste, Saturday oil-presser caste, his experience tells a different tale, how did the hooded bullocks make the rounds as for crushing seeds for bread. Their ancestors took to oil pressing soon after their arrival in India. A rabbi-saint, instead of his wish or trial, he can never be, he is what he ahd to be. Nissim Ezekiel’s Background, Casually is more powerful and beautiful than that of Kamala Das’ An Introduction. To turn and twist and present the things is the job of Nissim and he does it so eloquently. To take the matters lightly and jocularly and to regale and to recreate is his poetic art, craft and technique.

Nissim seems to be serving, offering Indian chutney or European sauce and this can be felt in his poem Goodbye Party For Miss Pushpa T. S., as it is in other poems too. God knows, who is this Pushpa? Is she a sister or a girl of acquaintance in disguise? Nissim all the time keeps us in the dark with regard to identity, letting it go, changing the topic quite often to bemuse us. Here, just using coming, going, eating or sleeping, he recreates the whole scene. Pushpa is going to foreign and he is there to see her off. Pushpa is smiling and smiling to hear the English of Nissim as and when he says it that there is not only external sweetness in her, but some internal sweetness too is therein. We do not know it if the others have found or not, but he is good at pumping and puncturing. He can make one climb the palm tree and drink juice and at the same time has the guts of cutting the tree underneath. The juice-taker will come to feel what lies in the pleasure of taking at the cost of excitement.

To read Nissim Ezekiel is to smile sometimes, burst into a laughter all alone. Peculiar things he says them in a peculiar and humourous way. There is of course something of a commentator or an advertiser or an anchorman in him; an announcer he can recreate us entertainingly. Even if one asks him to pray or keep silence for a few moments by closing the eyes, he cannot keep still rather will make you burst into a laughter through his antics and activities.

The conservative husbands of the purdahwalli wives will themselves will love to read him if they get a chance to go through his verses, as for example, the poem entitled In India, taken from The Exact Name :

The wives of India sit apart.

They do not drink,

they do not talk,

of course, they do not kiss.

The men are quite at home

among the foreign styles

(what fun the flirting is!)

I myself, decorously,

press a thigh or two in sly innocence.

The party is a great success.

( Collected Poems, p.133)

To read Nissim Ezekiel is to come to feel it that he is not a yogi, but a bhogi and whoever claims it to be solely, it is really difficult to be. God knows, who is whose guru? Sometimes even the saints fail to keep themselves in control; we mean the pseudo-sadhus and their leaked in stories of life. In one poem, the poet sees the world full of girls and poetry as the language of lovers and he finding it in his prosaic poetry and the poem is none but The Language of Lovers for our kind pereusal. Under the pretext of putting the words through the mouth of a foolish critic, he clears the things of his heart tactically. The Egoists’ Prayers even twist and turn the dialogues taking place between him and God and it is quite clear that he can never be devout and dutiful as the personal works are too many to devote to and he is definitely not one among the chosen few to be mindful of his duties.