Placing Ezekiel

Imtiaz Dharker’s portrait of Nissim Ezekiel (1978)

Nissim Ezekiel's strange ordeal is over. He died on 9 January, in his native Bombay. I say "strange ordeal" because we cannot imagine what it is like to be stricken with Alzheimer's, to have one's mind reduced to a tabula rasa on which nothing can be inscribed. We sometimes pontificate that if one can live in the moment one becomes truly liberated. Alzheimer's disease must be the reductio ad absurdum of such smug philosophizing. But the real ordeal of the disease is perhaps borne by those who love and respect its victims and have to care for them.

I knew him only slightly. I met him thrice at international literary events--in Lahore (1985), Edinburgh (1986), Glasgow (1990). A few letters were exchanged. He sent a couple of poems for Form, a magazine, now defunct, with which I was associated. I showcased him in my anthology, Contemporary Indian Poetry (Ohio State University Press, 1990). But more significant than these personal contacts, is what I owe to him as an exemplar in the practice of the craft of verse. And so it is only fitting that I should mark his passing with a few notes towards a definition of his position in literary history.

For those interested in biographical details pertaining to Ezekiel, Raj Rao's Nissim Ezekiel, The Authorized Biography (Viking, India, 2000) provides ample information, though the book is shoddily written and callow, and reminded me of Wilde's aphorism about Judas as biographer. Here, a few facts should suffice by way of a biographical context.

Ezekiel belonged to the Bene Israel, the oldest of India's Jewish communities. He studied English literature at Bombay University and became a college lecturer. In his youth he came under the influence of M. N. Roy, but soon after Partition turned away from politics to devote himself to literature.

Ibrahim Alkazi, the theatre director, then became his mentor and paid for his passage to London, where he spent three watershed years and published his first book of poetry, A Time to Change (Fortune Press, 1952). On his return to Bombay, he worked for the Illustrated Weekly of India and in advertising before becoming an academic once again. He eventually retired as Professor of American Literature at Bombay University.

He married and raised a family, but then separated from his wife. The 1960s wrought a sea-change in his lifestyle, turning a strait-laced sceptical rationalist into a drug-taking promiscuous believer. At the same time he registered the impact of the Beats and related literary movements.

Besides poetry Ezekiel wrote plays, art criticism, short stories, columns and articles, and hundreds of reviews. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize and the Padma Shri.

Never afraid of controversy, Ezekiel supported Rajiv Gandhi's ban on Rushdie's Satanic Verses and, in Bangladesh, Taslima Nasreen's Lajja, arguing that these books had more contempt than criticism, and only served to increase the resolve of the forces of reaction and bigotry. By the time he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1998, Ezekiel's poetic career had attained a kind of completeness that is unlikely to be affected by any unpublished/uncollected pieces that may be appended to future editions of his Collected Poems.

The history of Indian poetry in English splits up neatly into two phases: pre and post-Independence. Nissim Ezekiel is the first poet of the latter phase, in terms of chronology as well as significance. By absorbing the lessons of modernism and making his poetic debut in an idiom that remains fresh after 50 years, he showed the way to his younger contemporaries and to subsequent generations of Indian poets. It is not only a question of direct influence, though that is considerable; just as crucial is the reaction he has provoked in younger poets, some of whom exhibit what Harold Bloom has diagnosed as the anxiety of influence. Ezekiel's position among contemporary Indian English poets is therefore that of a patriarch, admired by some of his children, resented by others. Indeed, he has been called "the Big Daddy of Indian Poetry." Someone in a mood for coining phrases could justifiably identify all contemporary Indian English poets as the tribe of Ezekiel.

The poetic achievement of Ezekiel and his tribe, in the context of contemporary world poetry, is not inconsiderable. In the Indian context it is remarkable, for two reasons. First, they have given us a body of verse that evinces the naturalization of the English language to the Indian situation, something earlier Indian English poets did not quite manage to do. Second, they have breathed life into the Indian English poetic tradition as a whole. This is a significant point in literary historical terms and requires some explanation.

It is common knowledge that Indian English poetry has a history going back nearly two centuries, but such a history is one thing, a tradition quite another. A literary tradition comes into being when writers interact not only with those of their own generation, but also with those of the past, thereby creating a complex pattern of influences, rejections, intertextual connections and disjunctions. Pre-Independence Indian English poets lived in isolation. They had virtually no literary interaction with fellow Indians, either contemporaries or predecessors. Their sole inspiration was the poetic tradition of England, the colonial "mother-country," into which they longed to be assimilated--a futile hope, for that tradition barely acknowledged their existence. The poets came, one by one, they wrote, and vanished. They tried to write like contemporary English mastersand produced sunburnt imitations. Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt echoed the younger Romantics, especially Byron. Toru Dutt and her family (almost the entire extended family: her sister Aru, her father and a couple of uncles, were versifiers) followed the Romantics and Victorians. Manmohan Ghose wrote like his fin-de-siecle contemporaries, Sarojini Naidu like minor Victorians and Edwardians. Among these poets, the later ones didn't even know the work of their predecessors, far less respond to it; Toru Dutt had heard of Michael Dutt but never saw his work. Their attention was directed entirely towards their English masters. If at all one describes them as a tradition the caveat should be added: "a tradition of mimicry."

One might interject that the situation remains the same after independence. Isn't Ezekiel shaped by the influence of Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Auden? G. S. Sharat Chandra by W. C. Williams, and the Black Mountain School? Mehrotra by the Beats and surrealists? Well, yes and no. Contemporary Indian English poets may absorb diverse influences, just as their peers in other countries do. But they also engage in antagonistic struggles with each other, and with older Indian English poets. In their response to pre-Independence Indian English poets, they have been stringently critical, but not entirely without sympathy or even appreciation. This critical examination has incorporated the older poets into a living tradition.

Thus R. Parthasarathy points out in the introduction in his anthology Ten 20th Century Indian Poets (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1974), that Toru Dutt achieved "The concretization of something as amorphous as nostalgia" in her best-known poem, "Our Old Casuarina Tree," and Sarojini Naidu had "perhaps the finest ear among Indian English poets for the sound of English."

Nissim Ezekiel, in one of the last interviews he gave, conceded that earlier Indian English poets, like Sarojini Naidu, even though he had "doubts about certain words and phrases she is using," deserved to be read today because her "subject is 100% Indian." He agreed with the interviewer Nilufer Bharucha, that "voices like hers . . . need to be reclaimed."

Though Ezekiel is generally acknowledged as the first modern Indian English poet, this is not strictly accurate. That title rightly belongs to Shahid Suhrawardy, author of Fallen Leaves (London: Michael Joseph, 1910) and Essays in Verse (CUP, 1937). The first book is that of an aesthete, the second of a modernist. In "When Thunderclouds About Me Break," dated 1914, the following quatrain belongs to the same terrain as Eliot's "Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady":

Whilst I sit darkling in my room,
Beating against the prison-bar,
You come and fling into the gloom
A bright inconsequential star.

In order to relate Ezekiel to Suhrawardy, it will be helpful to refer to Spender's classic work, The Struggle of Modern, where he distinguishes modern from contemporary writers. The former view their world as problematic, in a way different from past ages, and seek radically innovative styles and techniques to deal with it; the latter see no rupture between the present and the past and are therefore happy with inherited literary forms and techniques. In early 20th century poetry Eliot and Pound were innovative moderns, while the Georgians were contemporaries who were happy to use a conversational idiom and an iambic metre. The moderns soon become literary history, after which poets like Larkin and Ted Hughes brought back a kind of neo-Georgianism, but with a difference. These new "contemporaries" were more self-conscious and critically aware than the older ones; in other words, they had absorbed important lessons from the moderns.

Ezekiel is in many ways comparable to his post-World War II English contemporaries of the so-called Movement. Among them he is closest to D. J. Enright with whom he shares a cool, ironic, satiric style that combines aspects of the "modern" and the "contemporary." In terms of the history of Indian English poetry, Ezekiel's poetry combines the modern element introduced by Suhrawardy with the "contemporary" elements of two interesting but little-known forebears, Joseph Furtado and Fredoon Kabraji, author of A Minor Georgian's Sons and A Cold Flame, both published by the Fortune Press in London. Furtado was a Goan poet who wrote in a lively idiom incorporating Indianisms:

Fortune teller, memsaib!
Tell fortune very well,
Past, present, future tell,
A only one rupees
All fortune telling fees
Fortune teller, mensaib!
("The Fortune Teller")

Furtado anticipates Ezekiel's use of Indian English, but the latter is more self-conscious as befits someone whose sensibility has been strained through the modernist sieve.

Nissim Ezekiel's Collected Poems present the harvest of forty years, and demonstrate the consistency in his work as well as its technical and tonal evolution. From the start Ezekiel used both strict forms and free verse, but unsurprisingly the latter gained in importance in his later work. Much of his first three collections is a little heavy-footed, perhaps because he is desperately holding out against the lure of a freer style, such as is characterized by William Carlos Williams, to whom he writes:

I do not want
to write
poetry like yours
but still I
love
the way you do it.
("For William Carlos Williams")

The most successful of Ezekiel's attempts in conventional forms came in the early sixties, in such poems as "Urban," "Enterprise," "Marriage," "Jamini Roy," "Philosophy," "Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher." A relaxed lyric grace, subtle imagery and irony come together in a manner illustrative perhaps of what the British Movement (Larkin, Enright, Davie) stood for:

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on hill
To note the movement of a timid wing.
("Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher")

From the same period we have "In India," with its insistent three or four beats to a line, and mixture of metrical and free verse. Bruce King mention's that Ezekiel "often likes four iambic feet to a line" (Three Indian Poets, 26). He is particularly successful in using the form with satiric intent,

I went through this, believing all,
Our love denied the Primal Fall.
Wordless, we walked among the trees,
And felt immortal as the breeze.
("Marriage")

"Night of the Scorpion" illustrates Ezekiel's easy mastery of free verse as early as the early sixties. With its matter-of-fact opening ("I remember the night my mother/ was stung by a scorpion"); its use of repetition (. . . his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said./ May he sit still, they said./ May the sins of your previous birth be burned away tonight, they said."); its gentle comedy ("My father, sceptic, rationalist, trying every curse and blessing"/), it bids fair to remain a favourite with the common reader and the anthologist.

From "Poems (1965-1974)" we notice a lightening up in the movement of Ezekiel's verse. Concomitantly, he moves out of the study and incorporates language coming from the lips and pens of others. His hilarious, and slightly controversial, poems in Indian English are said to be based on what he actually jotted down of the speech of Gujratis speaking imperfect English, among them the Principal of Mithibai College, the source of "Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa, T. S." Also somewhat controversial are what I would describe as the poems of womanizing, like "Nudes 1978." Then there are the 'found' poems, derived from newspaper reports, and the 'poster' poems, which are more like collections of aphorisms. All in all, Ezekiel was undoubtedly the first major figure in Indian English poetry who found a resonant, authentic Indian voice. This would not have been possible without his existential commitment to the place of his birth:

I have made my commitments now.
This is one: to stay where I am,
As others choose to give themselves
In some remote and backward place.
My backward place is where I am.
("Background, Casually")

Of Ezekiel's other works, his plays have had a mixed reception, but probably deserve more attention than they have so far received. They are rather Shavian in their preoccupation with ideas, and in the absence of Shavian wit do not make for very successful theatre. His essays, represented in his Selected Prose, will always be relevant, especially the masterly "Naipaul's India and Mine," a subtly-textured argument that will enhance any reader's understanding of the complexities of South Asian reality. As poet and man of letters Ezekiel's position in any postcolonial canon is more than secure.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at the University of Dhaka.