One hundred years of Nissim Ezekiel: What the poet’s life and work tell us about him

In the midst of various household tasks, a few pieces of paper would always fall in front of me, from the pile of books in my reading room. Like pages from the memory storage, I pick these souvenirs, dust them off and put them back again thinking that I can look at them in detail another day. Today, I can see the frail figure of a poet with a gentle demeanour through the pieces of paper that are tearing off. A letter of introduction that poet Nissim Ezekiel wrote for me, some thirty years ago. The poet who moved gently in the fast pace of the big city of Mumbai; The poet whom I met during my travels through the Jewish landscapes in Maharashtra as part of my research at Jawaharlal Nehru University. My main purpose then was to learn about the Jewish community and their cultural life. But Ezekiel spoke to me as a poet, as a representative of the city of Mumbai, as an Indian.

“I am an Indian first and foremost. I do not want to immigrate to Israel just because I was born in the Jewish community. I would not opt for it. But I look at the alienation of the Bene Israel community in that country seriously,” he said. This is a 1990s story.

There were lots of flowering plants and birds in his small nest-like apartment among the big concrete buildings, in the Mumbai metropolis. At that time, we called that residence “the nest of poetry”.

He spoke very little. As he wrote in his poem, “The best poets wait for words”.

“The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go 
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow”

— ‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’, by Nissim Ezekiel

After returning to Kerala, after almost a quarter of a century, I wrote a poem about the traces of Jewish life in Kerala, “Like the sparrow I am, without a nest and without a branch”. It has the legacy of a period that has become a part of my own life.

The beginnings

Ezekiel, then an English Professor and a prominent figure in Mumbai’s art and culture scene, was the India office-bearer of the PEN International Poetry Society. He has also worked closely with Ibrahim Alkazi in the field of theatre. He acted in and also wrote plays.

Nissim Ezekiel was born on December 16, 1924, in Mumbai in a Bene Israel Jewish family. His parents, the Talkars migrated to the city from their ancestral village in Alibaug. He studied literature at the University of Bombay and later went to London to study Philosophy. It is said that he returned from London after three and half years to India on a cargo ship, working as a deck scrubber.

Ezekiel had a brief stint with MN Roy’s Radical Democratic Party. He broadcasted on politics, art and literature. He was the founder editor of the Quest journal and also wrote about art for the Illustrated Weekly of India.

“Cosmopolitan sophistication, a genial temperament, social adaptability – these are not the sovereign ways to artistic growth. I have greater faith in primal energy and all the methods of acquiring it”, he wrote.

As an aesthetician of great taste and exposure to both painting and poetry, he wrote about his likes and dislikes indiscriminately. In his art reviews, we can see him admiring FN Souza, while despising his individualism, applauding Gieve Patel for his social commentary and decrying painters who merely imitated the Western and the Latin American art without learning anything from them.

The legacy

One of the founding figures of English poetry in post-independence India, Ezekiel won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for Latter-day Psalms. Ezekiel’s Night of the Scorpion is famous. His poems are included in school and university curricula. He translated poetry from Marathi to English. In 1988, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. Until his death on January 9, 2004, he remained a key figure in the cultural life in the city of Mumbai.

Though he chose English as the language to write, he was among the pioneers of post-independence English poetry who gave an Indian identity to it. We can see him playing with the Indian accent and idiom on the one hand and transgressing them into a universal language to deal with the human condition, on the other.

India, however, was not an entity for jingoistic adulation for Ezekiel. It’s akin to self-knowledge with its shortcomings, its complexities. Several of his poems on India are sceptical musings on the social reality, dealing with cynicism and wry wit.

As well as fame, criticism also came from his contemporaries. Poets like the late Indian English poet Jayanta Mahapatra of Odisha emanate a different imagination and regional cultural aesthetics from the Ezekiel line.

After my initial encounter with the outwardly simple-looking poet and his poems, it took several more years to come to an understanding of the many turbulences therein. Towards the end of his life, he battled with Alzheimer’s for a prolonged time.

“But residues of meaning still remain, 
As darkest myths meander through the pain
Towards a final formula of light…
What cannot be explained, do not explain”

— ‘Philosophy’ by Nissim Ezekiel

Poets do not die. Remembering their life and work is a tribute to India’s own diverse poetic cultural tradition. I cannot say enough how crucial these encounters were in shaping my life.

Sreekala Sivasankaran is a poet, author, scholar, essayist and translator.