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Chapter-I: Introduction

A.K.Ramanujan

Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born in Mysore in 1929. Like

most other Indian poets writing in English he is also bi-lingual. He wrote

both in Kannada and in English, and some of his finest works consists of

translations from Tamil and Kannada into English. He was a fellow of

Deccan College, Poona in 1958-59 and a Full bright scholar at Indiana

University in 1960-62. He was a lecturer in English literature in Quilon,

Belgaum and Baroda for eight years. Since 1962 till 1993, he was at the

University of Chicago, where he was a professor of Dravidian studies and

linguistics. Thus he was a voluntary exile from India. He had cut himself

off from his immediate native environment, but this has been a gain and

not a loss. His essential Indian sensibility has enabled him to go to

India’s past and his sense of Indian history and tradition is unique.

A scholar of Indian literature, A.K. Ramanujan wrote in both English and

Kannada. He wore many hats as a scholar and author, those of a

folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged

across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit and English. He

published works on both classical and modern variants of these literatures

and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.

A man of unique synthesis between east and the west, A.K. Ramanujan

recognizes the ingredients of both the experiences in his writings.

7

Ramanujan wrote poetry almost entirely in English. Reviewer Bruce king

called Ramanujan, along with two other Trans cultural poets, "Indo-

Anglican harbingers of literary modernism". (King, Bruce. Three Indian

Poets, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005 p. 12)

This description highlights several characteristics of Ramanujan's poetry.

His poetry is full of jarring realism and hints at a kind of confessional

style.

Poet, translator and a folklorist, A. K. Ramanujan was a multifaceted

genius. At a moment when he was emerging as a major voice of South-

Asian culture and language, his death in 1993 was all too sudden to

afford him time enough to put together his creative and critical output in

a coherent form. His wife and friends published his Collected Poems in

1995. This was followed by the publication of The Collected Essays of

A.K.Ramanujan in 1999. But there was so much left unpublished that

forced his editors to bring out yet another anthology of critical essays,

interviews and poems under a very unusual and somewhat enigmatic title

Uncollected Poems and Prose: A.K.Ramanujan.

According to Vinay Dharwadker, over the period of forty years

“A.K.Ramanujan pursued three distinct but simultaneous careers, each of

which was sufficiently productive, successful, and unique to seem like a

full time profession.”(Dharwadker, Vinay: A.K.Ramanujan: Author,

Translator, Scholar, The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry,

Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998 p. 29) His primary vocation

was that of a bilingual poet and intermittent fiction writer in English and

Kannada, the languages in which he published six books of poetry and

one of prose in his lifetime. Of these, The Striders (1966), Relations

8

(1971), Selected Poems (1976), and Second Sight (1985) established him

as perhaps the most consistent and memorable poet in the history of

Indian English Literature, where Hokkulalli Huvilla (Haikai; 1969) and

MattuItara Padyagalu (And Other Poems; 1977), both collection of

poems, together with Mattobbana Atmakate (Mattobbana’s

Autobiography; 1978), a novella, distinguished him as an innovative

writer in contemporary Kannada. At the time of his sudden death,

Ramanujan was working on two volumes of poetry, one each in English

and Kannada, and had begun tentatively planning his collected poems in

English.

Ramanujan’s second career was his professional occupation as a teacher

and scholar in several disciplines, first in India through most of the

1950s, in colleges in Baroda, Belgaum, Madurai, Pune, and Quilon, and

then in the United States after 1960, where, apart from his doctoral

studies at Indiana University and brief periods at institutions like

Carleton College and the University of Michigan, he worked at the

University of Chicago. In the classrooms and in his scholarly articles,

formal lectures, and conference papers, he ranged with effortless

expertise over linguistics, anthropology, the history of religions,

folklore, and literary studies, usually covering South Asian, British,

American, and European discursive traditions. His interdisciplinary

critical and interpretive engagements resulted in a number of influential

articles in the last ten years alone including ‘The Indian Oedipus’ (1983),

‘Telling Tales’ (1989), ‘Toward a Counter System: Women’s Tales’

(1991), and ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ (1991).

9

Bridging Ramanujan’s literary and scholarly careers was his third

vocation over four decades, as a translator who brought together an

unparallel variety of languages, texts, genres, literatures, historical

periods, and past and present cultures. He translated mainly from

Kannada and Tamil into English, but also, less extensively, from English

into Kannada and, with the help of the collaborators, from Malayalam,

Telugu, Marathi, and Sanskrit into English. He focused his attention on

verse as well as prose, rendering epic and classical poetry from the

ancient period (chiefly works composed between about 500 B.C. and 500

A.D.), early and late poetic texts from the middle period (from the eighth

to the eighteenth centuries), and poems, short stories, novelistic fiction,

and numerous folk tales from the modern period (the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries). His translations appeared in books, edited

anthologies, and periodicals, usually delighting and transforming his

readers with the material and quality of rendering and displacing existing

bodies of writing in English in unexpected ways and sometimes to a

radical extent.

Emmanuel Narendra Lall introduces A.K.Ramanujan’s career in the

following words: “As an Indo-Anglican poet, his creative work is limited

to three books of poems: The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), and

Selected Poems (1976); all these are Oxford University Publications. In

addition to his original volumes of poetry, Ramanujan has translated

from Tamil and Kannada, two Dravidian languages spoken in the

southern part of India. Three volumes of poetry, The Interior Landscape

(1967), Speaking of Shiva (1973) and Hymns for the Drowning bear

testimony to his genius as a translator. He has also translated a Kannada

novel, Samskara by U.R.Ananth Murthy. Ramanujan’s creative work,

10

both as poet and as translator, has drawn praise from the English

Speaking world. A note on the cover of his Selected Poems lists the

recognition his writing has received. The Striders won the poetry Book

Society recommendation, and one of his books of translation, Speaking of

Shiva, was nominated for the 1974 National Book Award in the United

States. Then it is not surprising that, among the Anglo Indian poets, he is

the most widely published. Many well known American poetry journals

and British Magazines ( such as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry(Chicago),

Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Encounter) have published his

poems, so has the Illustrated Weekly of India and Quest in India.” (Lall,

Emmanuel Narendra. The Poetry of Encounter. New Delhi: Sterling

Publishers Private Limited, 1983, p.42)

In India, Ramanujan’s contemporaries, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes,

and R. Parthasarthy “recognize his work as the best that Indo-Anglican

poetry has to offer. Ezekiel says that Ramanujan has enriched the Indo-

Anglican tradition of poetry, for Moraes he represents a sensibility which

is aware of the “world as it is”, and an Indo-Anglican poet whose

competence in the use of English language is of a high order. And from

Parthsarthy’s point of view, Ramanujan’s poetry possesses an individual

voice. Such critical approbation from contemporaries who are established

poets themselves, gives Ramanujan’s poetry an endorsement which it

richly deserves. His poems take origin in a mind that is simultaneously

Indian and Western; therefore they succeed in opening more passages to

India.” (Lall Narendra Emmanuel. The Poetry of Encounter. Sterling

Publishers Private Limited, New Delhi, 1983, p. 42-43)

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Wikipedia, a famous online encyclopedia, introduces A.K. Ramanujan by

noting that his “modernist style include an almost jarring realism and

hints at a kind of confessional style. While reviewer Geeta Patel agrees

with King’s description of Ramanujan’s work, she faults King for failing

“to plumb the ramifications of exilic writing and the reconstruction or

retrieval of the fantasies of tradition… that are characteristics of writing

in a postcolonial transnational world” (Patel, 1992:961). Themes of

hybridity and transculturation are highlighted in the poetry of

A.K.Ramanujan.” (www.wikipedia)

The famous poet-critic R.Parthasarthy comments on the poetic world of

A.K.Ramanujan by highlighting his Indian and American experience:

“His Indian experience repeatedly features in his verse, and is often

precisely repeated in its original setting. But his American experience

seems less frequently to impinge on his verse or, for that matter, round

off anomalies in his obviously Hindu outlook, India and America tend to

exist separately, and come together, however, only at a time of personal

crisis explored... Ramanujan writes, ‘English and my disciplines

(linguistics, anthropology) give me my outer forms- linguistic, metrical,

logical and other such ways of shaping experience; my personal and

professional occupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore

give me my substance, my inner “forms”, images and symbols. They are

continuous with each other, and I no longer tell what comes from where.

His poems are like the patterns in a kaleidoscope, and every time he turns

it around one way or another, to observe them more closely, the results

never fail to astonish.” (Parthasarathy, R. Ten Twentieth-Century Indian

Poets. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 95-96)

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In order to view the poetic genius of A.K.Ramanujan, Bruce King

compares the three major poets of the flock, namely Nissim Ezekiel,

Dom Moraes and A.K.Ramanujan .Bruce King writes that, “There are

large differences in manner, style, perspective, and opinion between the

three poets. Ezekiel, raised in a secular Jew, was a product of the modern

world and Bombay. Moraes, raised as a skeptical Roman Catholic, was

influenced by many tiers of living in England and other countries. It is

easy to forget he was Indian. A.K.Ramanujan, who was raised in a family

that was modern and traditional South Indian Brahmin, carried memory

of older India to America where he lived for many years. While being

very much part of the world of modern ideas, international travel, and

rapid cultural changes, Ramanujan was also concerned with his

Indianness, not in revivalistic manner, but as a past from which he grew,

a past which remained part of himself. He did not sentimentalize his

Indianness and at times seemed to regard it as a plague, but it was there

whether he wanted it or not. If his consciousness of being part of an

Indian heritage is different from that of Ezekiel or Moraes, he was, of the

three, the most influenced by and most apart of modernist poetry. He is at

the other extreme from Moraes’ romanticism, use of older literary

conventions, ease in British tonalities, and lack of interest in Indian

ness.”(King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets, New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1991 p. 10)

Ramanujan was very much a modern poet, instinctively ironic, and had a

mind packed with a wide variety of ideas and information. An intellectual

at home with the latest concepts and theories, he was also concerned with

Indian philosophy and literature, with family relations in India, and with

himself as someone moulded by a wide variety of influences. His

13

Indianness is a part of his past, the seed from which he grew and to which

he remained inextricably linked as he changed and developed. Often such

links are childhood fears, the beginning of some anxiety, disenchanted

memories of family. There might also be themes from Indian classical

literature. His poetry is rich in images and cultural echoes as words

reflect and interact with other words to bring to in a wide variety of

associations from more than one culture and from various historical

periods.

While evaluating the poetics of Ramanujan, Bruce King terms him

‘difficult’ poet. He writes that, “…Ramanujan can be ‘difficult’, even

when the literal meaning is clear. While his poems are marvels of

technique they can feel harsh, angular, muscular, hurried in movement,

sardonic in tone. The poems are also difficult to discuss as they blend the

psychological and the philosophical, and are rich in ironies, allusions,

references. They are economical, compressed, and multi-layered.

Ramanujan is aware of both modern European and Indian poetics; this

makes some of his poems a house of mirrors in which the meanings is

likely to change according to the perspective brought to them. The poems

are usually structured around some narrative, argument, moment of

feeling or insight, but they have been so revised, worked, crafted,

polished and made into an artifice (Ramanujan was known to revise a

poem through fifty or sixty drafts) that they can take a rich complexity of

allusions, resonance, and implication. Many critics and Indian poets,

including Ezekiel, consider him the best Indian poet but he has not had

the same general recognition and following as Moraes and Ezekiel,

except for his translations from classical Tamil and Kannada. Unlike

Moraes and Ezekiel he is a trilingual poet, influenced by Indian poetry

14

and poetics.” (King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets, Oxford University Press,

New Delhi, 1991 p. 94)

Thus the multifaceted personality like A.K.Ramanujan is bound to be a

complex poet. There are chances of one aspect of career mingling and

over influencing the other. After looking at the kind of work published by

Ramanujan, he can be categorized as following:

Ramanujan as a poet: This aspect will be discussed in detail in the

course of the thesis.

His contributions to South Asian Studies: In the famous essay

titled as “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”, Ramanujan

discusses between “context-sensitive as opposed to context free.”

(www.wikipedia)

Folklore Studies: The theme of cultural sensitivity does not appear

only in the cultural essays of Ramanujan, but also appears in his

writing about Indian folklore and classic poetry. In “Where Mirrors

are Windows”, (1989) and in “Three Hundred Ramayanas” (1991),

for example, he discusses the “intertextual” nature of Indian

literature, written and oral. By this, he means that Indian stories

refer to one another and sometimes to other versions of the very

story being told. He says, “What is merely suggested in one poem

may become central in a ‘repetition’ or an ‘imitation’ of it.

Mimesis is not only mimesis, for it evokes the earlier image in

order to play with it and make it mean other things.” As a scholar

and translator of works in the South Indian languages Kannada and

Tamil, Ramanujan worked to make non-Sanskrit Indian literature

acknowledged in the realm of South Asian Anthology (1967),

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Speaking of Shiva (1973), Hymns for the Drowning (1981), and A

Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India. (www.wikipedia)

Sociolinguist Theorist: Ramanujan’s work as sociolinguistic also

speaks about the critique of Sanskrit Indology. As shown in his

1964 essay with W. Bright, ‘Sociolinguist Variation and Language

Change’, Ramanujan opposes those who would posit a monolithic

standard grammar for Indian languages. Rather, he seems to

legitimize the vast variety of linguistic dialects found in India.

Specifically, here, Ramanujan and Bright compare a Brahmin

Tamil dialect with a non-Brahmin Tamil dialect. The Brahmin

dialect, they found, was mush more influenced with Sanskrit loan

words and styles, whereas the non-Brahmin dialect tended to shift

by innovation on existing phonologic and morphologic features

rather than by foreign adoption.

NISSIM EZEKIEL

The story of Nissim Ezekiel’s life and role as a founding father of Indian

English poetry is now well known and is, at times, the material of

romance. Before Ezekiel the main energies of Indian writing in English

were those of an older generation of novelists who began writing during

the National Independence movement with its emphasis on such

supposedly national themes as the rural laborer, spirituality, and the

classic tradition. The same applies to poetry as well, as Bruce King

comments that “Pre-independence poetry in English shared many of such

concerns- for which modern poetry, with its emphasis on lyricism,

intensity, economy, expressive form, purity of language, image and art,

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was unsuited. Consequently most Indian poetry before Ezekiel was old

fashioned, Victorian, amateur, either public political declamations or

spiritual guidance, more a hobby than an art.”(King, Bruce. Three Indian

Poets, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991 p. 2-3)

Nissim Ezekiel comes from a Jewish family who had long ago migrated

to India and settled down in Bombay. Nissim Ezekiel was born in 1924 in

that city. Both his parents were teachers, the father in a college and

mother in a primary school. After finishing school, Nissim Ezekiel went

to college and there he stood first in M.A. English examination of the

Bombay University in 1947, a distinction for which he was awarded the

R.K.Lagu Prize. Then for a short period he worked as a lecturer in

English at Khalsha College, Bombay. The next stage in his life came with

his departure for England for higher studies. He spent three and half

years in London. During his stay there he evinced a great interest in the

cinema, in the theatre, and in art (namely painting). He also studied

psychology and philosophy. However, he had shown much greater

interest towards literature; and during his stay in London, he published

his first volume of poetry under a title A Time to Change in 1952. It is

interesting to note that this volume of poems was published by an English

firm publisher. In the same year Nissim Ezekiel returned to India and,

having no money, took up a menial job on an English cargo ship to pay

for his passage.

Ezekiel has such an interesting life, personally as well as professionally

as a poet that it would be fruitful to go through his life chronologically:

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1924: December 16, born in Mumbai to Moses and Diana.

1934: Admitted to the Convent of Jesus and Mary.

1937: Admitted to Antonio Desouza High School.

1941: March, matriculous from Desouza High School. June, Wilson

College, University of Bombay,

1945: August 21st, B.A. First-class Honors in English, Wilson College,

university of Bombay. Teaches at Hansraj Morarji Public School,

Andheri.

1946: Theatre group formed by Sultan Padamsee in Bombay; Nissim

Ezekiel joined the group on his return from England.

1947: First Class M.A., University of Bombay; wins the R.K.Lagu

Prize for standing first in Bombay University in English literature.

Lectures at Khalsa College till 1948.

1948: November, leaves for London with Ebrahim Alkazi.

1951: Enrolls for a course in Philosophy at University of London.

1952: Returns to Bombay employed as deck-scrubber and coal-carrier

aboard a cargo ship carrying arms to Indo-China. A Tlme to

Change and Other Poems, Fortune Press, London. Sub-editor, The

Illustrated Weekly of India, Bombay. On 23rd

November marries

Daisy Jacob Dandekar. Regular broadcasts on Art and Literature

for the Bombay Station of All-India Radio, till 1962.

1953: SixtyPoems published by the author.

1954: Resigns from The Illustrated Weekly of India. Joins Shilpi

Advertising, Bombay, as a copywriter. Theatre Group splits,

Ebrahim Alkazi and Nissim Ezekiel form Theater Unit.

1955: Founder editor of Quest, ‘a journal of Arts and Ideas.’

1956: Promoted manager of Shilpi. Six months marketing training

practices for Shilpi in New York City.

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1957: Resigns as editor of Quest, but unofficially continued to edit the

journal till 1960.

1959: Resigns from Shilpi and joins Chemould Frames as Manager.

Published The Third.

1960: Published The Unfinished Man, Writers workshop, Calcutta.

1961. Associate Editor of Imprint, for which he wrote the entire book

review section till 1967. Appointed Head of English Department,

Mithibai College.

1962: Art critic for The Times of India till 1967.

1963: Elected Honorary secretary-Treasurer, The P.E.N. All-India

Centre, Bombay, till1965.

1964: Visiting Professor at University of Leeds till 30 June. Editor,

Indian Writers in Conference, The Sixth P.E.N. All-India Writers’

Conference, Mysore, 1962.

1965: Published The Exact Name, Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Editor,

Indian Section for Poetry of the Commonwealth, London. 2nd

edition of The Unfinished Man. Editor, An Emerson Reader,

Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Editor, Writing in India: The Seventh

P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Lucknow, 1964.

1966: Founder-Editor of Poetry India, a quarterly, edits the journal till

June Publishes Gieve Patel’s Poems.

1967: Visiting Professor, University of Chicago, delivers five lectures on

Indian Writing in English.

1968: Conducts art appreciation courses for J.J. School of Art and Sophia

College, Open Classroom, Bombay.

1969: Three Plays, Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Nalini staged in

Bombay in Marathi translation and in English. Editor, A Martin

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Luther King Reader, Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Appointed

Poetry Editor, The Illustrated Weekly of India till 1971.

1972: Resigns from Mithibai College for a Readership at University of

Bombay in American Literature. Editor, All My Sons by Arthur

Miller, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

1973: Publishes Chaman Revri’s Collected Poems. ‘Sight and Sound’,

The Times of India weekly T.V and Radio column till 1978.

1974: Editor, Indian section of World Poetry in English, London. Invited

to read his own poems by the United States government on the

International Visitor’s Program. The Actor, a sad funny story for

children of most ages published.

1975: Tour of Australia, reading his poems under the Indo-Australian

Cultural Agreement of 1971. Exhibition of ‘Passion Poems and

Posters’ at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Bombay. Collaborates with

Vrinda Nabar on a translation from Marathi of Snake-Skin and

Other Poems of Indira Sant: Bombay: Nirmala Standard

Publishers.

1976: ‘Special Nissim Ezekiel Issue’, Guest-edited by Inder Nath Kher,

Michigan State University: Journal of South Asian Literature.

Hymns in Darkness, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, New

Poetry in India series.

1978: Invited to read his poems at Rotterdam International Poetry

Festival.

1980: Editor, Freedom First, a political monthly till 1983.Editor, Rajaji

Reader, Madras: Vyas Publications.

1982: Latter-Day Psalms, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, A New

Poetry in India Series. Art critic for Mid-Day, Bombay, till 1983.

20

Appointed Professor of American Literature, University of

Bombay.

1983. Invited to read his poems at the Edinburgh Book Fair. Receives

Sahitya Akademi Award for Latter-Day Psalms. Art critic for The

Afternoon Despatch and Courier, Bombay, till 1985.

1984: Keynote address for Seminar on Commonwealth Literature,

Marathwada University, Aurangabad. Retires from University of

Bombay.

1985: Nalini staged at various places.

1986: Editor, The Indian P.E.N. Appointed International Chairman of

British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

1987: Preview of ‘Picture of a Poet: A Portrait of Nissim Ezekiel’

scripted and directed by Jane Swamy, photography Gerry

D’Rozaria.

1988: Receives Padma-Shri from the President of India.

1989: Collected Poems 1952-1988, with an Introduction by Gieve Patel,

New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Don’t Call It Suicide,

Madras: Macmillan, India.

1990: Another India, the best of fiction and poetry from Vagarth,

selected and edited by Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee,

New Delhi: Penguin Books, India.

1992: Selected Prose, with an Introduction by Adil Jussawalla, New

Delhi: Oxford University Press.

1998: Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and hospitalized. Mapping Cultural

Spaces: Postcolonial Indian Literature in English, Essays in Honor

of Nissim Ezekiel, edited by Nilufer Bharucha and Vrinda Nabar.

21

2004: January 9, dies of a lung infection. (Anklesaria, Hanovi (ed).Nissim

Ezekiel Remembered, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008 p. xvii-

xxiii)

Ezekiel's poetry is both the instrument and the out come of his attempt as

a man to come to terms with himself. One finds in the poems the imprint

of a keen, analytical mind trying to explore and communicate on personal

level feelings of loss and deprivation. After Furtado, Ezekiel is the only

poet to have seriously considered the use of Pidgin English.

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. This was a

period marked by alienation with all the attendant social and political

upheavals. There was a cross current between an unwillingness to let go

of the Raj legacy and a quaint exotic supposedly native use of language

in the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Nissim Ezekiel can be termed as an

Indian English poet coming in terms with the self and surrounding amidst

the growing urbanization and modernization. In true sense of the term,

Nissim Ezekiel is urban poet who observes the urban sensibility, urban

expectations and their nuances in the language which is a part and parcel

of their day-to-day living, enjoying and suffering. Thus while A.K.

Ramanujan offers the quest for self and Indian Ethos in a bit globlized

manager, Nissim Ezekiel offers the localized picture of it.

More than writing poetry, as the Chronology suggests, he made other

writing poetry. A large proportion of the significant history of modern

22

Indian poetry in English was made by or has some connection to Ezekiel.

He founded, edited, opened the way to, and had influence with the better

magazines and presses which published poetry. Many of the best poets

were his friends, students or discoveries. He wrote influential book

criticism, reviews, recommendations; he greatly expanded the cultural

space for modern poetry and for the modern arts. He was one of the

better modern Indian dramatists in English, a critic of art, music and

dance in Bombay. In the world of increasingly narrow specializations he

showed that it is possible to be a poet, man of letters, and an intellectual

actively engaged with culture and politics. In this regard Bruce King

opines that, “His most important contribution was in the idea that poetry

is a discipline which takes a larger share of one’s life and is not a hobby

for amateurs. His own life was an example. He self published poetry in

English, he started magazines, he advised magazines, he wrote criticism,

he helped and promoted other poets, he kept writing, was part of the most

significant publication circles, demanded higher and higher standards,

and generally created a cultural space and network of English-language

poets with connections to modern poetry in the other Indian languages

and to the non-establishment political-intellectual scene. As a social

democrat, Ezekiel was often in the forefront of those concerned with

preserving personal liberties against both reactionary and government

forces.”(King, Bruce; Three Indian Poets, New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1991 p. 3)

With Ezekiel, Indian English poetry started on a new basis rooted in what

were felt to be the traditions of modern poetry, as reformed by

W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W.H.Auden, using contemporary

urban images, language and concerns. The feelings were personal,

23

expressed in tonal ironies and with a complexity of emotions and

consciousness. Ezekiel aimed at preciseness of image, conciseness, and

exactness of language, feeling, and poetic form.

In 1974 Chetan Karnani’s book Nissim Ezekiel appeared in Arnold-

Heinemann’s Indian Writers’ series; but the poet still did not have the

publisher. That soon changed. A special issue of the American Journal of

South Asian Literature (Vol.II, 3-4, 1976) was devoted to his poetry and

critical studies of his work. In 1976, Oxford University Press began its

New Poetry in India series, which included, among the first six books,

Ezekiel’s Hymns in Darkness and Parthasarathy’s Selection of Ten

Twentieth- Century Indian Poets in which Ezekiel has a prominent place.

Ezekiel’s poetry is essentially the poetry of struggle: struggle with self,

struggle to come to terms with the outer and inner. But, eventually the

struggle is expressed more in an ironic tone than in a tragic note. There is

less frustration and more depiction in the poetry of Ezekiel. Bruce King

remarks that, “Over the decades Ezekiel’s poetry recorded various phases

of a struggle between personal desires and the wish to be a responsible,

rational member of the society. Perhaps one reason for the low quality of

his poetry after Collected Poems was that in the 1990s he became

obsessed with helping others. He became guruish in treating things of this

world as vanity; he was concerned with social harmony and the need to

avoid humiliating others. Although this might be thought fashionable

political correctness, it also was the effect of ageing and the desire to

avoid conflict. He had never separated from the Bene Israelits with whom

he identifies he felt outside an increasingly Hindu India.”(King, Bruce.

Three Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991 p. 7)

24

Shakuntala Bharvani appreciates “a certain magic” that Ezekiel possessed

which drew people to him. She notes that, “He selected poetry for

publishing houses and helped publish the work of others. His office on

the ground floor of the Theosophy Hall, Marine Lines, Bombay, literally

opposite Churchgate Station, which he used as Secretary of the PEN All

India Centre and the Editor and the Publisher of its magazines for several

years, was accessible and open to all. He was always “there”, hospitable

and warm. And just in case he wasn’t in, one knew one could wait.

Unlike “Godot” he would definitely turn up, unless he was out of

Bombay for a poetry reading session or lecture series.”(Bharvani,

Shakuntala. Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008 p. x)

The quotations cited below are good examples to describe the persona of

Ezekiel. They are from Ezekiel’s interview with Indu Saraiya, which she

conducted soon after the announcement of the Sahitya Akademi Awards

in 1983:

1. “I was lucky in having parents who were both educationists. My

father was Professor of Botany and Zoology at the Wilson College

and my mother founded her own school in Mazgaon of which she

was the Principal till she died. We were a close knit Jewish family

of three brothers and two sisters…”

2. “My friend, Ebrahim Alkazi-yes, master-builder of the National

Drama Academy- met me one day and said, ‘Why don’t we go to

England?’

I replied: ‘It’s all very well for you, Elk, but what about me, where

do I get the fare from?’

25

The next day, Alkazi came over again, this time with two boat

tickets in his hands and said: ‘Here you are-there’s one ticket for

you and one for me.’

So with 10 pounds in my pocket, and the exuberance and optimism

of youth, I boarded the Jal Azad.”

3. “I joined Shilpi Advertising as copy writer and in the earlier part of

the mornings I edited Quest, the sister magazine to Encounter. I

also wrote a great deal of literary and art criticism, the latter of

which Alkazi taught me, though he never cared to write for

himself. During my five years at Shilpi I Was elevated to

Manager’s position, and then sent to America to study their hard

sell techniques. But I learnt more about art and other things than

about advertising…”

4. “In 1972, a vacancy arose in the post graduate department of

English of Bombay University; I was invited to become a reader in

American Literature. I was only too happy to accept…I conducted

an advance course for teachers at Hyderabad every year and go to

Goa annually as a visiting Professor. I have been abroad to

Australia and Hawaii.” (As quoted by Bharvani, Shakuntala.

Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008 p. xxiii-xxiv)

Ironically, the poet who wrote in an ironic tone, his last years were ironic

as well. Living alone, rejected by his wife who felt he had earlier

abandoned her, he experienced the problems and diseases of ageing. R.

Raj Rao’s Nissim Ezeliel: the Authorized Biography (2000) documents

the final decade and the personal circumstances. Despite being

internationally famous Ezekiel was impoverished, frightened, poorly

dressed, smelled badly, and lived in filth. He had avoided medical

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doctors and used health cures; although by 1994 he was suffering from

Alzheimer’s disease it was not diagnosed until 1998 when he was placed

in a nursing home where he spent his final years.

By the time of his death Ezekiel’s place and contribution to Indian

literature and culture were clear. The obituaries, reminiscences, and

homages spoke of him as a nationalist, recalled his decision to return to

India, and that unlike many Indian Jews he had not moved to Israel, how

he had forged a contemporary poetic language for Indian poetry in

English, and his contribution to the intellectual life of the nation,

especially in Bombay. A year after his death a national conference to

discuss Ezekiel’s role in Indian culture was held at Benares University.

And it was very much obvious. When asked by John B. Beston that

“writing in English in India, would you see yourself essentially an Indian

poet, or a world poet?” Ezekiel answered, “I see myself essentially as an

Indian poet writing in English.” (As quoted by Chindhade, Shirish. Five

Indian English Poets. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors,

2001 p. 30)

In other words, the desire to fit in the native tradition and to belong to

the native scene is explicit. One more reason to believe so is his explicit

declaration:

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. (CP, p. 181)

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Another Ezekielian comment further clarifies the relationship with India:

“I am not a Hindu, and my background makes me a natural outsider;

circumstances and decisions relate me to India.”(R. Parthasarathy, “Indo-

Anglican Attitudes,” TLS , March 10, 1978, p.285) These two statements

point to a conscious decision on Ezekiel’s part to speak from within

India.

In her ‘Preface’ to the Second Edition of Collected Poems, Leela Gandhi

also discusses the ‘Indianness and nation-love’ of Ezekiel. She notes that

“Both are amply manifest in the writings of Ezekiel, as elsewhere in

accomplished Indo-Anglican poetry, but never as themes that constraints

the impulse toward empathy and heterogeneity. To be cosmopolitan in

the poetic dispensation to which I have been referring is above all to

claim, as Ezekiel once did in his famous rejoinder to Naipaul’s An Area

of Darkness, the privilege of having a ‘skeptical’ love for one’s own

country, being witness to its exclusions…”(Gandhi, Leela. ‘Preface’,

Collected Poems of Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,

2004, p. xvii)

Emmanuel Narendra Lall gives the accounts of different critics who

“seem to agree that Ezekiel’s poetry is a personal quest for identity,

commitment and harmony in life.” He quotes many critics as the

following: “Linda Hess says that Ezekiel strikes her as “an endless

explorer of the labyrinths of the mind, the devious delving and twisting

of the ego, and the ceaseless attempt of man and poet to define himself,

to find through ‘the myth and maze’ a way to honesty and love.” Michael

Garman remarks, “He is a poet of whom it is not trivial to say that his

28

poetry and his life are inextricable, and whose purpose in writing is to

make a harmony out of purely biological fact.” Similarly, Chetan Karnani

observes in Ezekiel’s poetry a “first hand record of life’s growth.”

Another critic who notices a close relationship between Ezekiel’s life and

poetry is V.A.Shahane, and for him Ezekiel is “primarily a poet seeking,

sometimes in vain, other times unsuccessfully, a balance between an

existential involvement with life and an intellectual quest for

commitment.” Also, H.M.Williams in his survey of Indo-Anglican poetry

draws our attention to Ezekiel’s pursuit of self-discovery through poetry.

He says Ezekiel uses his “poems as experiments, he seeks to dive deep

into the psyche, into his own psyche.”(Lall, Emmanuel Narendra. The

Poetry of Encounter. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited,

1983 p. 66-67)

On the other hand, Adil Jussawalla groups Ezekiel’s poems under two

categories as “those which are portraits, descriptions of people, and

encounters with them which generally end in impasses of depressive

regularity; and those which deal directly with his subjective state at times

of personal crisis.”(Jussawalla, Adil. The New Poetry JCL, 5 July 1968 p.

23)

Ezekiel loved Mumbai like anything. He sang of the city in his poetry.

Bruce King writes in this regard that “Like Baudelaire’s Paris or Eliot’s

London, his Bombay was archetypical of modern experience in contrast

to the spiritualism and peasantry that had been the focus of much Indian

writing. He explored his own experiences and the world he knew. After

he showed how to write in a contemporary voice about modern India

without resorting to clichés and stereotypes, it became possible for other

29

poets to write about more varied experiences. He was not, however,

someone who broke the mould of art to make it radically new; rather he

showed how contemporary poetry in Indian English could use traditional

forms of verse and metrics and that free verse need not be shapeless and

without rhythm. During the decades when English language poetry in

India needed an example of serious commitment to its practice, he was

the main influence.” (King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets. New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 8-9)

Positioning Ezekiel in the Indian literature scene, Kaiser Haq said that

“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 essential commitment to the place of his birth.” (As

quoted by King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1991, p. 9) Keki Daruwalla noted that “He showed

others the way how to break the pseudo-spiritual, pseudo-philosophical

poem brimming with sonorous Miltonicisms’ that was Aurobindo’s

influence”. (As quoted by King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets. New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 9)

John Theme, in an ‘Introduction’ to Collected Poems, remembers Ezekiel

for his individuality. According to him Ezekiel’s “considerable

contribution to the development of Indian poetic discourse and his

involvement with P.Lal’s Calcutta based Writers Workshop and other

venues that attempted to introduce precision of technique and modernity

of outlook should not cloud the originality and distinctiveness of his own

poetic output. He was, and is, one of the post-independence India’s finest

poets, and much of the strength of his writing lies in his individuality.

30

While his earliest vers bears the imprint of his European Modernist

influences, the more mature Ezekiel is a poet whose verse defies easy

categorization. His distinctive poetic practice on a range of traditions-

Judaic and Hindu, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern-to create a

highly personal Indian landscape, albeit one that also has broader

resonance as an embodiment of post-independence secularism.”(Thieme,

John. Ezekiel Nissim Collected Poems. New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 2004, p. xx-xxi)

Ranjit Hoskote has written well of the basic conflict between the need to

‘relish experience’ and the ‘traditional householder’s dharma’ which

‘provided his poetry with abiding themes.’ He notes that, “It was through

his negotiations with the fundamental question of language and

belonging that Ezekiel became the first modernist in Indian poetry in

English. Much of his poetry was a sustained meditation on the act of

poetry, its ability to testify to the experience, but much more vitally, to

act as a mode of knowledge. Ezekiel’s ruminative, sometimes almost

sententious tenor, his dry wit and self-deflating irony have attracted much

notice, few readers counterbalance these with the magnificently lyrical

moments when the poet achieves a searing insight into human frailty.”

(As quoted by King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1991, p. 9)

Summarizing the contribution of Ezekiel to the Indian English poetry,

Bruce King writes that “Ezekiel’s contribution to modern Indian poetry

and culture is on a larger scale than can be easily summarized. Through

example, encouragement, editing, teaching, and critical writing he

influenced the several generations of Indian poets who write in English,

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and whose poetics derive in some measure from him. Traits include a

personal voice, realism, moral consciousness, direct communication with

the reader, economy and precision of language and image, the poem as

feeling expressed through and filtered by thought concluding with

reflection or observation.”(King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets. New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1991 p. 10)

Shirish Chindhade, writing about the mood in the poetry of Ezekiel,

comments that “the mood is permanently one of self absorption,

inwardness, introspection: all roads lead to the city within, the city of the

soul. There is a consistent attempt at self-search and self definition. The

holy grail of the search is hidden within the soul and poetry affords

consolation in such a state of mind.”(Chindhade Shirish, Five Indian

English Poets. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2001, p.

30-31)