1. Title of Research work

Existential Concerns in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel

2. Introduction

The advent of modernism in Indian English literature is one subject, an

adequate history of which still waits to be written. If the year 1914 was the

watershed that announced the herald of modernism in Europe, in India ,the

process was far more spread out.Looking back, in the post-colonial scenario

in Indian English Writing, the Romanticism and Victorianism of

Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Manmohan Ghose and the Mysticism of Sri

Aurobindo had outlived its relevance. Since, the Indian freedom struggle had

become a deep rooted nationalistic upsurge during this time, the prevailing

political and social conditions as well as the general emotional climate was

fertile for the growth of a typically romantic art. Technically, also, the pre-

Independence poetry shows the characteristics of derivativeness and lack of

concern with the significance of language and art in poetry.

The decades after independence saw a quickening in the shift-- from the then

prevalent poetry that engaged in dialogues with eternity to one that sprang

from a search for spiritual dimensions inside. Now the voiceless vacant found

a voice. The conventional sonnets and elegies made way for the blank verse

and modern idiom .The old imageries as well as attitudes metamorphosed

into a new language – the living language of Indian experience.

Little homogeneity existed amongst the Indian English poets who were

writing in this era on matters such as- views on life or poetry per se or even

in forms that ranged from formal metered to free verse. However,

camaraderie did exist, whose objective of defining and justifying its role was

fulfilled by The Writers Workshop founded in 1958. The declaration of Hindi

as the national language and the exclusion of English from the list of Indian

languages in this decade, further served as catalyst that brought the Indian

poets closer to each other-- to reaffirm their faith in English as a language

that they felt could play a creative role in Indian literature and a language was

at par with other Indian languages in its ability to convey the subtle nuances

of the native rhythms. In 1959,this commitment found itself adapted into a

revolutionary eight point “Kavita Manifesto”, edited by P.Lal and

K.Raghavendra Rao to define the realm of realistic poetry and set the tone

of poetry to come. In their modernist manifesto ,they announced at least two

notable principles.

In the first place, they declared for honesty of theme and accuracy of

expression. They conceived the first duty of the Moderns as being to

disembarrass poetry of its shadow of piety, and they rendered the service.

This was the modernism in Indian terms that implied both a radical criticism

of the past and a definite commitment to change the values of the future. It

was characterized by praise of non-conformism, courageous exploration and

confidence in the final victory of time and immanence over traditions that try

to appear eternal and immutable.

Their second principle followed--emphasizing the newness of the matter.

They were obliged to make their meters more elastic to accommodate their

novelties. Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history. Hence,

modernism was not historically but aesthetically forward.

The distance between the reader and the poet was narrowing down and the

stage was set for a change whereby, Nissim Ezekiel, as a mouthpiece of this

movement, establishes for himself a place and claim. As an original creative

writer of poetry in English in India, he not only was the voice of this new

creed but also the inspiration of poetry for many young poets.

While there is a formidable list of the modern Indian poets in English, the

poetry of most of the leading poets- Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, P. Lal,

Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel, A.K Ramanujan, R. Parthasarthy, Kamala Das,

Gauri Deshpande, Monica Verma, to name a few, lends itself to study as a

movement or a body of poetry for which self- probing and defining contexts

of self have been major concerns.

Ezekiel, the poetry czar of post- independence Indian-English Poetry was

born on 16 December, 1924 to Moses Ezekiel Talkar and Diana of Bene-

Israel Jewish descent in a chawl off Byculla Bridge in Bombay. His father

was a lecturer in Wilson College and mother, the founder of the school she

taught in. A living legend, whose interests ranged far and wide from

writing drama ,poetry-and-art criticism , as well as academics, poetry was

Ezekiel’s forte. His prolific poetic output , spanning over half a century

resulted in publication of eight volumes of poetry including the Akademi

Award winner “Latter Day Psalms”(1982).

Ezekiel’s work can be divided, from the technical point of view, into prose

poetry and verse. The bulk of his poetry is in free verse, but it includes

rhymed verse as well. His corpus also contains poster poems, poems meant

for singing and Indian English poems. The themes that his poetic corpus

embraces are many and varied. The versatility of the themes explored by

Ezekiel clearly leads one to the reflection of life’s impulses in them.

Ezekiel’s poetry derives all its sustenance from his immediate environment-

social, cultural, literary, political, aesthetic and most importantly, his own

mind - the inner environment, the self .The meaning springs out as integrity,

sincerity, authenticity, compassion and freedom of choice. A free

disseminator of thoughts, Ezekiel always defied totalitarianism, by denying

being fenced- in and defined purely in contexts of stalwarts like Pound,

Rilke or Eliot--an individualist to the core.

The objective of the proposed work is to study existential concerns in the

poetry of Ezekiel and how they stand reflected throughout his poetry. The

term existential will embrace all the human concerns , human spirit and

human actions in Ezekiel’s poetry .A poet on a voyage of discovery of an

authentic idiom and poetry being life itself for Ezekiel, this quest matures

into a voyage inwards. The term will also explore the philosophy of

Existentialism as it applies to Ezekiel’s poetry,

The term –Existentialism- was explicitly adopted as a self-description by

Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary

and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates—notably Simone de

Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus—existentialism

became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the

1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists

were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean

Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset and

Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov.

The nineteenth century philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich

Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Their views

existed more as a critical attitude towards common assumptions and

positions in traditional theology and philosophy. More specifically,

existentialism displays hostility towards abstract theories or systems that

propose to describe all of the intricacies and difficulties of human life

through more-or-less simplistic formulas. Such abstract systems tend to

obscure the fact that life is actually rather disorganised , often problematic.

For existentialists, there is no single theory that can contain the whole of the

experience of human life.

An existentialist viewpoint may be understood as the philosophical theory

which holds that whatever happens to us, is a consequence of our choices

and we must take responsibility for that — there is no way we can transfer

that to any other agency, human or otherwise.

This predominant feature strikes the discerning reader in Ezekiel’s poetry

where his sensitivity is found operating in response to the ethical,

cultural, literary and political scenarios and the poet emerges as - doubter,

interpreter, creator, silent thinker, communicator, innovator and messiah.

Ezekiel's views on love, religion and poetry are all connected with his ideas

on the state of man, his pangs of loneliness in "First Theme and Variations"

(Sixty Poems,1953) For him , human existence is characterized by Sartrean

‘nothingness’ where he surrenders to ‘the final void’ ’which would analyze

his errors’(“Nothingness” Sixty Poems, 1953).His existentialist ‘authenticity’

indicates a certain kind of integrity—not that of a pre-given whole, an

identity waiting to be discovered, but that of a self-defined role to which he

commits himself in his commitment in ” Background ,Casually”(Hymns in

Darkness, 1976)

The studies made on Ezekiel so far concentrate more or less on the stylistic

devices, thematic aspects, form and value of his poetry, in a segregated

manner or his poetic art in synthesis. Little has been done to contextualize

these aspects vis-à-vis his concerns about ‘existence before essence’. His

thoughts about human existence require new categories not found in the

conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought. Ezekiel’s “ Conclusion”

(The Third, 1958)proclaims that human beings cannot be understood as

substances with fixed properties or as subjects of an outside world

Just at this moment of extreme individualism, however, Ezekiel steps back

and reminds us that we aren’t isolated individuals but rather members of

communities and of the human race. There may not be a universal human

nature, but there is certainly a common human condition — we are all in this

together, we all living in human society, and we are all faced with the same

sorts of decisions. He advocates development, decision and defining of the

world through an engagement with oneself, the society, and the natural

world. (“Creation”, Sixty Poems, 1953)

Ezekiel unabashedly portrays critical moments where basic truths about

human nature and existence come crashing down upon him, upsetting his

preconceptions and shocking him into a new awareness about life in poems

like Psalm 151, Sixty Poems, 1953. These “existential moments” of crisis

then lead to more generalized feelings of angst. He exhorts absolute freedom

in the world. This freedom in turn produces anxiety and fear because,

without an essence, humanity is left alone and without an external source of

direction or purpose. Then for him , there is-

So much light in total darkness!/So much courage given beside the abyss.

(Hymns in Darkness,v.) .

The objective of this research works then is (a) to study closely the

instances existential concerns Ezekiel’s poetry(b) to gauge the ingraining of

existentialism in moulding and explaining the contexts of his poetic self.

3. Brief review of work already done in the field

A review of critical literature on the poet demonstrates that the five book

length studies that have appeared so far comprise of Chetan Karnani’s

Nissim Ezekiel(1974) in which a systematic graph of Ezekiel’s poetic

sensibility has been chalked out , A Raghu’s The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel

(2002) carries out a thematic and stylistic analysis of the corpus of Ezekiel.

Anisur Rehiman in his Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel

(1981)has dealt with the form and value in Ezekiel’s poetry. Harish

Raizada in his Nissim Ezekiel: A Poet of Human Balance

(1992)concentrates on the humanistic pre -occupations of the author. Sanjit

Mishra’s The Poetic Art of Nissim(Ezekiel 2001) provides rich glimpses into

the author’s poetic virtuosity.

There has been no dearth of critical interest in the works of this versatile

author. Qamar Talat in her paper “Nissim Ezekiel vis-à-vis His

Contemporary India”in Indian Writing In English ,Vol 1(Ed. Rama

Kundu,2003) enumerates and evaluates the glimpses of India that a reader

catches in Ezekiel’s works. M.K Pandey discovers Ezekiel’s concern with

finding meaning in life on his”Quest for Self-Realisation in Nissim Ezekiel’s

Poetry” in Indian Poetry in English (Ed. Birendra Pandey,2001) .A.K Sinha

captures “The Ontological Elements Ezekiel’s Poetry” in Indian Writings in

English,Vol 5( Ed.Manmohan.K.Bhatnagar,1994) .

There is a large number of researches on different aspects of the works

of Nissim Ezekiel, some of which are listed in the attached Bibliography.

Much has been written on various aspects that engage his poetry, however,

to the best of the researcher’s knowledge ,no other doctoral research work

has been completed on the theme of existential concerns in his work.

4. Noteworthy contributions in the field of proposed work

As mentioned above, there is little or no work dealing directly with the topic

of this proposed research work ,to the best of researcher’s knowledge.

However, there are a number of articles dealing with the idea of humanism

in Ezekiel’s work which are listed in the attached Bibliography.

A handful of critics have attempted to study and highlight the social

consciousness ,Indianness, quest for identity, humanism and inner conflicts

of some Indian poets like Pritish Nandy, A.K Ramanujan and Ezekiel.

Existentialism in the works of Nissim Ezekiel, however, has not been

explored separately. Since Ezekiel’s highly developed and projected

existential strains are the main feature in most of his poems, my study will

explore this feature in the poetry of the author.

5. Proposed Methodology of Research Work.

The proposed methodology for this research work is descriptive ,analytical

and comparative with other poets with special focus on the selected angle of

enquiry. Texts will be corroborated with current trends in Ezekiel’s

criticism. For the purpose of documentation, MLA Handbook for Writers

of Research Papers, Seventh Edition, will be followed.

6. Proposed Chapter –Wise Division of Dissertation

Chapter-1 Poetic credo of Ezekiel

Nissim Ezekiel will be placed in the historical background of Indian English

poetry and vis-à-vis his contemporaries and his predecessors. The credos of

these poets will be discussed in comparison to that of Ezekiel .

Chapter -2 Existentialism-Concept, Nature and Directions

The chapter will examine the meaning, nature and scope of existential

concerns and take existentialist themes as its basis . Existentialism is a

philosophical movement which emphasizes on individual existence, freedom

and choice. There are several philosophical positions that existential

philosophy adopts but the main identifiable common proposition, is that

existence precedes essence. By this, existentialism states that wo/man exists

and in that existence, wo/man defines her/ himself and the world in her/his

own subjectivity. S/he wanders between choice, freedom, and existential

angst .

Chapter- 3 Quest for ‘the Self’

The chapter will find answers to questions like-what it means to be a ‘human

being’ for Nissim Ezekiel. The theme of love ,problem of identity and self-

questioning will be discussed as predominant themes of this phase and their

echoes will be discovered in his poetry in the corpus of A Time To

Change(1952) ,Sixty poems(1953)) and The Third(1958) . His poetry will

be explored as the endeavours and outcomes of the poet in the quest and

evolution of his own idiom in poetry and will also compared and contrasted

with similar quests in other poets. Glimpses of existential angst,

abandonment and subjectivity will be highlighted.

Chapter -4 From Skepticism to Faith

In this chapter, an analysis of poetry from the corpii of The Unfinished

Man(1960),The Exact Name(1965) and Hymns In Darkness(1976) will

shed light on the poet’s stance as he is juxtaposed between an existential

involvement and an intellectual-theological urge to rise above it. The

exploration will show the achievement of the poet in reaching a holistic view

in which dualities are embraced .

Chapter- 5 Reconciliation of Conflicts

This chapter will journey along with Latter Day Psalms(1982) and the

Poster Prayers which culminate in an acceptance and affirmation which

endow him with an enlarged sympathy. The poet’s response to the

macrocosm and his decision to celebrate life despite its paradoxes will be

understood.

Chapter- 6 Conclusion

This chapter will sum up the findings of the dissertation and open up

avenues for further research.

Chapter- 7 Expected outcome of the proposed work

The thesis is expected to shed light on the existential concerns operating in

the works of Ezekiel and consequently enrich the understanding of what

goes into the making of poetry.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Nissim Ezekiel’s Works

A Time to Change, London : Fortune P, 1952.

Sixty Poems. Bombay : published by the author, 1953.

The Third. Bombay: Strand, 1958.

The Unfinished Man. Calcutta : Writers Workshop, 1960.

The Exact Name. Calcutta : Writers Workshop, 1965.

Hymns in Darkness. Delhi : Oxford UP, 1976.

Latter-Day Psalms. Delhi : Oxford UP, 1982.

Collected Poems 1952-1988. Delhi : Oxford UP, 1989.

Secondary Sources

Karnani, Chetan. Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi : Arnold Heinemann, 1974.

Kher, Inder Nath. “Introduction.” JSAL, 11.3-4 (1976) : 3-7.

____‘ “That Message from Another Shore” ’ :The EstheticVision of Nissim

Ezekiel.” Mahfii, 8.4 (1972) : 17-28.

King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Delhi : Oxford UP, 1987.

_______.Three Indian Poets : Nissirn Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes.

Madras : Oxford UP, 1991.

Kundu , Rama, Ed Indian Writing in English.New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003.

Misra, Sanjit. The Poetic Art of Nissim Ezekiel .New Delhi :Atlantic, 2003.

Naik, M.K Ed..Aspects of Indian Writing In English. New Delhi:

Macmillan,2006.

Pandey, Birendra . Indian Poetry in English, Atlantic: 2001

Paranjape, Makarand. Ed. Indian Poetry in English. Madras Macmillan, 1993.

Raghu, A. The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Atlantic,2008.

Rahman, Anisur. Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Delhi : Abhinav,

1981.

Rao, R. Raj. Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography. New Delhi : Viking-

Penguin, 2000.

Sarang, Vilas, Ed. Indian English Poetry since 1950 : An Anthology. Bombay:

Disha-Orient Longman, 1990.

Sartre,J.P.Existentialism ,tr, Bernard Frechtman.Oxford,UP, 1956.

Shahane, Vasant A. “The Religious -Philosophical Strain in Nissim Ezekiel’s

Poetry” JSAL, 11.3-4 (1976) : 253-6 1.

.

Existential Concerns in the Poetry of

Nissim Ezekiel

SYNOPSIS

Submitted for the the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English

By

Rinkoo Wadhera

under the Supervision of

Dr. Abha Pandey

Professor and Head

Department of English

Government Model Science College, Pachpedhi, Jabalpur

Rani Durgawati Vishvavidyalaya

Jabalpur (M.P)

PROFORMA FOR SYNOPSIS (Para-3)

1. Title of Thesis :...............................................................................

2. Introduction: Giving purpose : .............................................................................of research (in about 200 words)

..............................................................................

.............................................................................

.............................................................................

3. A brief review of the work already :.............................................................................

done in the field.

4. Noteworthy contributions in the :.............................................................................field of propose work.

.............................................................................

5. Proposed methodology during the .............................................................................

tenure of the research work.

.............................................................................

6. Expected outcome of the proposed : ..............................................................................

Research work.

.............................................................................

7. Bibliography in standard format :..............................................................................

...............................................................................

8. List of published papers of the :..............................................................................Candidate.

...............................................................................

Signature of the Supervisor Signature of the Candidate