RECALLING NISSIM EZEKIEL: A POET OF THE MIND AND HEART (1924-2004)

NILUFER E. BHARUCHA

It was my good fortune to have known Nissim Ezekiel in several capacities – first, as a poet I had read and studied at school and at college; then, as a teacher, when I was doing my MA in English Literature. When I started teaching in the Department of English, I got to know him as a senior colleague at the University of Mumbai. Nissim, as a stern editor, was yet another facet of the man I got to know. This was when he asked me to send him some of my short stories for publication in the Indian PEN which he edited. Finally, he became a dear friend. It was also my privilege to have engaged Nissim in a long free- wheeling interview spread over weeks, which was then much condensed to become the preface to the Festschrift that we at the University of Mumbai had brought out in his honour.1 Unfortunately, by the time the book was released on 16 December 1998, Nissim’s 74th birthday, the brilliant mind was already being destroyed by the insidious Alzheimer’s. Nissim was ultimately confined to a small hospice for chronically ill patients and those of us who used to visit him in his little room at this hospice knew that the mind often wandered and he rarely, if ever, remembered our names, but he did know our faces and the welcoming smile was always there. Amazingly, when some of my students – “budding poets” as Nissim used to call them – visited him with their fledgling poems, he would give them a completely rational analysis of what he thought was right or wrong with their poetry. It is this man and his mind – even though damaged in the last few years of his life – which I recall.

1 “In Conversation with Nissim Ezekiel …”, in Mapping Cultural Spaces: Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Essays in Honour of Nissim Ezekiel, eds Nilufer E. Bharucha and Vrinda Nabar, New Delhi: Vision Books, 1998, 11-40. 100 Nilufer E. Bharucha

What I would also like to recall is the quality of Nissim’s heart, his childlike simplicity and enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life – like a good poem, a good plate of idlis, a piece of cake and a good cup of tea. These idlis and tea he would offer to all who visited him, taking them across the road from his Theosophy Hall office, to a small unpretentious Udipi restaurant. Here he would listen to their poems and also to the stories of their lives and sometimes offer cryptic comments, which Nissim when dwelt upon in solitude, revealed themselves to be rather sagacious wisdom. He never ever turned away anybody who had a poem to recite, a story to narrate. This quality of heart is also evident in his poetry which, however, is never tainted by sentimentality and is often well disguised in overtones and undertones of irony and self-mockery.

The poet of the mind While almost all of Nissim’s poetry displays a certain elegance and mental agility, it is in the poems written in the 1980s that we have some of the best examples of sharp wit, sophisticated irony and a brilliant quality of mind. Therefore, it is on the Latter-Day Psalms (1982) and Poems 1983-1988 that this section is focused. Nissim is one of the most studied and critiqued Indian poets in English. He is credited with having started the post-independence school of Modern Indian poetry in English. Indians have been writing poetry in English since the 1820s and these poets of colonial India such as Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu were influenced by the English Classical, Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian ethos. The poetry of Nissim and his contemporaries such as Dom Moraes was influenced by Modern poets such as Eliot, Pound and Auden. However, Ezekiel and Moraes had their own distinct voice as Kaiser Haq put it:

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.2

2 Kaiser Haq, “Placing Ezekiel”, The Daily Star, IV/237, 24 January 2004.