Confiscate my passport, Lord
I don’t want to go abroad.
Let me find my song
Where I belong.

Born in Bombay to a Bene Israel family, Nissim Ezekiel, who died in 2004 at the age of seventy-nine, was among the most prominent of Indian poets writing in English. Ezekiel was revered as a mentor and father-figure by many younger poets, critics and novelists. For half a century, Ezekiel faithfully served his poetic muse, and nurtured the muses of many others, from his home in Bombay. The Bene Israel community, which traced its ancestry to a pre-Christian Era migration from Israel to Western India, was in Nissim’s youth well established in Bombay. Ezekiel’s parents were young professionals: his father Moses Ezekiel, who authored a history of the Bene Israel community, taught botany at a local college; his mother Diana was director of a lower school. At the end of his long career, Moses Ezekiel was a college principal; his wife Diana founded a Marathi school for the poor that she ran for thirty years until her death in 1974. Moses Ezekiel’s own father had joined the British Bombay Native Army, and after serving in the Boer War, taught in a local school in Maharashtra. This legacy of service was continued and enlarged upon by Nissim Ezekiel; he too was a life-long teacher.

Ezekiel’s life and work has been the subject of scholarly articles and an “authorized biography,” published in 2000. This essay will focus on the relationship between Ezekiel’s life and literary work, with special emphasis on the poet’s Jewish background and the evocation of that background in his writings – poems, essays, and criticism.

As a mentor of writers, as college professor, as secretary at the Indian Section of PEN, and as journal editor, Nissim Ezekiel – like his parents, was always teaching. Throughout his long life he was generous with his time to young aspiring writers. Joined to this commitment to education was an aversion to formality and to the triumph of the letter over the spirit. His early poetry was vehemently anti-puritanical and anti-bourgeois.

Like many of the children of Bombay’s intellectual elite, Ezekiel was educated at a Roman Catholic school, the Antonio de Souza High School. Students came from Muslim, Hindu, Parsi, Jewish and Sikh families. Ezekiel remembered his school fondly, and he credits his teachers with unwittingly leading them to learn about the various Indian religious traditions. “The Fathers used to say to the students that there was nothing at all in Hinduism. The Hindus, Parsis, Muslims all said, ‘What? There is nothing in Hinduism?’ So we started reading the Gita and the Upanishads…which I may not have done in the next ten years had the Fathers not said there was nothing in it.” (Prose, 163). It was in this Catholic school that the young Nissim discovered his vocation of poetry. Nissim wrote his first poem at the age of twelve. His teacher, shown the poem by a classmate of Nissim’s, praised the poem and the poet, and announced dramatically, “Listen all of you, we have a poet in the class.”
“I decided at that moment,” Ezekiel recalled forty years later, “whatever happens, I am going to write poetry, good, bad or indifferent.” (1979 interview, quoted in R. Raj Rao, 2002)
A year after this declaration, Nissim celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Bombay’s Rodef Shalom synagogue. This was India’s only Reform congregation. The services were conducted mostly in English and it attracted many in the educated Jewish elite. (See J. Roland, 1998, 270) In a 1997 interview, Ezekiel explained his parents’ choice of liberal Judaism in this way: “Quite early on, my parents moved from the normal synagogues to a new kind of institution which had come up and still exists. It used English for the prayers instead of Hebrew. Or if Hebrew was used, it was followed by an English translation… So we were part of a worldwide movement, which had organized this language change to the language used locally… I attended prayers and read about Jewish people, but was also part of a movement which tried to get us to define our own concepts of what modern religion was.” (De Souza, 1999, 8) The ‘normal synagogues’ that Ezekiel referred to were a number of Bene Israel congregations, foremost among them Magen Hasidim, where Nissim and his two brothers were circumcised as infants.

Nissim described his parents as ‘secular’, though the family attended the Liberal synagogue on the Jewish High Holidays. They spoke Marathi and English at home and used English in their professional lives, though Nissim was never to master conversational Marathi. The Bene Israel community was some thirty thousand strong at the time of Nissim’s birth. In Indian terms, this was a microscopic number. The Bombay census of 1921, conducted three years before Nissim’s birth, put the Hindu population of the city at 76%, the Muslim population at 19%, and the Jewish population at .06%. By the time that he returned from his sojourn in England in 1952, many of his extended family and childhood friends had moved to Israel and most of the Bene Israel of the Konkan villages had moved to Bombay. Nissim Ezekiel wrote that “my grandfather used to live in a west coast village. Then he moved to Bombay and urged other Jews to do so, but we used to go back to the village for long vacations.” (de Souza, 1999, 8) By the late 1950s, there were some twenty thousand Bene Israel Jews in India, and by the 1990s only some five thousand. Their reception and absorption into Israeli society was uneasy at best – and troubled and antagonistic at worst. In a well-publicized case of the early nineteen fifties, 137 Bene Israel emigrants to Israel, unhappy with their reception in the Jewish State, requested repatriation to India. Eventually, the Israeli government relented and arranged their passage back to India. (Within five years most of these people had returned to Israel or emigrated to the U.K.). Especially insulting to the Bene Israel was the Israeli Rabbinate’s skepticism about their claims to Jewish origins. The Rabbinate insisted that members of this ancient community “convert to Judaism” if they wanted to be considered Jews.

As the oldest records of the Bene Israel are from the eighteenth century, their actual history is shrouded in myth, and their claim to an unbroken tradition of Jewish practice has not been authenticated. The Bene Israel origin legend tells of an ancient shipwreck on the South West Indian coast from which seven Israelite men and seven Israelite women survived. Their descendants, who resisted absorption into the Hindu majority, fit into the caste system as oil pressers. As they did not work on the Jewish Sabbath, these “children of Israel” were known as Shaniwar Telis, those who refrained from oil pressing on Saturday. As Saturday is an inauspicious day in Hindu culture, the choice of this day as a religious holiday made a deep impression on observers. A medieval reference, which would seem to validate the Bene Israel origin tale is in an 1199 letter of the Jewish sage Maimonides. He refers to Jews living in India “who have nothing of religion except that they rest on Sabbath and perform circumcision on the eighth day.” (N. Katz, 2000, 92) But Maimonides might be referring to another group of Jews; the identification with the people who later called themselves Bene Israel is not definite. In Bene Israel documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they refer themselves as ‘Children of Israel’ and to the Jews from Muslim lands, Baghdadis and others, as “Jews.” In the twentieth century, the Bene Israel were more assertive in referring to themselves as “Yehudim,” Jews.

The first direct reference to the Bene Israel in modern times is in an 18th century letter from a Jew in Cochin to his trading partner in Holland. “They live in tents, they own oil presses, some of them are soldiers, they know nothing as regards their faith except to recite the Shema and rest on the Sabbath.” (Ibid, 91) That “some of them are soldiers” was a reference to the many Bene Israel men who served in the British Indian Army. As oil pressers, they were able to join the army. Farmers, linked to their land holdings, were not attracted to military service. In 1775 Hassji Diveker, a Bene Israel officer, was appointed Native Commandant of that army. He brought many Bene Israel into the officer corps and the regular forces. By the mid 1800s, there were hundreds of Bene Israel men in the army (see Ezekiel, 1948, 62-3). Their families remained in their ancestral villages and carried on their oil-pressing trade.

Nissim’s father, Moses, was one of the chroniclers of Bene Israel history in the modern period. Though his professional field was botany, he made this one foray into the social sciences. In his 1948 short book History and Culture of the Bene Israeli in India, Moses Ezekiel tells the story of his own Indian “tribe.” “Discovered” by Christian and Jewish travelers of the late eighteenth century, the Bene Israel eventually began to see themselves as members of a larger Indian Jewish community, one that included the Jews of Cochin and the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay. Baghdadi Jews first came to Bombay in the first decades of the eighteenth century as agents of the East India trade. In the nineteenth century, many of the Bene Israel moved up the West Indian coast to Bombay, where some worked for the East India company and others served the British Army in India. Nissim Ezekiel’s ancestors sprang from this Bombay community. Their interactions with the two other Bombay Jewish groups were fraught with ambivalence. The Baghdadis, who traced their lineage to the Judean elite of the Babylonian exile, were reluctant to confer full recognition on either the Cochini or Bene Israel Jews. These two groups, in turn, saw themselves as the older “original” Indian Jews. They were there long before the Baghdadis, and merited recognition as India’s “real” Jews.

Nissim Ezekiel, in his early twenties when his father researched and wrote his history of the Bene Israel, was brought up with the sense of the Bene Israel as India’s ‘original’ Jews. The young Nissim also had a keen sense of his family history. He knew that his father’s family were Bene Israel from the village of Tal, a few kilometers from Alibag, and that his grandfather had served in the Boer War as a soldier in the British Indian Army. His mother’s family were Bene Israel from Pune, where they were leaders in synagogue and community affairs.

The mid-nineteenth century conflict between the Bene Israel and the Baghdadi Jews would replay itself a century later in the State of Israel. For when in 1962 Bene Israel emigrants to the Jewish State sought full recognition as Jews (which would mean that they could gain automatic Israeli citizenship and marry Jews of other diaspora communities), Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, a Baghdadi, denied them this right. It was only after a two-year political struggle, in which some of the Bene Israel staged a hunger strike in front of the Israeli parliament, that the government and Rabbinate relented and declared the Bene Israel “acceptable” as full members of the Jewish community. But their earlier harsh treatment by the Rabbinate and the government left a residue of bitterness among Bene Israel Jews in both Israel and India. Baghdadi and Cochin Jews fared better in Israel; they were more easily integrated into the new society. The integration of the Bene Israel into Israeli society has not been easy. At present there are approximately sixty thousand Bene Israel in Israel. (They represent 90% of the world Bene Israel population.) More than most other immigrant groups in a country of immigrants, they struggle to maintain their culture within the Israeli Jewish melting pot.

In contrast to many Jewish writers of the first half of the twentieth century Ezekiel’s identification with Jews and Judaism was not a response to anti-Semitism. For as he often reminded his interlocutors, he had never experienced any anti-Jewish prejudice. In a 1996 interview, Nilufer Bharucha asked Nissim Ezekiel about his youth: “Was there any anti-Semitism at school? This was after all, the period when there was a distinct anti-Semitic movement in the world at large?”
Nissim Ezekiel: “Let me point out that even apart from schools and colleges, anti-Semitism did not exist in India. …Even the word anti-Semitism did not mean anything to me. And I tell people this when I go abroad as they inevitably ask questions about Judaism in India.”

If Nissim Ezekiel’s Jewish identity was not built on a reaction to prejudice, what then was it built on? One element was a sense of the continuity of the Jewish religious and cultural tradition from the deep past to the present. Ezekiel saw the Jewish community of the Bene Israel as part of Judaism’s religious history but outside of the traditions of wider Jewish cultural accomplishment: “The community existed at a peasant level in the early years and must have found it necessary to be isolated, for survival. It was small, insignificant and just about kept the rituals going. They spoke Marathi for a couple of hundred years, but they were not able to produce scholars, poets, or musicians, not even a theologian. Compare this with the American Jews. It can’t be an accident” Ezekiel’s visits to the United States had strengthened this positive impression of American Jewish life.

In Wilson College, Nissim Ezekiel was introduced to the ideas of M.N. Roy and his New Humanism. Roy’s opposition to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence in all situations spoke directly to Ezekiel. In the early nineteen thirties Roy actively opposed Fascism and contemplated armed opposition to Fascist violence. Gandhi’s advice to the Jews of Europe – to oppose Nazism by non-violent resistance – angered many anti-Fascists, both Jews and non-Jews. Ezekiel, as a Jew and a leftist, was very sensitive to this question, and it may have influenced him to accept Roy’s ideas. This political identification waned during Ezekiel’s three years in England. Once he returned to Bombay in 1952, Ezekiel remained politically unaffiliated.

Indian Poetry in English

Ezekiel, brought up with Marathi and English at home and educated at English-language institutions, gravitated naturally to English as his medium of poetic expression. It was in England that he wrote and published his first book of poetry, A Time to Change. Responding to those Indian nationalist critics of the nineteen eighties who condemned English as the legacy of Colonialism, Ezekiel said, “If they confront me, they say, ‘Why the hell do you not write in your mother tongue?’ Without grasping the historical situation which makes writing in the mother tongue impossible for me. In other words, I would have to stop writing altogether. And I prefer to go on writing in the language which happens to be the one in which I feel and think and live.”

Ezekiel’s friend, A.J. Ramanujan, poet, translator, and Indologist, was similarly harsh towards critics of Indian poetry in English. “I think a lot of controversy about Indian writing in English is mistaken. Some Indians wish to write in English and others accuse them of writing in English; both of them seem to believe there is choice in the matter. The question is not whether you wish to write or not, but whether you can. If you can, you will. And if you do, you must be judged by the results.”

A tradition of Indian verse in English developed in the mid-nineteenth century; in its early form and content much of it was imitative of English Romantic poetry. Significant English language voices of the first half of the twentieth century were Tagore and Aurobindo. After the Second World War, Indian poetry in English acquired a new voice and life. The revival came both from within India and from Indians living outside the country. Nissim Ezekiel, in London from 1949 to 1952 was a key figure in this revival. While living in London Ezekiel submitted some of his poems to literary journals. Poetry Quarterly, a prestigious journal, published some of them. His first book of poems was published in London in 1952 (Dom Moraes’ first book was published in London in 1957). Other Indian poets soon joined them and in the late 1950s and early 1960s English verse in India underwent a revival, much of it under Ezekiel’s direct influence. The issue of the appropriateness of English verse in an India aspiring to political and cultural autonomy was then the topic of lively debate. “Can real Indian poetry be written in English? In what sense is poetry now written in English in India, truly Indian?” This question was posed by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in 1962 (Indian Writers in English): On the possibility of finding “all-India language” other than English, Deb Kumar Das noted in that same period that “Sanskrit is dead, Hindi is a lexicographer’s fantasy, and although English is ‘alien’ it is at least a living language and can be shaped by creative minds not by grammarians or linguistic experts.” Three important twentieth century Indian poets were at the forefront of this shift to a new Indian poetry in English. Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan (born, respectively, to Jewish, Catholic, and Hindu families). Each poet underwent a period of apprenticeship in exile in England or the U.S. Ezekiel returned to India after three years in England. Moraes lived for thirty years in Europe before returning to spend his last decade in Bombay. Ramanujan, who went to the U.S. as a young man, spent the rest of his professional life there – most of it at the University of Chicago, though he did return to India for extended visits.

In terms of our discussion of Jewish poet Nissim Ezekiel’s poetry perhaps the most apt observation from the language debates of the nineteen fifties is Pradip Sen’s reference to the place of the English Bible in the Western Canon. “If the English language is suitable to express the sentiments and feelings of Jews two thousand years ago, I do not see why it cannot express Indian imagery and tradition.”

Ezekiel had a strong sense of poetry as a lifelong vocation. He built a life in literature that enabled him to produce a small book of poems every few years, with eight volumes of poetry in all. His aspirations were modest. He wanted to be recognized as a poet, but had no delusions of grandeur. After attending college at his father’s place of employment, Wilson College, Ezekiel received a master’s degree in literature from the same institution. Upon graduation, he taught English literature at Bombay’s Khalsa College (1947-48). The following year he traveled to London. Once there, he took a few evening courses in philosophy. (“Philosophy, Poverty and Poetry, three companions shared my basement room.”). His formal training in philosophy informed his poetry and prose – and it would later lead him to membership in the Bombay Philosophical Society. At Oxford Ezekiel studied with eminent philosopher C.E.M. Joad.

Ezekiel’s bohemian sojourn in post-war Britain is powerfully evoked in his first book of poems, A Time to Change, published in London in 1952. “I am corrupted by the world, continually reduced to something less than human by the crowd, newspapers, cinemas, radio features, and speeches. Demanding peace by men with grim warlike faces…” And, in “Encounter”, a prose poem which closes that volume: “The city pressed upon me; shops, cinemas and business houses spoke in unambiguous accents. Only the people said nothing.” This urban realism, which Ezekiel first developed in London, was a hallmark of his later poems about Bombay. In this first volume, Ezekiel placed himself within an ongoing transnational tradition of poetic expression:
“A poem is an episode, completed
In an hour or two, but poetry
Is something more. It is the why
The how, the what, the flow
From which a poem comes.” (13)

During his three years in London, Ezekiel immersed himself in the London poetry world. He went to many readings, made the acquaintance of many poets and read widely in English poetry and in a wide array of other topics. Offered a job in the India Office in London, Ezekiel worked briefly writing information booklets, but he soon quit a job he experienced as soulless. He would devote himself to poetry and philosophy, not to propaganda.

On his return to India Nissim Ezekiel supported himself in a series of jobs, including a stint at an advertising agency. By the early 1960s, he had created the persona of a public intellectual and journalist, in addition to being a poet and a professor of English and American literature. His poetry was often cited and quoted in representations of Bombay. In his poetry it is a city both vibrant and self-destructive. “The recurring note in Ezekiel’s recent poems is the hurt that urban civilization inflicts on modern man, deadening his sensibilities and dehumanizing him.” (Iyengar)
Nissim Ezekiel’s decision to return to Bombay in 1952 signalled a series of commitments:

Having returned to Bombay to stay for good Ezekiel sought a degree of normalcy and domesticity after his three bohemian years in London. He married Daisy Jacobs, a fellow member of the Bombay Jewish community (this was an arranged marriage.) He pursued an academic career (his father was then a professor of botany) and continued to write poetry. Service to the communities with which he was associated, both the community of Bombay poets and the Jewish community of India, was a pivotal commitment in the life Ezekiel forged for himself in the Bombay of the nineteen fifties. In the little that Ezekiel has written about his parents one senses that he was inspired to public service by their examples: “My mother was teaching Marathi. She deliberately moved out of an expensive school to a slum school, and she went on teaching there till her death… My father was a rationalist. He was a professor of Botany and took a great interest in his students.” (de Souza, 1999, 8) But like many with a commitment to public service, his relationship with his wife and growing children was somewhat troubled. Marriage soon proved a disappointment to both husband and wife. Ezekiel entered into a series of relationships with women in the literary and arts communities. He had embraced conventional domesticity, but had too wide a bohemian streak to sustain a conventional marriage.

On one level, his first volume’s opening poem “A Time to Change (to my Mother)” is a hymn to domesticity, or so it might seem at first reading. “To own a singing voice and a talking voice/A bit of land, a woman and a child or two…is all the creed a man of God requires.” Ezekiel contrasts this effort of “patiently build a life with these” to “The pure invention or the perfect poem… These are merely dreams; but I am human/And must testify to what they mean.” The sharp contrast between the daily and the exceptional, the conventional and the creative is a constant theme in Ezekiel’s poetry. The attempted resolution of this conflict became a theme in both his life and his work. In his poetry Ezekiel strives mightily for a resolution of opposites, literary and religious, and waits for poetic inspiration “and even/finds on a lucky day a metaphor/leaping from the sod.”

In this first volume of Ezekiel’s poetry Biblical references are to the New Testament. The title poem’s epigram is from the Book of Revelation, and the referent of the long middle section, “Something to Pursue” is the Crucifixion. Thus it is Christian imagery that informs Ezekiel’s early work, it is only later that Jewish themes figure largely in his poems. In his years in England, Ezekiel was very much under the sway of Eliot, Auden and Spender, each of whom used Christian themes and symbolism in their poetry. Ezekiel was too knowledgeable about the Jewish tradition and too loyal to his Bene Israel roots to fall into the “Judaeo-Christian” fallacy. After this more ‘Christian’ period, Ezekiel did not use religious imagery in his poems of the early and mid-sixties. After his LSD experiments of the late nineteen sixties Ezekiel returned to religious themes and imagery, with the Jewish tradition as his source.

Ezekiel’s 1953 collection Sixty Poems, includes two Old Testament referenced poems, “Psalm 151” and “Lamentation”. Both poems introduce us to Ezekiel’s technique of inverting and challenging conventional readings of Biblical narratives. This is reminiscent of English poet Robert Graves work of the nineteen twenties, including “David and Goliath” and “Jonah.” In these poems, the Biblical tale is retold with an unexpected ending. Goliath kills David and the whale does not save Jonah.

It is some fifteen years after the publication of his first poems, in the poems of the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties that Ezekiel emerges as an urban poet, the poet of Bombay. And it is there, in the Bombay poems, that Old Testament references and Jewish themes fully emerge. These poems appear in the volume The Unfinished Man (1960), though urban images were presaged in “Something to Pursue” in (A Time to Change):

“After a night of love I left the city
With intention to return but carried it
Within me markets and courts of justice
Slums, football grounds, entertainment halls,
Residential flats, palaces of art and business houses,
Harlots, basement poets, princes and fools.”

Bombay was always with Ezekiel, even when he was elsewhere. In 1986 Ezekiel told an interviewer that “I would never leave Bombay – it’s a series of commitments” (Bharucha, 134) And in “Island,” one of Ezekiel’s oft quoted urban poems, he writes:
“I cannot leave this island/I was born here and belong
Even now a host of miracles/hurries
Me to daily business/minding the ways of the island/as a good native
Should/taking calm and clamour in my stride.” (Collected Poems, 182)

Novelist Amit Chaudhuri has written of “a peculiarly Bombay mixture of proximity and transcendence” that is expressed in Ezekiel’s poetry.” For many Indian readers Ezekiel’s poems became a symbol of the gritty yet glamorous port city. In “Edinburgh Interlude,” written in the nineteen eighties, Ezekiel evoked his beloved Bombay while strolling in the historic center of the Scottish city. On a walk through Edinburgh, he recalls the mangoes of Bombay:

Perhaps it is not the mangoes
that my eyes and tongue long for,
but Bombay as the fruit
on which I’ve lived,
winning and losing
my little life

The Bombay poets who gathered around Ezekiel – Gieve Patel, E. deSouza, Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar and others – grew to share and amplify this rough urban sensibility. One might think of this a “Jewish” urban sensibility – in the European flaneur tradition of Walter Benjamin. Just as dislocated Eastern European Jews ‘discovered’ the cityscapes of Central and Western Europe in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, Bombay’s poets rediscovered Bombay in the sixties and the seventies. The process involves seeing yourself as an exile in your own city or in your adopted city. (Like Israeli poet Leah Goldberg in Tel Aviv of the mid 1930s, a city she emigrated to from Central Europe). The poet has to become a foreigner in his or her own city, and cultivate a love-hate relationship with the “new” city and its people.

In 1954 Ezekiel took on the editorship of a new journal, Quest. As editor, Ezekiel sought new literary talent – both in the regional Indian languages and in English. He often served as translator of new poems in Marathi, and he found excellent translators for poems in other Indian languages. Quest was funded by an American foundation, The Congress for Cultural Freedom. This same group funded the British Journal, Encounter edited by Stephen Spender and the American journal Diogenes. In the late sixties, the Council and its journals were accused of being CIA fronts. Ezekiel was then embroiled in one of many political controversies that dogged him throughout his career. Generally, he was more conservative politically than many of the poets and novelists he befriended and mentored. Some of these poets were aligned with Progressive Marxist politics; others were quite conservative. Quest was published bimonthly and “did much to encourage a whole generation of poets, a task to which it devoted itself again in 1972, when it offered its pages to an assessment of the recent poetic scene, and provided thereby a platform for both new and established poets.” (R. Parthasarthy, 1976, 1) Ezekiel edited Quest while working full time at a succession of jobs that included writing advertising copy and serving as general manager of a picture frame company. In 1957, Ezekiel made the first of four visits to the United States. He was sent there for management training by the Indian advertising company that employed him. While in the United States, Ezekiel familiarized himself with the literary scene in New York and other major cities – an experience which strengthened his commitment to literature and weakened his commitment to writing advertising copy. He left the company soon after his return to India. From 1961 onwards he held an academic position teaching English literature, at Mithibai College of the Arts in Bombay.

Ezekiel’s London years of poverty and struggle had imbued him with a life-long commitment to help young aspiring poets. Toward the end of his life he explained this commitment to an interviewer: “When I was in London, I had experienced two types of editors. The first type rejected your poems outright. The second type said he didn’t like your poems but he would like you to go over and discuss them with him. It was then that I decided that I would one day do this for other young poets. My family now keeps telling me don’t talk to young poets all the time. But I am not going to stop doing it. I don’t consider it a waste of time.”

Ezekiel’s decision to mentor young poets was put into practice soon after his return to Bombay. Among his first students was Dom Moraes, who was then sixteen years old. Moraes showed Ezekiel some of his work. Moraes recounted this first encounter in his autobiography, My Father’s Son: “I had read some of his poems in the Illustrated Weekly, and, even at my uncritical age, could see that they were a lot better than anything else there… He turned my poems over in long, somehow disdainful fingers. ‘These are not poetry yet,’ he said, his words penetrating icily to my heart, ‘but,’ he added, they show some talent.” Over the next few months, Ezekiel and Moraes met weekly; at each meeting Ezekiel would offer a long constructive critique of Moraes’ work. … Moraes wrote that “Ezekiel had introduced me to the idea that mine was not merely a gift that had floated down on the wind, but a craft I must study, and know intimately, before I could do it well.”

Ezekiel’s dedication and persistence was remarkable. His dedication to poetry and to poets was both personal and public. A.K. Mehrotra noted that “the fifties and sixties, when he did some of his best work was not an exciting period for Indian literature in English generally. One would have had to be utterly dedicated to one’s craft, and believed strongly at the same time in the possibility of better days ahead, to have survived those decades. He must have been a lonely figure.” (de Souza, 1999, 107) Mehrotra, who would become a prominent poet in the eighties, was a student in Bombay in the nineteen sixties. It was there that he met and was deeply influenced by Ezekiel’s circle, which included Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar and others. (See P. Mishra, in Poetry 12/1/05). And like the other Bombay poets, his life and work was affected by the visit of Allen Ginsberg and his Beat colleagues.

Critic Bruce King has noted that “a large proportion of the significant history of modern Indian poetry in English was made by or has some connection to Ezekiel… In a world of increasingly narrow specializations he has shown it possible to be a poet, a man of letters, and an intellectual actively engaged with culture and politics.” (King, 1991, 4) After Ezekiel’s death in 2004 literary critic Ranjit Hoskote wrote: “People called Ezekiel the professor; to me, he was always the Rabbi, an only half-facetious title that amused him, for the teacher was blended in him with the skeptic who yet seeks wisdom, the wounded healer.” (Hoskote, 2004)

Thirty years earlier Ezekiel wondered aloud about giving himself a Rabbinic title.

“I went to Roman Catholic school,
A mugging Jew among the wolves.
They told me I had killed the Christ,
That year I won the scripture prize.
A Muslim sportsman boxed my ears. At home on Friday nights the prayers
were said. My morals had declined
I heard of yoga and Zen
Could I, perhaps, be rabbi-saint?
The more I searched the less I found.
(“Background, Casually” 1976)

A decade later, Ezekiel reflected on his “Indianness.” “I am an Indian national. I was born in India, my tribe of the Jewish community has lived here for two thousand years. If I had rejected my Indianness, which some Indian writers obviously have done, and if I had decided that I am so much of an outsider that I have to settle down in London or New York, and then, even if I did write about India, I don’t know if I could be regarded as an Indo-English writer.”

In 1962 four American Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, (to whom Snyder was then married) and Peter Orlovsky, came to India for an open-ended stay that lasted over a year. They visited Nissim Ezekiel at his home, and he arranged for the Beat poets to put on a public reading in Bombay. Over a hundred people attended the reading, including the American Consul. (See M. Schumacher, Dharma Lion 376). The year-long visit of the Beats was to have a powerful effect on Indian poetry. And it was to have a similarly profound effect on Nissim Ezekiel. For the visit of the Beats to his home opened up a friendship with Allen Ginsberg, who welcomed Ezekiel to his home in New York five years later. On that visit Ginsberg arranged for Ezekiel to take LSD, an experience that must have been sufficiently pleasurable and enlightening for Ezekiel – for he was to take another twenty-three acid trips over the subsequent five year period. In Ezekiel’s poems of the late sixties and seventies the religious/spiritual dimension reappeared, a change he attributed to his experiments with LSD.

In early 1964 Ezekiel was invited to Leeds University in England to teach for a term as a visiting professor in the department of English literature. From Leeds he came to London for a set of readings. His visit was heralded by his friend Dom Moraes in his “The Arts in London” column published weekly in The Times of India. Moraes was by then a very successful journalist and documentary film-maker. Moraes wrote that “Ezekiel is in London and the world of poets is already gravitating towards him: I have always felt it was time Mr. Ezekiel’s work was better known in England, and now it is clearly about to be. He has also brought with him some of the work of a young Indian poet who writes in English, Adil Jussawalla, which seems to me of extreme promise.”

The most well-known of Ezekiel’s public pronouncements was his 1965 essay “Naipaul’s India and Mine” published in the Indian journal Imprint, which Ezekiel
co-edited. It was a considered yet passionate response to Naipaul’s widely-read and in India, strongly-condemned book An Area of Darkness: An Experience of India. Naipaul’s travelogue angered many Indian intellectuals. The West-Indian writer’s critique of Indian inefficiency, corruption, and backwardness seemed to them unduly harsh and cruel. But as poet and physician Gieve Patel noted in the nineteen nineties, the vociferous reactions to An Area of Darkness, “were as hysterical in tone as was Naipaul himself in his condemnation of the country. Ezekiel’s essay stands out among the rest for the extraordinary clarity with which he refutes Naipaul. It is remarkable prose in its measured tone and quite passion, its argument relevant even today.” Ezekiel’s unique insider/outsider status came into play in his response to Naipaul, and in this response he alludes to his Jewishness. “In the India which I have presumed to call mine, I acknowledge without hesitation the existence of all the darkness Mr. Naipaul discovered. I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider… In other countries I am a foreigner. In India I am an Indian. …India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India.”

Ezekiel’s calm and considered response to Naipaul made him famous in India and abroad. Considering the controversy some forty years later, Jeet Thayil remarked that “Naipaul was obsessed by defecation, said his critics. He was hysterical. The poet Ezekiel became a beacon of sanity in the contentious debate that ensued.” “My quarrel with Mr. Naipaul,” Ezekiel wrote, “which I hope to conduct in a way that will be understandable to him, is not because of these condemnatory judgments of his, so fiercely, so blazingly expressed. My quarrel is that Mr. Naipaul is so often uninvolved and unconcerned. He writes exclusively from the point of view of his own dilemma, his temperamental alienation from his mixed background, his choice, and his escape. …If only Mr. Naipaul could have realized how utterly unreasonable this attitude is! It nearly undermines the validity of his arguments.”

The quarrel between V.S. Naipaul and Indian intellectuals has never been fully resolved, and for many Indian intellectuals the quarrel remains a festering wound. Salman Rushdie, writing in 1997, noted that Naipaul’s three books on India (An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization, India: A Million Mutinies Now) “are key texts, and not only because of the hackles they have raised. Many Indian critics have taken issue with the harshness of his responses. Some have fair-mindedly conceded that he does attack things worth attacking… Some of Naipaul’s targets…merit the full weight of his scorn. At other times he appears merely supercilious. India, his migrant ancestors’ lost paradise, cannot stop disappointing him.”

To say that Ezekiel did not withdraw from India was an understatement. His engagement with the cultural and intellectual life in India was expressed both in his teaching, his writing, and his public life. In addition to poetry Ezekiel wrote plays, essays and literary criticism. Towards the end of his life he estimated that he had written over five hundred book reviews. He was head of the India section of PEN, where some of the younger writers criticized his anti-Soviet, pro-Western pronouncements. Ezekiel’s was a constant presence in the intellectual life of Bombay. His training in philosophy is reflected in “Poetry and Philosophy,” the Inaugural Address delivered to the Bombay Philosophical Society in July of 1965. (Selected Prose, 41-9). Written with great clarity, this essay restates and expands upon a distinction made by T.S. Eliot. In Ezekiel’s words “Eliot makes a distinction between poets who think or philosophize in their poetry, as for instance Tennyson and Browning and Arnold often do, and poets who create from their thinking and philosophizing emotional equivalents and linguistic devices, all of which are merged into something which can only be called poetry.” A close reading of Ezekiel’s poetry reveals that he bridged these categories. In his poetry Ezekiel drew on the language and concepts of philosophy, and he did so in the most direct, down-to-earth manner. Similarly, his use of Hindu, Judaic, and Christian sources was direct and plain-spoken. He was not displaying his erudition, and he was not flamboyant, nor reaching for “greatness.” Drawing on the ancient texts – he was both respectful and skeptical. In this context we might remember his childhood visits to the synagogue – where he imbibed both a set of religious teachings and skepticism about them from a friend in the congregation.

From the early nineteen sixties to his retirement in the nineteen eighties Ezekiel was a college professor, first at Mithibai College of the arts and then at Bombay University. There he raised a generation of students of literature some of whom became published authors. In 1967 Ezekiel was invited to the United States to give a series of five lectures and a number of readings at the University of Chicago. On that visit, he spent much time with his friend A.K. Ramanujan. Five years earlier, Nissim Ezekiel had hosted Ginsberg in Bombay. This was to be the first of twenty-four acid trips Nissim took between 1967 and 1972. These trips unlocked a mystical tendency in him, and a rejection of atheism.
A resurgence of the religious feelings dormant since his childhood brought him closer to spiritual phenomena in general and to Judaism in particular. It also generated two new sets of poems, one based on Hindu myths and the other a response to the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. (“Hymns of Darkness” and “Latter Day Psalms.”) To explain his drug use to his Indian colleagues, some of whom were scandalized by Ezekiel’s forays into the emerging counterculture of the West, Ezekiel wrote a short essay titled “Drugs: A Personal Footnote.” He opened it with an apology of sorts. “I am interested in the disciplined use of drugs for expanding the consciousness, and for the variety of emotional and intellectual experiences which they offer. Drug addiction is another matter. The abuse of drugs is another matter… Most of my LSD trips were taken in the company of a ‘guide’ whom I had instructed on how to guide.” After writing the essay, Ezekiel decided not to publish it, though he did refer to his LDS experiments in articles and interviews. (R. Raj Rao, p. 179-80)

In a September 1967 letter to Adil Jussawalla, Ezekiel remarks “what Ginsberg told you about my taking L.S.D. in New York was quite true, and not naughty at all.” For Ezekiel, taking LSD, was an experiment in truth, not a recreational pastime. One might say that his drug experiments were sacramental.

In 1969, Ezekiel published an anthology for Indian readers of Martin Luther King’s writings: “The idea of compiling an anthology of this kind came to me the moment I heard of Dr. King’s assassination… I regard him as one of the sublimest public figures of our time.” Ezekiel reminds his readers of King’s 1959 visit to India and provides a context in which to understand that visit. In Ezekiel’s understanding there were two somewhat contradictory aspects to King’s activities during his month in India. As a distinguished American visitor to India King met with Indian officialdom; he was feted as an American hero. As a student of Gandhi’s teachings – he studied with Gandhian teacher Smarak Nidhi. By 1959, twelve years after Indian independence and nine years after the establishment of the Indian Republic, the Congress government and the Gandhians had grown far apart. Authentic Gandhians lived on his ashram, emulated the Mahatma’s practices and preached nonviolence. On his visit to India King was shuttling back and forth between government officials and anti-government Gandhians.

Nissim Ezekiel’s formal study of European philosophy enabled him to contextualize King’s theological position: “Martin Luther King embraces neither Liberalism nor Christian neo-Orthodoxy. (On the issue of absolutes)…he constantly maintains his good sense between a partial yes and partial no. It is the clue to his mode of thinking and living.” The Martin Luther King anthology was one of a number of such public education projects that Ezekiel devoted himself to. Long an admirer of the best in American culture and literature, Ezekiel edited and published An Emerson Reader for the Indian readership. In addition he edited several collections of new Indian writing, among them Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry, co-edited with Meenakshi Mukherjee.

Nissim Ezekiel as a Mentor of Young Indian Poets

I have mentioned Ezekiel’s mentoring of Dom Moraes, who went on to a type of stardom in English literary life of the nineteen fifties and sixties. A.K. Ramanujan, had a more reciprocal mentoring relationship with Ezekiel. Nissim Ezekiel helped the young Ramanujan in his first literary efforts. When Ramanujan moved to the University of Chicago, he would host Nissim Ezekiel at his house, where they would work together on translations. Ramanujan was supportive of Ezekiel’s literary efforts and contributed to anthologies Ezekiel edited. Nissim Ezekiel started Poetry India in 1966-67 with the support of corporate sponsors, but soon broke with them over issues of editorial control. Poetry India published translations into English of poetry from many Indian languages. In a June, 1963 letter to poet and editor Adil Jussawalla, who was then studying in England, Ezekiel wrote of the great disappointment he anticipated among young Indian poets if a proposed literary anthology of Indian writing in English were not to be published. “From time to time they are asked to submit manuscripts for this or that project and then nothing comes of it. That is why I am now trying so desperately to save the New York anthology.” This encouraging letter ends “Let’s all of us write plenty of new poems before the year ends.” (19 June, 1963, Bombay) Subsequent letters of July and August of that year end with Ezekiel’s exhortations to “write more poetry!” and “keep writing, and writing to me.” While in England in 1964 Ezekiel promoted Jussawalla’s work by bringing it to the attention of poet and critic Dom Moraes. And in June of 1965: “I needn’t say that you will write one day the kind of poetry you want to. It’s so obvious from what you have written but you refuse to be reassured. Perhaps you expect too much too soon and reject what may well be just right for “Outposts” and Poetry India ” (25 June, 1965).

Ezekiel saw himself as a mentor to young South Asian poets writing in English, including poets from Pakistan. In September Adil Jussawalla sent Nissim Ezekiel poems by the young Pakistani poet Adrian Husain. But by December Husain had decided to withdraw his poems, which had been accepted by Poetry India. . Nissim Ezekiel wrote “I was sorry to hear that he did not want them used in Poetry India because he is a Pakistani, and there was this trouble with Pakistan recently. As a matter of fact I was trying to get some Pakistani poems as soon as the idea of the journal was mooted. So far I have had no success.” (Nissim Ezekiel to Adil Jussawalla Dec. 20, 1965)

While promoting the work of others Nissim Ezekiel was modest about his own poetry: In an October 1971 letter to Adil Jussawalla he writes “Please don’t trouble to write about my poems. I think I must make the critical effort myself to see them as they are, and move out to something different.” Nissim Ezekiel also mentored writers of fiction, including in his literary journals and anthologies stories translated from Indian languages.

Nissim Ezekiel’s life-long vocation was a poet – but he did not have illusions or delusions about “greatness” as a poet. As he wrote in the early nineteen seventies: “It is possible to be good minor poet, without major delusions.” In private Nissim Ezekiel could be quite harsh about literary friends: From Nissim Ezekiel to Adil Jussawalla, 20th Dec., 1968 “I don’t think highly of Dom’s autobiography. Much of it is trivial, even when well-written. I didn’t think Gone Away better. I like your poetry best.” But this sort of criticism was always private; he refrained from criticizing other writers in public. An exception to this was his evaluation of Salman Rushdie’s novels, which Ezekiel did not think highly of.

From Nissim Ezekiel to Adil Jussawalla, 29th May, 1969. “I’ve returned to poetry after a pretty long phase of other things. I like what I’ve done, but I know there’s plenty more revising to be sweated out before I publish. Still, I’m happy to be back at it.”

His modesty was linked to his sense of daily duty and ordinariness. “Ezekiel is the poet-laureate of the ordinary. He seeks to transmute the mundane, in himself and his surroundings, in such a way as to lead-not to quiescence – but acquiescence.” (Rajeev Patke in Mehrotra, 2003, 248)

One of the young writers that Ezekiel mentored, Ranjit Hoskote, wrote that “Ezekiel patiently played Bodhisattva to ever-expanding circles of literary enthusiasts.” (Hoskote, Jan. 18, 2004) Poet Jeet Thayil, who befriended Ezekiel in the late nineteen eighties wrote that “Ezekiel was a role model for many writers: not only did he write knowledgeably about art, literature and theater, he had held jobs in journalism and advertising.”

Invited to Holland’s Rotterdam Poetry Festival in 1978 Nissim Ezekiel found himself without anything to read in between the sessions. In his hotel room he decided to read the Gideon Bible. He read through Job (no easy task!) and began to peruse the Psalms and was enchanted by its language and images. This rereading inspired his “Latter Day Psalms,” a cycle of ten poems. The first nine are responses to individual psalms (I,3,8,23,60,78,95,102, and 127); the tenth poem, “Concluding Latter Day Psalm,” is a mediation on the spirit of the whole Book of Psalms, which has one hundred and fifty psalms altogether. “The Images,” Ezekiel writes, “are beautiful birds and colourful fish: they fly, they swim in my Jewish consciousness. God is a presence here and his people are real.” He concludes this poem, and the complete Psalms cycle with this reflection: “Now I am through with the Psalms; they are part of my flesh.”

Twenty-five years earlier, in 1953, Nissim Ezekiel had written “Psalm 151.” One of his early gritty urban poems, it opens on a melancholy note: “Light rebukes and sky abuses/streets are empty, houses jaded.” Unlike the Biblical psalmist, Ezekiel finds no comfort or consolation in contemplation: “In sorrow I am not enlarged/my corn and wine do not increase.” Ezekiel finds some resolution in a direct appeal to the divine. “Deliver me from evil, Lord/Rouse me to essential good/change the drink for me, O Lord/Lead me from the wailing wood.”

In the nineteen eighties many of Nissim Ezekiel’s literary colleagues were disturbed and dismayed by his support of the Indian government’s publishing ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Nissim Ezekiel was at the time the head of Indian P.E.N. , and one of the most influential voices in Indian literary journalism. He had published hundreds of book reviews in Indian newspapers and literary journals. During the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975-77, Ezekiel was a vocal critic of the regime. This made his support of the government ban on The Satanic Verses, even more disturbing. Ezekiel’s reasoning was that Indian Muslims would be offended by Rushdie’s Satire of Islam’s founding stories and that the government has the responsibility to protect those who might be insulted by the book.

Despite his strong consciousness of his Jewish origins, Ezekiel was not enthusiastic about Zionism. He did not think well of the nineteen fifties mass emigration of Bene Israel Jews to Israel and never visited the Jewish state. But, later in life, he became an advocate of Israel, and wouldn’t brook any criticism of the actions of the Jewish state. On this issue, as on Cold War politics generally, Ezekiel often found himself at odds with his younger colleagues.

In 1985 the American Joint Distribution Committee, A Jewish charity, asked Nissim Ezekiel to serve as their “Honorary County Representative” for India. According to historian Joan G. Roland, “Nissim Ezekiel believed it was very important to A.J.D.C. to have a charity wing in Bombay and from 1985 to 1990 the organization focused on assistance to the poor.” Ezekiel, to his wife’s dismay, turned down the offer of a salary for the part-time work he did for the charity. In 1996 he told an interviewer, “it is all very well for a full-time staff, but I would not accept money for such work… I still feel very proud of doing work for them.” At A.J.D.C. Ezekiel was asked to evaluate requests from Indian Jews (of all three communities) for charitable donations. In the mid nineteen eighties Ezekiel described the change in his attitude towards Judaism in this way “…Judaism was my religion bit I not only rejected it in my youth but all religions with it. That I am today back into Judaism in a small way and accept the core of all historical religions is a different story.” (R. Raj Rao, 317)

Two years before he entered a nursing home, his student Nilufer Bharucha asked Ezekiel about his choice to devote his life to poetry: “In an early poem, “Nothingness,” you had indicated that you were ready to sacrifice everything for poetry…May I be allowed to say that this has come to pass? If you had your life to live again would you have led it any differently?” “No, absolutely not. I have no regrets.” (Bharucha and Nabar, 1998, 40.)

Nissim Ezekiel’s last years were spent in a nursing home. He was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease – with a long, slow onset. From the late summer of 1998 until his death six years later in the winter of 2004, Ezekiel was cared for by a dedicated nursing staff and by friends who continued to visit him – though he couldn’t recognize his visitors. The fees were paid by two parties: Nissim’s son Elkana and the American Joint Distribution Committee.

In 2001, visiting his teacher Nissim Ezekiel in his nursing home, Ranjit Hoskote mourned the cruel fate of a writer deprived of his memories “it is the worst of betrayals, this insidious treachery of the neural circuits.” Hoskote wrote that “at such moments, I think of the poet who was my guru, and wonder how he managed to balance the demands of a life divided almost equally – for five busy decades – among poems, essays, teaching, activism and human relationships.”

The fragment that serves as the epigram of this essay, “Confiscate my passport, Lord/I don’t want to go abroad,” declares Ezekiel’s commitment to Bombay. The second two lines “Let me find my song where I belong,” is a reference to Psalm 137, refers to the Psalm where the exiles to Babylon ask: “how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In this poem and throughout his long productive literary career, Nissim Ezekiel asserted that he can “sing the Lord’s song” where he belongs, at home in India.

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Shalom Goldmanis Professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. His most recent book is "God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination".