For verification of this paper, please visit on http://www.socialresearchfoundation.com/innovation.php#8

Nissim Ezekiel, honoured with the most prestigious awards Padamashri and Sahitya Academy, is one of the most distinguished Indian poets in the history of English literature. He is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of 20th century India. He may truly be called the barometer of modern India’s literary atmosphere. His poems have several themes but the theme of urbanity and modernity is reflected in most his poems. He is an urban poet. His poetry is the poetry of urbanity. In words of K. N. Daruwalla, “Ezekeil was the first Indian poet to express a modern Indian sensibility in a modern idiom”. [1] Nissim Ezekiel has spent most of his life in the highly westernized circles of the cosmopolitan city. He claims that he began writing in English because he did not know any other language well enough to express himself. He himself has written, “I write in English for this reason and cannot write in any Indian language”. [2] Ezekiel displays urbanization in most of his poem. He was accused of being a poet of local habitation and a name of only being restricted to the city of Bombay. He depicted the city of Bombay stripped of its glamour in a realistic manner. It is not hyperbolic estate that no other Indian English poet has given a more comprehensive picture of various facets of metropolitan life than Ezekiel. To him, Bombay was the metaphor for the urban life in India. He genuinely attempted to balance diverse tensions of urban culture. After sometime he was to write in his writings, “I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider. Circumstances and decisions relate me to India. In other countries, I am a foreigner. In India, I am an Indian”. [3] The sensation of oppression in a crowd civilization represented by the city of Bombay is one of the most recurring themes in his poetry. Bombay is the bitter native city where the poet was born and where he lives till his death. Ezekiel has seen the Splendor and poverty of the great city, its air conditioned skyscrapers and slums, and its marvelous capacity for survivals and its slow decadence. In Ezekiel’s poetry, this Indian dilemma are is symbolised by the city of Bombay. Ezekiel’s poetry acquired an unmistakable Indian ethos and local colour. He was so involved with the urban life, the life in Bombay that he imparted space for everybody, be it upper or lower class people, be it a boss or a typist, a drunkard or dancer. In his famous poem A Morning Walk, he states, “Barbaric city sick with slums, Deprived of seasons blessed with rains, Its hawkers, beggars, iron-lunged, Procession led by frantic drunks.” [4] For others city may be useless, uninspiring but it is the attitude of Ezekiel towards the city. Various images of city that have evolved with modern poetry have become the trademark with Ezekiel. Even less prominent poets like Amit Choudhary, Iqbal Monani, Dilip Chitre and Anup Mitra have expressed shock and disgust at the growing dehumanization of the city. It is the milling words of Bombay, “one feels the greatest distance separating map from man.” [5] More than any other Indo-Anglian poet, Nissim Ezekiel presents a comprehensive picture of the urban life at once realistic and ironic. He lived through a “life of cheerful degradation normal in my neighbourhood” until a mature awareness ensconced him. Today towards the fog end of his career, as condemner of the great city is iniquitous ways, he has come to realize in his great poem The Edinburgh Interlude, “I cannot save Bombay You cannot save it They don’t even want to save it.” The city played an outstanding and vital role in his poetry. Ezekiel presented Bombay as it is without concealing anything or singing unnecessary praise of the city. It is understood that though there is the apparent darkness, engulfing the city, which is not permanent and is not unredeemable. His choice of land did not prove futile. His choice proved correct, “the objective watchfulness, the critical, sceptical tone, give weight and a sense of triumph to the smallest victories of flesh and spirit. The tortured, torturing environment, irascibly has become home.” [6] Ezekiel was an urban poet by virtue of the time. He was born in and in which he wrote his poetry. Many of his poem from different correction deal with the modern urban life. Instead of providing an anchor for his thoughts and hopes, it launches the poet into an unending search for stability and repose, “However Ezekiel has kept his commitment by depicting life faithfully as he finds it in the city of Bombay. He has not shown any craze for visiting foreign countries. Instead his poetry has acted as a mirror for reflecting life as it is actually lived in this backward place.” [7] The main aspect of his being an urban poet is his representation of certain ethos, environment, thought, sentiments of the essential man behind the modern urban man. His desire to escape from the tantaliser city of his birth is never realised because one cannot escape from oneself. The city becomes his addiction. This thing is being reflected in the first collection of his poems entitled A Time to Change- “To save myself From what the city had made of me, I returned As intended, to the city I had known.” Urban appeared in The Unfinished Man Ezekiel is an Urban poet, a singer of city life, especially the vignettes of the city of Bombay. He never sees the skies; he never welcomes the sun or the rain; his morning walks are dreams floating on a wave of sand: “The hills are always far away. He knows the broken roads, and moves In circles tracked within his head.” A Morning Walk intended to be a walk out of the city’s fatal grip but ends up once again as walk towards the city’s festering fascinations- “The marsh of reality and the distant (but troublesome to the city dweller) hills are the counter-parts, in terms of landscapes, to the old dichotomies in Ezekiel’s work, between sex and unrealized goal of an all-inclusive love, between body and soul, a sense of sin and the prospect of redemption, action and patience.”[8] Poetry written in a particular period does have impact of the time. Nissim was no exception, and his poetry also shows impact of poetry of modern poets like Eliot, Auden and W. B. Yeats. One of the earliest impact on Ezekiel was T. S. Eliot. A Morning Walk in spite of its unquestioned originality compels comparison with Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. Eliot’s theme is the drabness of European civilization immediately after the First World War. Eliot’s poem to chapel perilous through a parching and agonizing area of horror and darkness where, “One can neither stand nor lie nor sit.”[9] Nissim was the first Indian poet to catch and voice these trends in his poetry. As a modern urban poet in India, he started to voice his own thoughts and opinions, his own experience, which were experiences of the everyman. He felt that it is not fair for Indian poets, for any poets for that matter be caught between the two words ‘the one dead’, and the other powerless to ‘be born’. He has told Anees Jung in an interview: “The problems of Indian writers are strange. They have to make a synthesis between the the ancient and modern cultures.”[10] Ezekiel’s love sonnets display the sad case of a pair of lovers longing for privacy in the midst of a noisy and crowded metropolis. Ezekiel’s poetry is a colourful album of various facets of urban life in India. In this connection, K. R. S. Iyenger aptly stated that is the hurt that urban civilization inflicts on modern man, dehumanizing him and subjecting his verities to pollution and devaluation. The modern Indian English verse is the resultant of awareness of the international happenings, which helped Indian English verse to mature and be at par with the International verse. G. S. Fraser rightly points out: “Any poetry can be called modern if it appeals to us, if we can relate ourselves, our time and life with it.”[11] Nissim Ezekiel has composed some poem in Indian English in which he remarkably creates an illusion of real life as it is lived in Indian city life. The city like the woman on Bellasis Road fascinates and repels the poet. Like the fake Guru on its pavement, and the city extends its unscrupulous hands to the unwary citizen. The amorphous crowd in “Entertainment” is a cross section of Bombay’s polluted conscience the crowd that collects, thickens and applauds. Finally dissolves in an act of involuntary, meaningless and ungrateful impulse. Thus in his poetry, “The city being more than an image is transformed into a symbol of decomposed garbage, a space infected as also it is on a deeper level not a particular place in the large Cosmos but a system of living shattered and corroded at the every core. The sapling of life with its freshness, vigor and innocence does not blossom here anymore.”[12] The poem Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher in The Exact Name is one of the finest poems of Ezekiel. It is “a wonderfully orchestrated poem, the tone becoming impassioned and exultant as the feeling rise to the crescendo.” In this beautiful poem, Ezekiel expresses his views on the art of poetry and the crowded of people of city through vivid and beautiful images. Ezekiel adds, “To force the pace and never to be still Is not the way those who study birds Or women. The best poets wait for words. The hunt is not an exercise of will But patient love relaxing on a hill To note the movement of a timid wing.”[13] Adil Jussawalla says that Nissim Ezekiel poems are the records of the moral aches and pains of a modern Indian in one of his own cities.[14] Ezekiel stood alone in Hindu-Muslim urban society, on account of his Jewish ancestry. As a Jew, he could not co-relate himself to the Indians history nor to the land of origin of the religion; as Jews were forced to move out of their land. Nissim Ezekiel calls it is Characteristic, which gives the poet a chance to see things in a particular way. Ezekiel is fully involved in the urban situation of his native land India. He does not examine experience in an ideological framework: “He was painfully and poignantly aware of the flush, flesh, its instant urges, its stark ecstasies, its disturbing flirtations with the mind. In his later poetry, however, there is revealed a more careful craftsmanship, a more marked restraint and a colder, a more conscious intellectuality” than in the early poetry. [15].

Before I analyze the technique in Ezekiel’s poetry, I would to put on record the observation of some important critics on the technical aspect of his poetry. Adil Jussawalla is one of the pioneering critics on Ezekiel’s poetry to say that “Ezekiel is perhaps the first Indian poet consistently to show Indian readers that craftsmanship is as important to a poem as its subjects matter”, To David Me Cutchain, Ezekiel belong with Thom Gunn RS. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings, Anthony Thwait and others like them. He has cautions, discriminating style, precise and analytical with its conscious rejection of the heroic and passionate as also the sentimental and cozy. The technique is immaculate: themes are carefully varied yet regular rhythms. Lines that run over with a praised deliberateness, are there. But behind the causal assurances one senses the clenched first the wounded tenderness William Walsh too, has a word of praise for Ezekiel’s technique when he says, “Ezekiel’s poetry more than any other of these writers (Indian English poets) seems to be generated from within and to have within it a natural capacity for development. It is intellectually complex, mobile in phrasing fastidious indecision: and austere in acceptance.” Ezekiel’s style moves with time. Rajeev Taranath took note of this and remarked about his verse published 1956 in the following words. His more recent style, open and passionately introspective is definite sign that is Ezekiel we see a poet in whom creativity is not part from the changing pressures and priorities of living M K Naik makes a perceptive comment on Ezekiel’s technique when he says, “Ezekiel’s poetry reveals technical skill of a high order. Except in his work where his choice of an open form sometimes moves for looseness. He has always written verse which is extremely tightly constructed. His mastery of the colloquial idiom is matched by a sure command of rhythm and rhyme.

Nissin Ezekiel’s poetry evokes the Indian scenes, recreates Indian reality and reflects Indian sensibility and therefore is easily distinguished from poetry written in English elsewhere in the world. Although modernity is essentially considered to be a styliotic revolution in literature necessitating a fragmentation of a traditional literary forms, it does not lose sight of the revolutionary changes in society, Alan Bold has aptly suggested in an illuminating article.

1. Dr. Satish Kumar in Indo-Anglian poetry, Laxmi Narayan Agrawal, Agra 2. Nissim Ezekiel, Answer to Questionnaire in Modern Indian Poetry in English, 2nd(Ed.) by P. Lal 3. Nissim Ezekiel, Naipaul’s India and Mine’ in new writing In Indian(Ed.). Adil Jussawalla. 4. Nissim Ezekiel, A Morning Walk. 5. Amit Chaudhary, At Church gate station. 6. Gieve Patel, In Ezekiel: 1983: Introduction. 7. Chetan Karnani, “Nissim Ezekiel” (Arnold Heinemann, 1974). 8. German, Michael, Nissim Ezekiel, “Pilgrimage and Myth” included in critical Essay on Indian writing in English(Ed.) by M.K. Naik, S.K. Desai and G.S. Amur(Macmillan, 1971). 9. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land- V, “Selected Poems”,(Faber). 10. Jung, Anees. 1968, “LSD, “The Meaning of Reality”: An Interview with Nissim Ezekiel” The Times of India. 11. Freser, G.S. The Modern Writer and his World Calcutta, Rupa and Co: 1961. 12. Anisur Rahman, Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, Abhinav Publication, 1981. 13. Nissim Ezekiel, Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher. 14. ‘The New Poetry’ included in readings in commonwealth Literature, Ed. by William walsh, Publication Oxford, 1973.