Nissim Ezekiel Remembered: Edited by Havovi Anklesaria. With assistance from Santan Rodrigues; Sahitya Akademi. p.603, Rs 275.
Both Havovi Anklesaria, the editor of Nissim Ezekiel Remembered, and Santan Rodrigues, who assisted her, were students and long-time associates of Nissim. The book, lovingly compiled, is their tribute to their friend and mentor, a poet who stood at the centre of the Indo-English poetic scene for half a century.
As a commemorative volume, the book is unexceptionable. Even the absence of a biographical sketch is a plus, because it encourages you to build your own biography of Nissim, using the information provided in the memoirs, interviews and chronology. You can see a clear picture of the man emerge, and see his work in the context of his life.
Sister’s view
Take, for example, “Remembering Nissim”, an essay by Nissim’s younger sister, Asha Bhende. When she says, ‘I would like to remember Nissim, as my brother who made our mother laugh’; the line surprises you, like a line of verse from Nissim. When she writes, a little later, ‘I still remember the day our mother died’; you begin to hear, in the background, the best loved of Nissim’s poems, “Night of the Scorpion”.
Mrs Bhende recollects how Nissim, in an effort to revive his mother, kept on fanning her after she was dead, saying, “she has only fainted”; and of how he disappeared from the house after the funeral for a week. Nissim rarely spoke about his mother, but this remark, made in an interview, is revealing: ‘But the real source of my literary sensibility was my mother. I always knew it came straight from her to me. She reacted intuitively to my writing. With the rest of the family it was conscious encouragement; with her it was a primal assurance.’
The other personal reminiscences add to the portrait. Gieve Patel recollects how sensitive Nissim was to human suffering. Santan Rodrigues recalls Nissim’s help in launching Kavi India, and how, when they ventured into book publishing later, he bought 100 copies of their first book to help them pay the printer’s bill. Laeeq Fatehally quotes her daughter, Shama, who spoke for all his students when she wrote “we took it as a given, that Nissim’s time was not his own — it belonged to all of us.”
The disintegration of that fine, sensitive mind, after Alzheimer’s struck, is one of the sad stories of our time. But somehow, even after the other faculties degenerated, sensitivity to poetry remained unimpaired. Santan recounts how they visited Nissim at the nursing home he was confined in, on his birthday, and asked him to read a poem. “He took his book of poems that we gave him and read, as if in the days of yore. And as if to mock us asked, ‘Who is Nissim Ezekiel?’”
Who is Nissim Ezekiel? That’s the question this commemorative volume raises. It throws light on the many facets of his genius: the poet who brought in modernity to Indian poetry in English; the man who influenced and promoted a host of young poets; a sensitive and perceptive critic who, through hundreds of reviews and articles, strove to improve the literary atmosphere in India; an art critic who, never intimidated by a painter’s reputation, spoke his mind; a superb prose writer; founder-editor of Quest and Poetry India; editor of Freedom First and The Indian P.E.N.; a playwright and broadcaster; a teacher who taught at several Universities; and above all, a committed individual whose ambition, expressed when he was only 18, was “to do something for India”, and who never backed out of that commitment till the end.
In world literature
Nissim’s position as the pre-eminent Indo-English poet of our time is well established. But what about his place in World Literature? The question never bothered Nissim. He was only concerned with the quality of his poems. When he was actually asked, ‘What about your place in World Literature?’ in an interview, he answered, with some irritation “Perhaps, I don’t make it on the international scene…Most Indian writers don’t. We’re just not good enough.”
Bruce King thinks that Nissim “is a good but minor poet — in comparison to such giants as Yeats, Eliot, or Auden.” He thinks that what possibly hampered Nissim from being a great poet was his “unwillingness to break the mould and make it new”. He was too sympathetic to others, too much a part of his surroundings, and too concerned with the ethical. And these are precisely the qualities we admire Nissim for! King admits that this attitude “contributed to his leadership of Indian poetry and its relationship to India, and it resulted in a surprising number of poems that are likely to last even as critical tastes change.”
Makarand Paranjape’s article, the longest in the “Academia” section, labours to prove that Ezekiel belonged to the Indian poetic tradition represented by Aurobindo. This surprising thesis is based on two reasons: one, Nissim used traditional metres; two, he shows “a most clearly defined spiritual quest in his poetry”.
Paranjape admits, though, that Nissim’s spiritual quest, in comparison with Aurobindo’s, is “modest.” A spiritual quest in poetry, modest or otherwise, is not an exclusive Indian property. And Nissim valued his Indianness, anyway, though he had no use for Aurobindo’s poetry.
His spiritual quest was no doubt prompted by his own inner need. Perhaps the LSD experiment had some role to play. Nissim said, in his interview: “…with the first LSD experience, I gave up atheism — it just collapsed. Religion and its mysteries became more acceptable.” LSD’s use as an entheogen is not unheard of.
Paranjape’s analysis of Nissim’s poetry is accurate: “Overall, Nissim’s work reflects an almost classical concern with order, balance, good sense and wit. Shying away from emotional or verbal excess, he is nevertheless intensely self-critical, honest and funny.”
But doesn’t this description point to the Movement poets rather than to Aurobindo? They all used regular metre, and were Nissim’s contemporaries: Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis were born the same year as Nissim; Donald Davie was two years older, John Wain a year younger.
I sometimes think that if Robert Conquest had read Ezekiel’s poems, he might well have included poems like “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher”, “Case Study”, “Poetry Reading” and “Paradise Flycatcher” in New Lines; and they would have been among the better poems in that fine anthology.
Selections
This brings me to my only quarrel with the book. Why are the poems mentioned above not included in this volume, which is “envisaged as a Reader” and “aims to provide a selection of the finest prose and poetry”? “Background Casually”, the only comprehensive autobiographical poem Nissim wrote, and “Naipaul’s India and Mine”, his best known essay, are omitted too. Preferring “the early and not so familiar ones” to the better poems, simply because the better ones are “much anthologised”, is not quite right in a Reader.
But the delights far outweigh the disappointments. The essays in the “Art and Artists” section, uncollected so far, are a revelation. Sharp and incisive in analysis, blunt in expression, lucid and sparkling in style, they show Nissim at his best as a prose writer. The most incisive among them are perhaps the ones on Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakkar and Laxma Gaud, all published in Z magazine.
Nissim wrote more than 500 book-reviews, most of them in Imprint. The reviews showed his ability to get his teeth into the core of a book, see its virtues and faults and describe them with accuracy. He wrote with such zest that even unfavourable reviews made us hunt up the books, to see if our views coincided with his.
Unfair criticism — or supercilious depiction — of Indian society raised Nissim’s hackles. His criticism was at its most severe then. The anger was due to his passionate involvement with India. He was not quite sure whether he really ‘belonged’, but the desire to ‘connect’ was always there. In an interview in 1977 he said, “I regard myself essentially as an Indian poet writing in English. I have a strong sense of belonging, not only to India, but to this city.”
When specifically asked if his Jewish background did not create a problem, he admitted that it did, but added: “I don’t want to remain negative: I feel I have to connect…”
Poignant message
Connect. That’s Nissim’s message. In 1997, when he was in the grip of Alzheimer’s but had a few lucid days, Nissim wrote an essay, “Poetry in the time of tempests”. I don’t know what impact it made when it was published, but here, in this volume, read against the backdrop of Nissim’s life, it becomes his poignant final message.
Coming out of amnesia, he recollects the past — not the events of his personal life but of the country’s history. The Emergency makes him warn us against “the insidious ways in which those in power try to suppress the inconvenient voices from the margin, the angry voices of the dispossessed and even the quiet voice of poetry.” Then the plea: to look for connections and build them, “so that we may revel in our differences and enjoy our plurality.”
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