This review-article was
published in ‘The Hindu LITERARY REVIEW’ of September 7, 2008. I thought I
should put it in my blog to make it available to my friends – and Nissim’s – in
Mumbai, where The Hindu is not widely read.
Remembering Nissim Ezekiel
Prabhaker Acharya
*
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.
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
eighteen, was “to do something for India”, and who never backed out of that
commitment till the end.
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. But 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 did not care 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 enough: “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, who used regular metre
and were Nissim’s contemporaries, rather than to Aurobindo? 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.
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 Lxma 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…”
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 comes the plea - to look for connections and
build them, “so that we may revel in our differences and enjoy our plurality.”
