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Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel


by
Dr.Arvind Nawale
Prashant Mothe




It’s fantastic
What a slave
A man can be
Who has nobody
To oppress him
Except himself
-Ezekiel(Collected Poems. 149)
Nissim Ezekiel is a poet of post-Independence era presenting the authentic identity crisis of modern 
man. He is venerated as a mentor and father-figure by many younger poets, critics and novelists. For half a 
century, Ezekiel stanchly served his poetic muse, and nurtured the muses of many others, from his home in 
Bombay. His collection of poems include : Time To Change (1952) ,Sixty Poems (1953),The Third (1959), The 
Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965) ,The Three Plays (1969), Hymns In Darkness (1976), and
Collected Poems (1966). Ezekiel was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award in 1983. In 1988 he received another 
honour, Padma Shri, for his contribution to the Indian English writing. He has written poems on various themes 
such as: clash of opposites, Indianness, love, city life, common human relations, region, philosophical concerns 
and Identity issues.
In much of recent Indian English poetry, the portraits of man is shown as alienated individual, rootless 
and helpless, psychological restrained and cautiously retreating to the inner world. “Man is alone” (53) says 
Ezekiel in Collected Poems. A Raghu in his critical book The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel rightly says about Ezekiel,
Whether or not this generalization is correct, the author of the statement has always 
been alone. Ezekiel has often struck me as one of the loneliest individual on earth 
(148)
1
The loss of ‘identity’ in the lives of men and women in the present commercial civilization is conveyed 
in the poetry of many Indian poets writing in English. One has reasons to believe that Ezekiel’s quest for 
identity has become the underlying theme of his poetry and can be perceived in the several poems. His poetry 
gives the impression of an oversensitive soul caught in the tentacles of a cruel city civilisation, unable to 
escape from its vagaries and consequently developing a love-hate relationship with its tormentor. Ezekiel has 
seen the splendour and poverty of the great city, its air-conditioned skyscrapers and claustrophobic slums, its 
marvellous capacity for survivals and its slow decadence. H. M. Williams asserts:
Many of his poems derive their effectiveness from the poet’s puzzled emotional 
reaction to the modern Indian dilemma, which he feels to be poignant conflicts of 
tradition and modernism, the city and the village: a somewhat obvious theme but 
treated by Ezekiel as an intensely personal exploration.
2
Ezekiel began with a sense of alienation with the world around him. His poetry has been attempted to 
establish some kind of recognizable order and relevance for his self in the irrational and featureless world that 
surrounded him. The poet’s gradual emotional disassociation from the immediate environment of the city 
where he was born began in early childhood. His failure to get into the mainstream of Bombay’s life is 
symbolically expressed: 
He never learnt to fly a kite 
His borrowed top refused to spin. 
(‘Background, Casually’) 
Alienation is another main aspect of modern poetry. The poet remains detached to his surroundings. 
The modern poet becomes alienated as he might have lost religious anchors, which was very true in Nissim’s 
case. The modern man is again spoiled by secularism, science and technology. Alienation became a code word 
in European literature since World War II; Ezekiel had the seeds of alienation ingrained in him. He stood alone 
in the Hindu-Muslim society, because of his Jewish ancestry. A passage in Ezekiel’s well known essay, 
‘Naipaul’s India and Mine’ clearly substantiates his identity crises: 
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
In his Poster Poems & Hymns in Darkness the poet’s mood is one of reverence and submission.
From this human way of life 
Who can rescue man
If not his maker?
Do thy duty, Lord.
Confiscate my passport, Lord,
I do not want to go abroad
Let me find my song
Where I belong.   
(Poster Poems & Hymns in Darkness)
The poet says that the man is now cut off from worldly love and affection and he is living a painful life. He 
is standing at the air-port searching for his Self:
Confiscate my passport, Lord,
I don’t want to go abroad 
Let me find my say
Where I belong ( Hymns in Darkness.213)
‘A Morning Walk’ is a great poem which translates the sense of the bustle of the “barbaric city” into a 
gnawing pain that oppresses the poet’s memory. The picture of the city deprived of seething with poverty, 
dirt, noise and bustle emerges with disturbing clarity in this poem: 
Barbaric city sick with slums, 
Deprived of seasons, blessed with rains, 
Its hawkers, beggar, iron-lunged, 
Processions led by frantic drums, 
A million purgatorial lanes, 
And child-like masses, many-tongued, 
Whose wages are in words and crumbs 
(‘A Morning Walk’) 
The several vignettes of disgust and revulsion Ezekiel presents in a haunting urban picture of societal 
doom and individual depravity. 
Here among the beggars, 
Hawkers, pavement sleepers,
Hutment dwellers, slums, 
Dead souls of men and gods, 
Burnt-out mothers, frightened 
Virgins, wasted child, 
And tortured animal, 
All in noisy silence 
Suffering the place and time, 
I ride my elephant of thought. 
(‘In India’) 
Nissim Ezekiel vivifies the feeling of the man at the threshold when he is grasped by a queer feeling 
and suffering from a sense of alienation in this world. The poet’s own self-diagnosis can be seen when he 
describes that he is “corrupted by the thing imagined” (A Time to Change). In the important poem ‘The Double 
Horror’ the poet gives his feeling in the following lines:
I am corrupted by the world,
Continually 
Reduced to something less than 
Human by the crowd  (‘The Double Horror’)
‘Background, Casually’ expresses the travails of an intelligent Jew boy of meager bone living and 
growing up in a multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-linguistic urban society where he was so alienated and 
frightened that 
One noisy day I used a knife 
(‘Background, Casually’)  
‘Enterprise’ is an allegory of the pilgrimage theme with a suggestion of futility. Journey from the city to 
the hinterland is a metaphor for contrived change from frustration to fulfillment. The futility of the trip, the 
struggles on the way, the deprivations the group undergoes and the failure to compromise the intention of the 
trip with its end are succinctly brought out in the final clinching lines :
.... … … differences arose 
on how to cross a desert patch 
……
Another phase was reached when we 
Were thrice attacked, and lost our way 
A section claimed its liberty 
(Enterprise) 
In ‘The Edinburgh Interlude’ Ezekiel wrote, 
I have become 
part of the scene 
which I can neither love nor hate. 
Nissim Ezekiel beautifully expresses man’s helplessness. The agony and anguish of loneliness is described in 
the following lines:
My daughter tells my wife,
Who tells my mother,
Who tells me (Collected Poems.200)
‘Urban’ is a poem of eighteen lines exploring the divergence between the Bombay man’s search for 
the nourished dream of a free, oppressionless existence and his perennial inability to achieve even a partial 
realization of it. 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 disgusting reality of everyday life, the resulting Jack of coordination between 
action and perception and the sense of futility of human efforts to discover meaning in hope are the outcome 
of the tyranny of the city over the citizen.
He knows the broken roads and moves 
In circles tracked within his head 
(‘Urban’) 
The poet digs at the mechanical and artificial life of the modern man, suffering from loveliness and 
tastelessness. Ezekiel is a philosophical poet and precedes systematically in the treatment his subject. How 
philosophically, the poet broods over the lot of modern human beings in his Collected Poems as:
If saints are like this
What hope is there then for us?’  (Collected Poems)
In ‘The Double Horror’, irony is combined with the urban theme and the distortions of a mass culture are 
mercilessly exposed: 
Posters selling health and happiness in bottles, 
Large returns for small investments in football pools, 
Or self-control, six easy lessons for a pound 
Holidays in Rome for writing praise of toothpaste. 
(The Double Horror) 
‘The Railway Clerk’ the first of the Indian English poems in ‘Collected Poems’, captures the miserable existence 
of a representative of contemporary lower middle class society as,
My wife is always asking for more money,
Money , money , where to get money?
My job is such, no one is giving bribe,
While other clerks are in fortunate position, 
and no promotion even because I am not graduate,
I wish I was bird (‘The Railway Clerk,184)
This inevitable choice to stay, however, unsettles the poet. Instead of providing an anchor for his 
thoughts and hopes, it launches the poet into an unending search for identity, stability and repose. His desire 
to belong to the city (Bombay) he chose is often frustrated by the impact of the strange city’s truculent mass 
culture. 
I have made my commitments now 
This is one: to stay where I am, 
As others choose to give themselves 
In some remote and backward place. 
My backward place is where I am. 
(Background, Casually) 
Caught in the vortex of a soulless city the poet longs for salvation. His poetry becomes a perpetual 
quest for identity and commitment in a world of eroding individuality and lack of purpose. The poet expresses 
his dilemma thus: 
.... .... .... The door is 
always open 
but I cannot leave 
(The Room) 




WORKS CITED
1.  Raghu, A. 2002,  The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Delhi: Atlantic  Publishers and Distribution, 
p.148
2.  Williams, H.M. 1977.  Indo-Anglian Literture 1800-1970,.; Madras: Orient Longman 
Ltd.,.p.116
3.  Ezekiel, Nissim ‘Naipaul’s India and Me’ p.88.
4.  Rahaman, Anisur. 1981,  Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel.  Delhi: Abhinav 
Publications. 
5.  Ezekiel, Nissim. Collected Poems. Delhi: Oxford UP. 
--------------------------------------------------------------About Authors
*Dr.Arvind Nawale, Head, Dept. of English, Shivaji Mahavidyalaya, Udgir, Dist: Latur (M.S.) He has published 
more than 40 research papers and 20 books. He is also working on Editorial Board of eleven International 
journals &
**Prashant Mothe, Assistant Professor Department of English, Adarsh Senior College, Omerga(M.S.).

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    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
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        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions