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.).
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.).
