NISSIM EZEKIEL’S “BOMBAY POEMS”
K. R. RAMACHANDRAN NAIR
Indian poetry in English
has had a chequered growth since HLV Derozio wrote his sonnets and narratives
in the tradition of the English romantics. Today, after about hundred and fifty
years, Indo-Anglian poetry clearly shows indications of an attempted breakaway
from the romantic traditions of the early poets like Derozio, Toru Dutt and
Sarojini Naidu. Both in content and craftsmanship Indo-Anglian poetry has
diversified into new fields and strange modes and today it stands amazed at its
own growth and consequent agonies. However, most Indo-Anglian poets are
restrained in their moment of sublimity by the absence of a common Indian
cultural milieu, lack of a tradition in their bones. Poetry in our regional
languages is mostly sustained by our racial and religious traditions and only
recently the breeze from the West has begun blowing into its tissues. The
Indo-Anglian poet educated in English and western literature has to be content
with the tricklings of Indian literary tradition he has assimilated and face
the challenges of the age of science, technology, politics and social
resurgence. Thus Indo-Anglian literature today is in search of a definite form
and style and the futile search is likely to continue until the Indo-Anglian
writer affirms the essential Indianness of his inspiration in his writings.
Only when the writer has an uncramped philosophical vision of the universe in
the light of Indian cultural traditions and experience and is capable of assimilating
a world outlook, he is able to express the Indian ethos quite effectively.
Nissim Ezekiel is one of
those poets of the post-independence era in whose writings we discover a
genuine attempt to harmonise the diverse elements of our volatile urban
culture. Ezekiel was born in Bombay in a Bene-Israel family and has spent most
of his life in the highly westernised 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. “Contemporary poets in India generally
write in English when they have gone through English medium schools”, wrote
Ezekiel, “I write in English for this reason and cannot write in any Indian
language”.1
Ezekiel bagan with a
sense of alienation with the world around him. His poetry has been attempted to
establish some kind of recognisable 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. At school he considered himself a “Mugging
Jew” among the Hindu, Christian and Muslim “wolves”, perpetually a “frightened
child”.2 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)
Later Ezekiel was to
write, “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 original tension in Ezekiel’s poetry was probably
born out of this agony of being a fortuitous Indian outside the pale of India’s
dominant culture.
Ezekiel’s life and
poetry are, in fact, inseparable. The activity of poetry produces a solemn
harmony of existence for him in a world riddled with discordant notes. Each
poem is a luminous link in that chain of continuity that glorifies and ennobles
the poet’s life.
Ezekiel is a poet of
multitudinous themes. One of the most recurring themes in his poetry is the
sensation of oppression in a crowded civilisation represented by the city of
Bombay. It is the “bitter native city” 4 where the poet was born and
brought up and where he lives now. A recurring note in his poetry is the wound
urban civilisation inflicts on unattached man. 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. His reaction to the
city’s oppression is a light-hearted, ironic and often sardonic exposure of its
several hidden faces. “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”.5 For Ezekiel this Indian dilemma is symbolised by the
city of Bombay.
Most Indo-Anglian poets
have dealt with the oppression, inertness and decay of city life. Particularly,
the city of Bombay has become a tantalising symbol of the bitterness and
decadence of urban life in India. The poets who have made Bombay their native
city and the poets, who have known Bombay through short spells of residence
there, have written about Bombay’s divergent moods and modulations. The impact
of the city’s growing and decaying civilisation on the consciousness of these
poets has produced some of the most telling Indo-Anglian poems. The poets, one
and all, have developed an ambivalent attitude of love-hate towards the city
and have been unable to escape its several seductions. For Dom Moraes, the city
is merely a “cave” suggesting its primitiveness and savageness.6 Gieve Patel is disgusted
with the “eternal station odour” 7 of Bombay which hits every nostril. The squalor and
putridness of the metropolis is reflective of the decay of human existence
caused by industrialisation. The woodenness and insensitivity that have gone
into the Bombay soul is subtly expressed by Keki N. Daruwalla thus:
I am the doctor who
bangs his doors shut
On
a queue of waiting patients.
(Bombay
Prayers)
Even less eminent poets like Amit Choudhuri, Iqbal
Monani, Abhanjan K. Mishra, Dilip Chitre and Aroop Mitra have expressed shock
and disgust at the growing dehumanisation of the city. It is in the milling
crowds of Bombay
one feels the greatest
distance separating map from man.8
In their poems several
dirty faces of the city appear with horrifying clarity – its dust and din,
“pushing and jostling” unceasing traffic, strident noises, dubious night life,
philosophy of live and kill and above all the animalism, greed, jealousy and
littleness of its inhabitants. Aroop Mitra’s poem “Cityscapes”, particularly,
focuses on the littleness that lurks behind the facade of greatness and
splendour exhibited by the city inhabited by a people.
........ breathing
little
Air, drinking little
water,
Earning little, spending
Little, wasting little,
And make a little love
And spice a little
music.
More than any other
Bombay poet, Nissim Ezekiel presents a comprehensive picture of the city, at
once realistic and ironic. Background, Casually expresses the travails of an intelligent Jew boy
of “meagre 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)
The “point” Ezekiel
mentions in this early poem is “how to feel at home”. This has continued to dominate his
poetry in several forms till today. In The Edinburgh Interlude (1983) Ezekiel wrote,
I have become
part of the scene
which I can neither love
nor hate.
He lived through a “life
of cheerful degradation normal in my neighbourhood” until a mature awareness
ensconced him. Today towards the fag end of his career, as a condemner of the
great city’s iniquitous ways, Ezekiel has come to realise
I cannot save Bombay
You cannot save it
They don’t even
want to save it
(The
Edinburgh Interlude)
In spite of his disgust
with the futilities of the sprawling city, Ezekiel, early in life, made a
commitment to choose Bombay as his place of residence
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)
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 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”.9 His desire to belong to
the city he chose is often frustrated by the impact of the strange city’s
truculent mass culture. His desire to escape from the tantaliser city of his
birth is never realised because one cannot escape from oneself. The city has
become his addiction.
To save myself
From what the city had
made of me, I returned
As intended, to the city
I had known.
(A Time to
Change)
The poet’s reluctant
return to the reprehensibleness of the city exposes him to the horrors of a
disintegrating culture. 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 poet, who was once
in advertising, knows the essential ingredients of the insatiable mass culture
of his city. Almost everything that corrupts and beguiles in the gallivating
culture of the metropolis is mentioned. The subdued reference to the Hollywood
film “A Roman Holiday” in the last line anticipates the surrender of the city
to the invading film culture of the West.
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 realisation 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.
He knows the broken
roads and moves
In circles tracked
within his head
(Urban)
The dichotomy between
man’s hopes and achievements in the distressed city is suggested by the
metaphor “broken roads” and “circles”. The disgusting routinisation 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 arc the outcome
of the tyranny of the city over the citizen. The dilemma of the poet who
desperately tries to disown and reject the city which “burns like a passion”10 is touchingly expressed
in Urban.
Like
Yeats in the “Lake Isle of Innisfree”, the poet here longs for a quiet
habitation away from the kindred clamour” of the wild city. But all his dreams
of solitary morning walks and vision of the far away hills, the beach and the
trees are thwarted by an overwhelming passion that turns the traffic of his
mind to urban chaos.
No one escapes from the
labyrinth of the Circe-like city. The city of “slums and skyscrapers” has
seduced the poet to a gradual bitter resignation. In Island he wrote,
I cannot leave the
island
I was born here and
belong.
As a “good native” he is
ready to reconcile with the “ways of the island”. However, the poem has ominous
undertones of frustration and sadness expressed through contrasting images like
“slums and skyscrapers”, “dragons claiming to be human”, “echoes and voice”,
“past and future” and “calm and clamour”. In Citysong there is a reluctant acceptance of the ways of the
city. From the terrace of a friend, the poet watches the city that lies below.
A sudden urge overtakes him to return to the city just as a repentent debauchee
returns to his seductress at her sight.
I want to return
As soon as I can
To be of this city
To feel its hot breath
I have to belong
(Citysong)
A Momillg 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
humaneness, 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 paralysis of the
will and the finer emotions the Bombay man suffers from is succinctly suggested
by a chain of metaphors. The “cold and dim” city is his purgatory. The morning
breeze and trees, the cool garden on the hill and the hedges cut to look like
birds are the symbols of Bombay man’s unattained and unattainable hopes. The
poet poses the question why
His native place he
could not shun,
The marsh where things
are what they seem?
(A Morning Walk)
A Morning Walk is intended to be a walk
out of the city’s fatal grip but ends up once again as a walk towards the
city’s festering fascinations. “The marsh of reality and the distant (but
troublesome to the city dweller) hills are the counterparts, in terms of
landscapes, to the old dichotomies in Ezekiel’s work, between sex and the
unrealised goal of an all-inclusive love, between body and soul, a sense of sin
and the prospect of redemption, action and patience”. 11
One of the earliest
influences 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 civilisation immediately
after the First World War. Ezekiel’s theme is a walk through the decadence of
Bombay’s soul which began immediately after the Second World War. Both have
their purgatory of existence in the turpitude of sunk values. Both are
searching for new insights in a world where new insights are only those of
agony and frustration. The central image of The Waste Land is that of
land blighted by a curse where crops do not grow and animals are cursed with
sterility. Ezekiel’s morning walk resembles the journey of the protagonist in
Eliot’s poem to the Chapel Perilous through a parching and agonising area of
horror and darkness where “one can neither stand nor lie nor sit”. 12
Love Sonnet shows the sad case of a
pair of lovers longing for privacy in the midst of a noisy and crowded
metropolis. The poet’s total rejection of Indian noise, the irony of the
Iranian restaurant instructions and the different disgusting scenes from Indian
life depicted in In India symbolize, in spite of their bantering tone, Ezekiel’s derision for the
values of a culture that grips him from all around. The several vignettes of
disgust and revulsion Ezekiel presents in In India add upto 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)
Ezekiel’s irony is at
its best in In India. With him irony is like a moving searchlight that sheds its brilliance on
hitherto undiscovered corners of our dark existence enabling us to see the
reality that lurks behind appearances. The Roman Catholic Goan boys hastening
to prayers after having their “solitary joy” with “high heeled toys”, the
Anglo-Indian gentlemen drinking whisky in company with secretive Muslims, the
wooden Indian wives who sit apart at parties and the ubiquitous Bombay typist
(or secretary) who is seduced by her English boss after an initial struggle are
some of the tinged close-ups presented with devastating irony in the poem.
The “unplanned city has
a death wish”13 and attracts several kinds of healers. “All of us
are sick”. 14 and so need some kind of barbiturate, meditation, a
Guru or a godman.
We cannot find our roots
here
don’t know where to go,
Sir
(Family –
Song for Nandu Bhende)
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)
The city like the woman
on Bellasis Road fascinates and repels the poet. Like the fake Guru on its
pavement, 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, applauds and finally dissolves in an act of involuntary,
meaningless and ungrateful impulse. Thus in Ezekiel’s 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 very core. The sapling of life
with its freshness, vigour and innocence does not blossom here any more”. 15
Adit Jussawalla says that
“Nissim Ezekiel’s poems are the records of the moral aches and pains of a
modern Indian in one of his own cities”. 16 The poet who has gone through the travails of the
city finds no alternate tabernacle of hope. This existential frustration is
expressed in Enterprise. Like Morning Walk and Entertainment, this
poem is moulded out of the fallouts of frustration in a “barbaric city.” 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 fulfilment. Even here a “shadow falls” on the group of pilgrims
because.
.... … … differences
arose
on how to cross a desert
patch
(Enterprise)
The group ignores the
thunder which is nothing but the inner voice that should have guided the group.
Man deprived of the inner voice or insensitive to the call of his own soul
invariably rushes into impediments:
Another phase was reached
when we
Were thrice attacked, and
lost our way
A section claimed its
liberty
To leave the .... … …
(Enterprise)
At the end of the journey there is complete
disillusionment. Was the journey worth undertaking? Instead of bringing any sense
of fulfillment, the “trip had only darkened every face”. 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 line
Home is we have to gather
grace.
(Enterprise)
This gathering of grace
comes in the form of an awareness in the poet of the regenerative and
recuperative power of art. The brilliantly evocative poem Jamini Roy is
an exception to the general tone of frustration Ezekiel exhibits in his city
poems. Jamini Roy was an urban painter who had learnt the secret of
self-expression and communication by turning to the rural folk and their style
of living. He was able to see things in their primitive simplicity and
innocence and could establish a personal identity with what is beautiful and sensuous in
rural life. He refused to recognise sex and power as main motives behind human
action; he did not try to depict the soul sickness of the urban civilisation,
but “he travelled, so he found his roots”. 17 Jamini Roy is an indication of Ezekiel’s belief in the
possibility of bringing about some sort of order and assimilation through art
in a world of moral chaos and ethical confusion. He discovers a new spirit of
hope and declares his intention to walk the streets of Bombay “Cezanne slung
around my neck”.18 Only
the artist can create a new and orderly world out of the ruins of the old. His
advice to the artist is,
Do not be satisfied with
the world
that God created, create
your own.
(Advice to a Painter)
REFERENCES
1 Nissim Ezekiel, Answer to questionnaire in Modern Indian Poetry in
English, 2nd Ed. by P. Lal (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1971) p. 168
2 Nissim Ezekiel, Background, Casually
3 Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Naipaul’s India and Mine’ in New Writing in India, Ed. Adil Jussawalla, p.
88
4 Nissim Ezekiel, Hymns in Darkness.
5 H. M. Williams, Indo-Anglian Literature 1800-1970, A Survey. (Orient Longman Ltd.
1976) p. 116
6 Dom Moraes, Cave
7 Gieve Patel, Extract
8 Amit Chaudhury, At Churchgate Station
9 Chetan Karnani, Nissim Ezekiel (Arnold Heinemann, 1974) p. 105
10 Nissim Ezekiel, Urban
11 Garman, Michael ‘Nissim Ezekiel – Pilgrimage and
Myth’ included in Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English Ed. by M. K. Naik, S. K.
Desai & G. S. Amur (Macmillan, 1971) p. 145-46
12 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land - V, Selected Poems (Faber)
p. 64
13 Nissim Ezekiel, Healers
14 Nissim Ezekiel, Songs for Nandu Bhende – Family.
15 Anisur Rahaman, Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. (Abhinav Publications,
1981) p. 54
16 ‘The New Poetry’ included in Readings in Commonwealth
Literature, Ed. by William Walsh (Oxford, 1973) p. 79
17 Nissim Ezekiel, Jamini Roy
18 Nissim Ezekiel, In India