Background

Nissim Ezekiel was born on December 16, 1924, (some sources say December 24) in Bombay, British India (now Mumbai, India). He was the son of Moses and Diana Ezekiel. His father was a professor of botany and zoology at Wilson College, a secondary school affiliated with the University of Bombay. His mother was also an educator; she founded a school in the city and served as its principal. His father worked in English, while his mother’s school used the local Marathi language. Descended from a unique community of Jewish people from Galilee who established a settlement in India after they were shipwrecked there in 150 B.C.E., Ezekiel grew up speaking English and the native Marathi tongue.

Education

In 1947, Nissim Ezekiel earned a Master of Arts degree in literature from Wilson College, University of Mumbai. After graduating, he traveled to London and studied philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Career

From 1947 to 1948 Nissim Ezekiel taught English at the Khalsa College in Bombay. His first book of poems A Time to Change was published in London in 1952. He returned to India in 1952, where he worked as an assistant editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India before managing a picture frame company and working as an advertising copywriter from 1954 to 1959. Next, Ezekiel founded the literary magazine Imprint in 1961, while also working as chair of the English department at Mithibai College in Mumbai from 1961 to 1972. At the same time, he wrote art criticism for the Times of India from 1964 to 1966 and was editor of Poetry India from 1966 to 1967.

Although Ezekiel's decision to compose poems in English - the language of imperialist forces in the minds of Indians - was initially controversial in his native country, his poems of love, loneliness, and religion, which at times ventured into humor when he occasionally poked fun at pidgin English, soon gained wide acceptance. Among his many collections of verse are A Time to Change and Other Poems (1952). The Unfinished Man: Poems Written in 1959 (1960), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and Collected Poems 1952-1988 (1989). Ezekiel also wrote plays, translated poems from Marathi into English, and edited poetry and fiction anthologies.

Achievements

• Nissim Ezekiel is considered the father of post-independence Indian verse in English. In 1983 he received a prize from India’s National Academy of Letters (the Sahitya Akademi) for his collection Latter-Day Psalms, and five years later he was granted the Padma-Shri, India's highest civilian honor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Collected poems, 1952-1988

    (This superb collection of Nissim Ezekiel's seven individu...)

    1989
  • Selected Prose

    (That Nissim Ezekiel is arguably the most influential, wid...)

    1992
  • Three Plays

    (Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) was an Indian Jewish poet, act...)

    1969
  • Hymns in Darkness 1976
  • Latter-Day Psalms 1982
  • Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry 1990

Views

Nissim Ezekiel’s early efforts as a poet had seen him as some kind of dreamer but he developed into someone constantly seeking the truth. He saw much corruption in his country, with a disenchanted population, and tried to highlight the problems strongly enough so that something might be done to make things better. By the 1970s though his motivation had waned and he realized that nothing much could be done. He seemed to accept "the ordinariness of most events"; he laughed at "lofty expectations totally deflated." His poem The Patriot was his protest against the radicalism and violence seen all over the Indian sub-continent in the post-war years of the 1940s onwards.

Interests

• Writers

  Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats

Connections

In 1952 Nissim Ezekiel married Daisy Jacob. They had three children: Elkana, Kalpana, and Kavita.

Father:

Moses Ezekiel

Mother:

Diana Ezekiel

Spouse:

Daisy Jacob

Son:

Elkana Ezekiel

Daughter:

Kalpana Ezekiel

Daughter:

Kavita Ezekiel

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2004
• Nissim Ezekiel
  2016