Forever the alien outsider

He was slighted by a teacher at school who once said sarcastically, “Listen everybody, we have a poet in class.” At that moment it...

He was slighted by a teacher at school who once said sarcastically, “Listen everybody, we have a poet in class.” At that moment it came to him: he would make poetry his calling, regardless of what the world thought. His life, from that day onward, was devoted to the Muse. For Nissim Ezekiel, born in Bombay on December 16, 1924, to Bene-Israel Jewish parents, poetry was not just a hobby or pastime. It was a vocation. As literary historian Bruce King says, others wrote poems, Nissim wrote poetry.

From the beginning, he was the alien outsider. The freedom struggle was at its peak during his teenage years. Yet, unlike the intelligentsia of his day, he wasn’t drawn to Gandhi but to the more maverick M.N. Roy. He took Roy’s Marxist teachings so seriously that at one stage he actually left home to live in a slum. It wasn’t Indian poets like Tagore or Aurobindo that he regarded as literary gurus, but poets of the English canon such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound. And the French poet Rilke. What he learnt from these Masters was that poetry must be used as a means of self improvement, it must use language as elegantly and precisely as it could.

Was form more important or content? Nissim could never really resolve the question. To anyone who asked, he’d explain that content could never be at the expense of form — if it wasn’t for form, how was a poem different from a piece of journalism. Yet his own poetry was the poetry of statement. A poem did not seem profound enough to him unless it performed a moral function.

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This is what brought him discredit in the ’80s and ’90s. Anthologists began to compare him to Ramanujan and Kolatkar, both of whom displayed a marked preference for the image, and found him wanting. Their verdict was that while Ramanujan and Kolatkar were great poets, Nissim was merely tolerable. He was too much of the orthodox Jew to be able to take on the role of poet.

But, clearly, there was a misunderstanding here. For Nissim, as for any mature poet, form and content, image and statement, were two sides of the same coin. It was simplistic to separate them. Besides, by stressing on poetry’s moral purpose, he was only demonstrating that human welfare was important to him. Art, for him, could never exist for its own sake. It had to contribute to human betterment. This, surely, is one of the yardsticks of great literature. It is little wonder, then, that Nissim gave up other, more lucrative jobs in order to become a university teacher. For the same reason, he made up his mind to settle down in India, rather than the West. Unsatisfied still, he became an activist for the cause of poetry. He devoted his most productive years to gen-next poets, whom he indefatigably advised and nurtured. He felt that unless this was done, poetry could never flourish, given the pedestrian and prosaic times in which we live.

To those who dismiss Nissim as an orthodox Jew preoccupied with sin and redemption, one has only to provide an inventory of the things he did. He was the able seaman who laboured on a cargo ship to earn his passage from England to India. He was the junkie who took LSD and used poetry as a pretext for his addiction. He was the debauched heterosexual lover. And so on.

Poetry thrives on conflict. Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. It isn’t a good idea for a poet to aim at nirvana, even if his verse gives the impression that he does. Nissim understood this only too well. One half of him was Plato, the other Aristotle. If there was a contradiction somewhere, he was prepared to live with it, even if the world called him inconsistent.

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R. Raj Rao is the author of ‘Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography’