A STUDY IN PERSPECTIVES: LAND, PEOPLE, AND LOVE IN SELECTED POEMS OF NISSIM EZEKIEL

Abstract

Nissim Ezekiel has long been acknowledged as the father of a modern Indian idiom; this paper examines the positions he takes up within it, reading his poetry of land and of love as a single study in perspective. A Bombay Jew writing through the city’s transformation after Partition, Ezekiel is, in John Thieme’s phrase, an “urban Bombayite” — yet one who “frequently seeks release.” The paper first traces his oscillation between detachment and participation in “Urban” and “A Morning Walk,” and his turn to the rural scene in “Night of the Scorpion” and “The Truth about the Floods.” It then follows the same mobility of position into the love poems — “Two Nights of Love,” “An Affair,” “To a Certain Lady,” “Advice,” “The Old Woman” and “Ganga” — where love, his central motif, is treated with the maturity and complexity of urban life. Employing Wolfgang Iser’s Reader’s Response framework, the paper argues that no single attitude prevails across Ezekiel’s work: observer and participant, insider and outsider, he places himself anew in each poem.