'Indian Writing in English- Nissim Ezekiel Essay\r'

'Indian song has flourished over the last 4000 years. Today, it is composed and write in more than than twenty Indian langu bestrides, including face. It has al delegacys echoed the component of the times and revealed the pains and passions of the people. Its growth has excessively reflected our well-off cultural heritage. The history of Indian mensural composition makes us aw ar of its glorious past in job to its present state. Today, as the world is shrinking and the chat net go away projecting hu adult male race cosmoss on the b e precise last(predicate)- make scene much faster, the past values argon getting lost in the struggle man is involved with.\r\nIssues confronting man have multiplied and so have his efforts for survival. meter line today is facing the seek of time. Poets engage to be organized more modishly than in the past to voice effectively their innermost thoughts and interact with each early(a) more often. bragg stratagem(a) away of awards to some of the few distinguished ones is non enough. Poets in India need to be encouraged in their creativity if we expect their regions to transform our society. New animateness is to be given to old values which had stood us in good stead for so dogged. The poets should throw in to the forefront to undertake this job.\r\nAs such(prenominal), organized efforts need to be made to promote the output and exit of good Indian meter. metrical composition written in different p machinations of India needs to be collected, see and propagated. Indian English literature (IEL) refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. It is similarly associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora, such as V. S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Salman Rushdie, who be of Indian descent.\r\nIt is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (Indo-Angl ian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should non be confused with the term Anglo-Indian). As a kinsfolk, this production comes under the broader realm of postcolonial literature- the production from previously settled countries such as India. A much over-looked category of Indian writing in English is poetry. As stated above, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English.\r\nOther primal worthy poets in English include Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, and her br different Harindranath Chattopadhyay. A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among these ar label the likes of Agha Shahid Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma and Vikram Seth. In youthful times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two really different poets. Dom Moraes, winner of the Hawthornden Prize at the age of 19 for his first book of rimes A showtime went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets writing in English.\r\nNissim Ezekiel, who came from India’s tiny Bene Israel Judaic community, created a voice and stray for Indian poets writing in English and championed their work. A significant and burn down beargonr poet is Nissim Ezekiel. Recent Indian English poetry adds to, what O. P. Bhatnagar terms as, a process of collective discovery, affirming its richness, sensitiveness and cultural complexity. If we examine the potential of the poery-making opinion in English, we should now discover aspects of the essentially assimilative whizz of the Indian people, snf a celebration of the vast terminate of voices that make Indian literature sing.\r\nThese poets write with an sensory faculty of their milieu and environment rather than British or American rhetoric or intellectual attitudes like alienation or exile. They share the central upshot of contemporary realiti es of Indian behavior. The Indo †Anglian poetry is said to be essentially Indian and everything else afterwards. It expresses the essence of Indian record and is also very sensitive to the changes of its national clime and it voices the aspirations and the joys and sorrows of Indians. It has been opined, that the Indo †Anglian poets are of two factions. The neo- forward-lookingists and the neo- figureists.\r\nThe outlook of the former is swarthy by humanism and irony and that of the latter is imbued with spectral mysticism and sublimity, but a perfect blend is achieved by the two groups in the realms of beauty. A perfect example, of anlndo †Anglian poet, who was able-bodied to arrive at a synthesis mingled with the two factions of poetry, is none other than Sarojini Naidu, for she took her place in the neutral, middle ground, amidst the sacred and profane field of study of poetry she was at home in twain the worlds and found them united in the realms of poe try. Nissim Ezekiel occupies an classic place in post-Independence Indian English literature.\r\nHe has wielded a great regulate as a spark advance poet, editor program and an occasional playwright. Be human faces, he is a long-familiar critic. Sometimes he also emerges as a politician in the guise of a sub for cultural freedom in India. Ezekiel held more important positions. He was for many years a prof of English in Bombay University. He is a famed name in the field of news media. In this talent he was editor of many journals including Poetry India (1966-67), pursuance (1955-57) and Imprint (1961-70), He was an Associate Editor to the Indian P. E. N. , Bombay.\r\nConsidered to be the Father of post independence Indian verse in English, Nissim Ezekiel was a prolific poet, playwright, critic, spreader and loving rumourmongerator. He was born on December24, 1924 in a Jew family. His acquire was a professor of plant and suffer was principal of her own school. Ezekiel was inclined to the poets such as T. S. Eliot. Yeats, Ezra Pound in his school days. The influence of all these literary ainities was apparent in his early works. His formal use of the English language was connect to colonialism and resulted in controversy.\r\nHis first collection of poetry ‘ cadence To Change’ was promulgated by Fortune push (London) in 1952. His poetry has all the elements of love, loneliness, lust, and creativity. Nissim Ezekiel went on to merge The Illustrated Weekly of India as an assistant editor in 1953. ‘lux Poems’ was his next book followed by ‘The nude Man’. Nissim Ezekiel started writing in formal English but with the passage of time his writing underwent a metamorphosis. As the time passed he acknowledged that ‘the apparition has its own secrets which light does not know.\r\nHis rime ‘The darkness Of Scorpion’ is considered to be one of the best works in Indian English poetry and is used as a study material in India and British schools. Nissim Ezekiel worked as an advertising copywriter and general manager of a picture frame company . He was the art critic of The Times Of India (1964-66) and editor of The Poetry India(1966-67). He was also the co-founder of the literary monthly Imprint. Ezekiel was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award in 1983. In 1988 he received another honor,Padma Shri, for his contribution to the Indian English writing. He passed away on January 9, 2004, in Mumbai after a prolonged illness.\r\nAs a man of letters Nissim Ezekiel is a ‘ variable’ figure. His achievements as a poet and playwright are considerable. K. Balachandran writes, â€Å"The post-Independence Indian poetry saw its new poetry in the fifties. Among the new poets A. K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Shiv K. Kumar, Kamala Das, Monica Verma, O. P. Bhatnagar, Gauri Deshpande, Adil Jussawalla, Ezekiel occupies a prominent place. His versatile admirer can be found in his poetry , plays, criticism, journalism and translation. Nissim Ezekiel has done a good work in Indian writing in English. He has written many volumes of metersâ€A Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact defecate (1965) and others. His plays Nalini, Marriage Poem, The Sleep-Walkers, Songs of Deprivation and Who Needs No presentation are already staged and published. He has also edited books Indian Writers in Conference (1964), physical composition in India (1965), An Emerson subscriber (1965), A Martin Luther King Reader (1965) and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1972).\r\nHis literary es hypothesizes published in magazines and papers are innumerable. The notable among them are ‘Ideas and Modern Poetry’ (1964), ‘The Knowledge of Dead Secrets’ (1965), ‘Poetry as Knowledge’ (1972), ‘Sri Aurobindo on Poetry’ (1972), ‘Should Poetry be Read to Audience? ‘ (1972), â €˜K. N. Daruwalla’ (1972), ‘Poetry and Philosophy,’ ‘ Hindoo Society’ (1966). He has written essays on art criticism ‘Modern Art in India’ (1970), ‘How expert is Sabavala? ‘ (1973), and ‘Paintings of the Year 1973’ (1973).\r\nHis e s s a y s o n social criticism Thoreau and Gandhi’ (1971), ‘Censorship and the Writer’ (1963), ‘How Normal is normality’ (1972), ‘Tradition and All That a Case Against the hippies’ (1973), ‘A Question of Sanity’ (1972) and ‘Our Academic conjunction’ (1968) are varied and auto telic of his wide interest. Ezekiel is an editor of several journals encouraging writing poetry, plays and criticisrm He also asked many writers for translation, affecting the theory and practice of the unexampled poets. The writers like Rilke and W. B. Yeats influenced Ezekiel.\r\nLike Yeats, he treated poetry as the ‘record of t he mind’s growth. ‘ His poetical bulk indicates his growth as a poet-critic and shows his personal importance. Chetan Karnani states, â€Å"At the centre was that sincere devoted mind that wanted to discover itself. In the process, he managed to mull over a unique achievement of his own. ” The poet Ezekiel has already published several volumes of poems. For him poetry-writing was a lofty vocation, a way of life. He treated life as a journey w here(predicate) poetry would be the main line of discovering and organising one’s own self.\r\nIn a sense, poetry to Ezekiel became a way for self-realisation. He calls life a texture of poetry. He identifies himself with poetry. So all of his volumes of verse are well-knit and they are in the poet’s view, a continuation of each other. Ezekiel’s experiments in prose rhythms and his fine sense of bodily structure and metrical ability. The verse rhythms of T. S. Eliot seem to haunt hi s mind. Ezekielâ €™s Si x t y Poems (1953), his second volume of poems was published in 1953. solely these poems are loose in structure and they are less appealing.\r\n nighttime of the Scorpion’, in which Ezekiel recalls the behaviour of ‘the peasants’, his aim, his sustain and a holy man when his mother was poisonous substanceed by a scorpion’s sting. Here the aim is to mother poetry in ordinary reality as observed, known, matte, experienced rather than as the intellect thinks it should be. turn the peasants pray and s eyeshade of incarnations, his father, ‘sceptic, rationalist’, tries ‘every chap and blessing, powder, mixture, herb and hybrid’ and a holy man performs a rite.\r\nAfter a day the poison is no longer felt and, in a final irony, his mother, in contrast to the previous hectic activity centred upon her, makes a typical motherly comment: My mother only said Thank divinity fudge the scorpion picked on me and spared my child ren. The ‘Thank God’ is doubly humourous as it is a commonplace expression of vocabulary in contrast to all the previous religious and superstitious activity. Ezekiel’s project is not, however, an expression of skepticism but rather the exact notation of what he saw as a child. The aim is not to explain but to make real by naming, by saying ‘common things’.\r\nThe poem is a new direction, a visionof ordinary reality, especially of Indian life, unmediated by cold intellect. The new purpose is seen in the poem’s style, unrhymed, with line lengths shaped by natural syntactical units and rhythm created by the cadences of the speaking voice into a long verse paragraph, rather than the stanzaic structure used in early poems. In his poetry there is the truth of acknowledging what is felt and experienced in its complexity, contradictions, pleasures, fears and disillusionments without preconceived ideas of what poetry should say about the poet and life.\r\nNissim Ezekiel’s ‘Night of The Scorpion’ is much comprehended by the critics and it has found place in many anthologies for as excellence, Critics, commenting on its aesthetic beauty expressed different views. In their critical sweep, they brought everything from superstitious ritualism to modern rationalism. One can keep that in the poem superstitious ritualism or sceptic rationalism or even the balance of the both with expression of Indian ethos by means of maternal love in the Indian way, is nothing but scratching the surface.\r\nThe poem has something more gigantic than its face value, which as I find is the symbolic juxtaposition of the forces of darkness and light that is in and of itself centripetal in the poem. It is ‘Night’ of The Scorpion’ with the first record book absorb accent. It seems to have been implicitly contrived here that ‘Night should stand as a symbol of darkness with the ‘Scorpion’ a s the symbol of evil. Such address in craftsmanship takes the poem to the higher take aim of understanding. Prof.\r\nBirje Patil is right in putting that in â€Å"Night of The Scorpion”, where evil is symbolized by the scorpion, The reader made to introduce in the ritual as well as suffering through’ a vivid evocation of the poison moving in the mother’s blood’. And evil has always been associated with darkness, the seamy side of our life, in human psyche. It has always been the integral calve of theology, in whatever form it has manifested that suffering helps in removing that darker spot in human mind, he patch that has been a besetting sin of man’s existence.\r\n may the sum of evil Balanced in this futile world gainst the sum of good become low by your pain, they said These lines amply testify that the poem aims at achieving something higher than its narrative simplicity. The choric ref rainfall ‘they said’ in the chain of reactions made by the village peasants is undoubtedly ironic, but the poet hasn’t as much to stress the concept of sin, redemption or rebirth ass he has to insinuate the intractable force of darkness gripping the minds of the unenlightened. Going through the poem attentively more than once, it can’t fail catching our notice that modern rationalism is also equally shallow and perverse.\r\nIt is also a road leading to muddiness where through emerges scepticism, the other darker patch on our modernized existence. The image of the father in this poem speaks volumes for this capsizing modernism which sandwiches in its arm- space the primitive and the perverted. The â€Å"sceptic rationalist’ father trying ‘powder, mixture, herb and hybrid’ bears upon human crudity and when he experiments with ‘a little paraffin upon a bitten toe and put a match to it he becomes a symbol of perversion in the modern man’s psyche. Christopher Wiseman puts i t, â€Å"… fascinating tension between personal crisis and mocking social observation”” ; uncomplete there is any personal crisis. On the other hand there is spiritual compassion and an hot urge for getting rid of this psychological syndrome that the totally modern world ha s b e e n caught, the slow-moving poison of this syndromic scorpion into the very veins of creation, the image of the mother in bedevilment nullifying the clear vision of human thought and wrap the all told of humanity In the darker shades of confusion more chaolic, troubles the poet as much sharply as the sting of the poisonous worm.\r\nThere is crisis, but it is the crisis of human existence thaat needs lo be overcome. The poet, though a distant observer, doesn’t take a stance of detachment. On the exact opposite, he watches with curiosity â€Å"the blast feeding on my mother’, but being uncertain whether the paraffin flame would cleanse her of the ugony of the absorbing poison, he loses himself in a thoughtful trance. The whole poem abounds with these two symbols of darkness and light. In the very beginning the poet has ushered in this symbolic juxta position and indeed as the poem advanced, built upon it the whole structure of his fascinating architecture in the lines.\r\nTen hours of tranquillise rain had driven him to crawl beneath a sack of rice parting with his poison †tucket of diabolic tail in the dark way he risked the rain again. The incessant rain stands for the apply and regeneration where with is juxtaposed the destructive hurdles to fruitfy that hope. just the constructive, life giving rain continuoues and the evil, having fulfilled its parts, departs. and so afterwards other hurdels more preying than the first, come in. more candles, more lanterns, more neighbours more insects, and the endless rain My mother twisted through and through groaning on a mat.\r\nThe symbols of light and darkness, candles lanterns, neighbours and insects and rain again are notworthy. only when the force of light gains a comprehensiveness handover the evil force and life is restored once again in its joyous stride and this life long struggle between forces of darkness and light reaches a crescendo when †after twenty hours It lost its sting. Here, In the above lines, lies the beuaty of the poem, when the ascending steps of darkness, being chased by the force of following light are ripped down; when at last on the peak the chaser wins and the chased slips down.\r\nThe man who has not soundless what motherhood is. might be taken in by such expression of motherly love. But I convincingly feel that any charr would have exclaimed the same thing as the mother in this poem did. In my view, it would have been unfeignedly Indian had the mother in her tortures remembered her children and though helplessly, had she desire to protect them lest the scorpion might catch them unawres. Anyway, the beauty of the poem remains- un marred by such revision. The poem is a thing of beauty par excellence.\r\n'