Nissim Ezekiel

A Modern Poet of the Have-nots

Dr. S. D. SHARMA
G. B. Pant University. Pantnagar

Writing about the poverty of a typical Indian in his famous poem Yashwant Jagtap.Nissim Ezekiel espouses the cause of the hoi-polloi, the downtrodden and the depressed section of the society. With a tinge of pathos, he points outthe fact that most of the people live a life of utter want and dejection. “A true blue-Indian is he”, writes he, “who cannot sleep because it rains” and because he has no shelter. “The water gushes through the roof; “there is only a cot in the mud-hut”: and “his wife, a son, a brother’s son” perch on it and “impatiently wait for light”¹ When the flood comes, the water rushes through the houses made of clay and “he places the child on his shoulder where he sleeps”, but the elder ones don’t and pass a sleepless night. A man of “sixty”, he has “eleven children and it is almost a hard nut to crack to bear the brunt of such a huge family only by pushing a handcart.” With as meagre income as a rupee per day, “a true blue-Indian” is ultimately, “reconciled to his lot” ² and leads a miserable existence. The population is increasing by leaps and bounds and all honest efforts to curb it are bound to fail. The result is poverty and it breeds other attendant social evils. Nissim Ezekiel does not curse the have-­nots or the poor, yet he is unambiguously justified to term poverty as a crime in a Gandhian sense, and exhorts the have-nots to get themselves relieved of it.

The poverty-stricken stratum of society is bereft of the privilege of the choice of their spouses despite the magnitude and warmth of their attachment and love for each other. Their course of true love does not go straight: it passes through rather serpentine ways, and when often it is likely toreach its ne plus ultra or point of consummation, it is vehemently and cruelly crushed. The major stumbling-block in the smooth running of their divine love is poverty. It forces them to seek divorce for the few unfortunately wedded; it compels many unwilling young girls to accept old persons to be their husbands. In his famous poem entitled Servant, the maid servant is married at the age of twelve or fourteen to a brute old drunkard. Her husband beats her mercilessly merely for the sake of fun. There are visible signs on her and thighs of a cruel beating and she is too poor to provide ointment for her wounds to heal up. Her only livelihood is to visit some houses to clean utensils and wash the floor, and her only fond hope is to bring up her only child in anticipation of providing some material relief in her old age. She has no enthusiasm for life; for, the present is wretched and her future is also bleak. She has started to give up her faith even in any divine power; for, her God of ten or eleven is dead and her religion of childhood is meaningless.

The gulf between the rich and the poor, as Nissim Ezekiel anticipates, widens gradually; the rich is becoming richer and the poor poorer. The capitalists like merciless spiders are sucking the blood of helpless flies – the innocent labourers. On the one hand is carefree consumption of money: on the other the miserly use of it; there are palatial buildings for the millionaires on the one hand, on the other, the dingy huts for the poor. The one is bored of richness, the other dies of hunger. In his famous poem Hangover.Nissim Ezekiel laments the inequality of wealth in the society: “the red-coated waiters of Harbour Bar;” “the redlight-district dancer at the Apollo Room” stand for the poverty-­stricken masses involved in all sorts of social, evils merely for the sake of money. “The expensive menu”, “the Biryani Hyderabadi”, “the Sindhi Sales Manager”, “the Parsi Fashion Model”, “the American family”³ enjoying the imported whisky­–all these symbols of richness of the privileged class stand in utter contrast to “the shadow of Marx”, “the sighs of Bangla­desh “, “a family of five staring at all”, “two blind beggars”⁴ helplessly crying for the poor pittance – all these symbols of chill penury. Nissim Ezekiel, the poet of the unprivileged, the have-nots is deeply pained to witness all this colossal waste of human power due to poverty.

Writing about a critic in his famous poem entitled For a Friendly Critic, Nissim Ezekiel talks of “the acute deficiencies” partly temperamental but partly the product of straightened social relations amongst the unprivileged class. Even the moral standards degenerate into a ritual for want of congenial social relations; the masses suffer from mental aberrations and spiritual hunger because they do not lead a sound social life. In a society founded on poverty and want, no sound philosophy or political system can work wonders, because everybody in such a society leads a hard-pressed life. Even on the state of total degeneration, the so-called social custodians remain “reticent” knowing that they too are “dancing for money as chorus girls.”

“Religion is an opium that induces sleep to the masses,” so wrote Karl Marx; and “poverty born of non-chalance is a crime”, so wrote M. K. Gandhi; and both of them anticipated a classless society on different socialistic patterns. Nissim Ezekiel finds spiritual dream unfulfilled without the substantial help and succour from religion and richness. Like Marx, he does not preach Marxism or Communism; like Gandhi he does not teach Gandhism; he, nevertheless, dislikes those political and religious imposters who bamboozle the unprivileged for their self-aggrandise­ment. Material prosperity, he regards, as of paramount significance to the uplift of the masses; religion, he considers to be of decisive value in shaping their future line of active life full of contentment and peace. He is, therefore, neither Marx nor Gandhi to the masses; his approach to the problems of the masses is purely humanitarian, which revolves round man; in which there is only one religion, one service, one motto – viz., the welfare of the unprivileged and the depressed. In his famous poems such as Cows, ground, Casually, Testament, and Progress, one comes across sporadic references to all these significant aspects of life of the Masses For instance, in ground, Casually, Nissim Ezekiel emphasises upon religious tolerance; he, nevertheless, realizes the fact that gradually our moral moorings are degenerating:

At home on Friday nights, the prayers
Were said, My moral had declined.
I heard of Yoga and of Zen,
Could I, perhaps, be rabbi-saint?
The more I searched, the less I found. ⁵

The have-nots are deprived of their right to be well-educated by the haves in a democratic society; the rich spend huge money on their children in educational institutions whereas the poor cannot even afford to send their wards. The dire conse­quence of this inequality is obvious – the rich form their own social coterie in which the poor is denied any entry and all this is ultimately bound to end in a class-distinction and class-­malignity. The lower class thinks. the interests of the higher class as absolutely incompatible with and controvertible to that of the higher class; the former tries to cause promiscuity by throwing all sorts of ignoble invectives on the latter, which in turns also manipulates to endanger the social and financial security of the have-nots. In his poems like Cow and Testament, Nissim Ezekiel nostalgically recollects the sufferings of the riif-raff, the block-headed, and the simpletons and their lack of education. Poorly equipped as their educational institutions are, they cannot afford expensive education, and their wards, therefore, turn out to be robbers and dacoits, only fit for the gallows. In Cows, an old lady of seventy collects petty amount for her school; her “school consists of three rooms, two in separate slums a hundred yards apart” and one “in a temple”; “the registered office” of the school “is in her bedroom, where she keeps the accounts” ⁶ also. This miserable existence of an educational institution is repre­sentative of thousands of such ill-equipped schools owned by the lower class of the society. In such a pitiable condition, they are expected only to produce “luddite mobs” involved in all sorts of social evils. Nissim Ezekiel is, therefore, pained to the core of his heart to witness such a discriminatory system of education – one meant for the elites, the other for the masses and points it out premonitorily in his poems.

Nissim Ezekiel, like Signor Mussolini, does not disparage democracy contemptuously as “a putrefying corpse”; ⁷ nor does he, like G. B. Shaw, regards it as “a big balloon filled with gas or hot air, sent up so that you shall be kept looking up at the sky whilst other people are picking your pockets”. ⁸ He accepts it, on the contrary, reverently like Abraham Lincoln as “the government of the people, for the people and by the people.” But he laments the negligible role played by the poor masses in a democratic set-up like ours on account of their want of money and literacy. Often votes are purchased and hence, no consideration of merit of the representative is kept while exercising their right of franchise. After the election to the Parliament or the State Assemblies, as the case may be, the representatives do not care a fig for the poor voters. Conse­quently their genuine problems remain unheard and unattended. In his poems, Healers, Testament and For Satish Gujral, there is a lurking illation to the fact that the lot of the poor masses remains neglected despite all confident anticipations and repeated assurances. The only consolation of the poor is that “God’s love remains with them as their heritage” ⁹ and that they “need not change their way of life”. ¹⁰ After all their lot is predestined!

¹ Yashwant Jagtap, lines 1-8.
² Ibid.,lines 15-19.
³ Hangover, lines 2-5.
⁴  Ibid., lines 13-15.
⁵ ground, Casually, Stz. IV.
⁶ Cows, lines 5-9
⁷ The Apple Cart, Preface, p. viii
⁸ Ibid. (quoted)
⁹ Healers, line 18.
¹⁰ Ibid.,line 19.