Nissim Ezekiel
Quick answer: Nissim Ezekiel craft guide: irony, formal discipline and Indian English as a poetic instrument. Techniques from the father of Indian English poetry.
Indian poetry in English essentially has a founding professional, and it is Nissim Ezekiel. Born in Bombay in 1924 into the city's small Bene Israel Jewish community, he published A Time to Change in 1952, and for the next four decades wrote, edited, reviewed and mentored with a craftsman's stubbornness, insisting that Indian poets writing in English hold themselves to the highest formal standards. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for Latter-Day Psalms.
Ezekiel's usefulness to a learning poet is immediate: he is a master of irony that includes the self, of strict stanzas holding untidy lives, and of listening to how English is actually spoken around him.
Bombay's resident craftsman
Ezekiel's biography is deliberately unromantic: he studied philosophy, worked in advertising and publishing, taught American literature at the University of Bombay, and stayed. While contemporaries emigrated, he made remaining in India his subject, most explicitly in 'Background, Casually', a wry verse autobiography in which he commits to his city with open eyes.
His collections, including The Unfinished Man, The Exact Name, Hymns in Darkness and Latter-Day Psalms, track a poet moving from tight rhymed stanzas toward freer forms without ever losing measure. As reviewer and editor he shaped the generation after him, and arguments about his verdicts are still a rite of passage in Indian English letters. He died in 2004.
The signature moves
Four Ezekiel techniques are worth stealing outright.
What you can learn
Turn your satire inward. Draft the poem mocking what you despise, then add three lines establishing your own membership in it. Ezekiel's Bombay poems endure because the poet stands inside the city he criticises; superiority is the death of satire, complicity its life.
Transcribe before you invent. Spend a week writing down sentences actually said around you, in whatever English your streets speak, and build one poem entirely from that music. Respect is the hinge: Ezekiel's idiom poems laugh with, and the moment they laughed at, they would die. Finally, put one dramatic family event through his parable machine: report it plainly, in order, and give the last line to the person who suffered most, without adding your interpretation.
Where to start reading
'Night of the Scorpion' is the standard anthology entry and deserves its status. 'Background, Casually' gives the life and the commitment to staying. 'The Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.' and 'The Patriot' show the Indian English idiom poems. Then read The Exact Name and Latter-Day Psalms as collections, watching the forms loosen while the measure holds. His Collected Poems, with introduction, is the sensible single purchase.
What poets can take from this
- Add three lines to your next satire that establish your own complicity in the target.
- Keep a week-long notebook of overheard sentences and build a poem from their actual rhythms.
- Report a family crisis in strict chronological order and give the final line to its central figure.
- Write free verse only after the draft has survived a counted-stanza version.
- Commit to your city or town as a subject for one full year of poems.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a local ceremony, a farewell party, a housewarming, a school function, in the exact English spoken at it. The speaker must be a participant, not an observer, and must reveal one of their own pretensions by the end.
Questions
Why is Nissim Ezekiel called the father of Indian English poetry?
His 1952 debut A Time to Change is commonly treated as the starting point of modern Indian poetry in English, and his decades of writing, editing and mentoring in Bombay set professional standards for the tradition that followed.
What happens in 'Night of the Scorpion'?
A mother is stung by a scorpion; villagers gather with prayers and theories while the rationalist father tries every remedy. It ends with the mother's brief thankfulness that the scorpion spared her children, a close Ezekiel leaves uninterpreted.
Are Ezekiel's Indian English poems mocking?
They reproduce Bombay speech patterns with irony but also evident affection, and the speakers retain dignity. Most critics read them as celebrating the idiom's expressiveness while gently observing its formalities.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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