Father of Modern Indian Poetry: Tributes, Poems, Personal Recollections

Nissim Ezekiel was born into a Bene-Israel Jewish family of Bombay on 16th December, 1924. He along with his contemporaries Keki N Daruwalla and R Parthasarathy ushered in a new era in post-Independence Indian literature. In his Introduction to Ezekiel’s Collected Poems (1989), John Thieme states that Ezekiel was ‘at the centre of the group of poets who inaugurated the Modernist revolution in Indian English poetry’ (p. xix). His first collection, A Time to Change (1952) initiated the shift in style from lyrical romanticism prevalent among pre-Independence Indian poets to what resonated with postwar stance on modernity. Recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award and Padma Shri, he was a poet of international repute, a prolific prose writer, an art critic, a teacher and the editor of The Indian P.E.N. in Bombay. Suffering from Alzheimer’s, he passed away on 9th January, 2004, at the age of 79.