Ganga by Nissim Ezekiel

2019

Abstract: The Ganges, the most sacred river, occupies an important place in Indian psyche, consciousness, thoughts, ideology, beliefs and cultural practices. The Ganga finds a mention in the Rig Veda, believably emanates from the toe of Lord Vishnu, one of the Hindu Trinity, and is brought on to the earth from the heaven by the prayer of Saint Bhagiratha to purify the ashes of sixty thousand sons of King Sagara to save them from the angry glances of Sage Kapila and is personified as a goddess. On the earth she was the daughter of Himavat and Minavati, became the wife of king Shantanu and gave birth to Bhishma in the Mahabharata. In Indian psyche and philosophy the Ganga carries intense recuperative mode of cultural, religious and ritualistic consciousness. It serves as a cultural alterity, provides pluralistic vision, therapeutic benefits and cultural essentialism to the needs of Indian civilization. The discourse of the Ganga in Indian literature, history, anthropology, political economy, mass sentiment, national unity, cultural multiplicity, ideological conditioning, philosophy, imagination of spiritual sovereignty and autonomy is full of beauty and aesthetic pleasure. The Ganga is the river of life and source of spiritual contentment for every Hindu. It is not merely a water body but the holiest of the holy things on the earth. While ancient sages and poets presented Ganga with its purgatorial effect, the modern day Indian English poets describe it not only to internationalise its geo-specificity but also to internalise the spiritual essence of this river in their thoughts, impressions and beliefs. The present paper aims at focusing the river in the imagination, obsession and recession of Indian thoughts, consciousness and idea of nationhood in the poetry of Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Susheel Kumar Sharma. It analyses Daruwalla’s assumption of collective Indian psyche that needs to immerse in the water of the Ganga for wrecking the doubts, Mehortra’s intellectual and ethical confusions which need a conscious assemblage and confluence in its spiritual significance and external reality, and Sharma’s faithful strands on the river. The paper compares the poets’ understanding of the philosophy of the Ganges and its internalising by them. Keywords: Civilisation, Culture, Degeneration, Ganges, Imagery, Material values

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Langlit, 2015

Poems on Womanhood in India

Besides the five formally accepted disciplines of Architecture, Urban Design, Conservation, Interior Design & Valuation, Kimaya has been active in the allied field of Education, Journalism, Environmental Activism, Photography, & Poetry. POETRY: The depth & width of one’s experience condition any expression. Several experiences & sensations of Kimaya have been expressed through verse. ‘Kimaya’, the Marathi essay by the late Prof. Madhav Achwal speaks about the word ‘Kimaya’ as a journey from the give & take of mundane everyday life to that of the most beautiful & complete consciousness. The aesthetic expression cuts across the media of architecture and all the ‘rasas’ – (aesthetic sensations) Kimaya has found poetry to be a useful medium for expressing the agonies & ecstasies in this journey. Several magazines have used these verses to express the inner meanings of the accompanying prose.

Muse India (Jan-Feb 2020), 2020

The river as a symbol of human life is a cliché and doesn’t go down well with modern-day poets who do not accept the romantic and sentimentalized notion of rivers. The landscape of Indian English poetry is populated with images of rivers. The perspectival array that the entire corpus of Indian English poetry offers is persistent and persuasive that can unlock an exploration of the instances where the image of rivers embodies as well as unravels unique relationship the poets have with rivers. In this paper, I attempt to study two poems on rivers by two Indian English poets, Attipat Krishnaswamy (A. K.) Ramanujan (1929-1993) and Abhay K (b. 1980). Ramanujan is critical of the older poets who only sang of the vitality of the rivers, thereby overlooking its complexities. He mourns the absence of imagination in the poets of the past and the present who fail to see beyond the normative view of life and things. He anticipated a fresh look at iconic rivers like Vaikai. Abhay K is one such poet who complements Ramanujan’s poetic vision and prefers to eschew the sublime in favor of the grotesque.

Crossings: A Journal of English Studies, 2017

Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), a major figure in the history of Indian English poetry, deals with a wide range of themes including the representation of the voiceless in his vast oeuvre of poetry. His poetic world is suffused with a variety of images, both urban and sylvan, and his poetry presents readers with people of different backgrounds from around the whole country. The poet depicts individuals from different strata of society who represent a great part of India. Some of his poems highlight distresses of the underprivileged people in various communities of India. Ezekiel shows that these people go through difficult times without having attention or empathy of the elites. Treated as the “other,” the poverty-stricken people cannot raise their voice though their struggle for survival continues. Ezekiel, a leading post-independence poet, represents his locale – many of his poems portray the actualities of Indian life. This article is an attempt to explore a selection of Ezekiel’s poems in order to find out how the marginalized people in India are exploited and oppressed, how they are deprived of their basic rights, how they suffer psychologically, how they are silenced, and how the poet strives to give voice to the voiceless.

Alluring slogans like "Feminism is Dead" are not really relevant in the context of developing societies like India where this 'ism' has not really even been born. Unlike the West where excesses and eccentricities of some women_ libbers have resulted in 'backlash against feminism', India, with her skewed gender-ratio and increasing heinous crime and violence against women, stands much in need of such revolutionary and consciousness-raising literature which is instrumental in creating a gender_equal and egalitarian society. The issue of ' female identity' in one form or another has become an inevitable part of the contemporary Indian literary and critical discourse.

Al Jadid Vol 24. No. 78, 2020

The Cholera The night became quiet Listen to the moans’ echoing sound In the depth of darkness, under silence, over the dead Interrupted, screams rise Burning, sadness flows Over it stumble, groans’ echoes In every heart, it is seething In the calm cottage, it is grieving Everywhere, a soul, in darkness, howls Everywhere, a voice yowls This is what death has torn apart O the Nile’s sorrow screaming at what Death did! Dawn broke Listen to the footsteps Of those walking In the silence of dawn Listen, look at the procession of weepers Ten dead, twenty Do not count. Listen to the wailers Hear the poor child’s voice Dead, dead, the figure got lost Dead, dead, no tomorrow is left Everywhere, bodies wailed by mourners No moment for peace, no silence This is what the hand of death did Death, death, death… Nazik Al-malaika Translated from Arabic by Imene Chaabane Bennani