Crossing points and connecting lines: Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in Bombay and beyond

Abstract

Like any other form of art, poetry depends upon social networks for its creation, circulation, appreciation and preservation. In turn, social networks are defined by cultural and historical circumstances. The flourishing of anglophone poetry in postcolonial Bombay provides a good case to for studying the significance and impact of social networks on the naturalization of literary modernism in a particular period and place. In this context, the parallel lives of two of India’s earliest and most accomplished postcolonial anglophone poets, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, reveal the relevance of the network paradigm in understanding their work. This article is a preliminary attempt at highlighting the vast network of local, national and international contacts underlying the different yet overlapping careers of these two poets in a wider context defined by events and realities (the cultural cold war, the decolonization process, the rise of postcolonial literatures) that simultaneously transcended and impacted the local scene.

Keywords:

• Nissim Ezekiel
• Dom Moraes
• social networks
• Quest
• Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF)
• Poetry India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On Caton, see d’Arch Smith (1983). David Archer remains, in the words of George Barker’s and David Gascoyne’s biographer, “one of the unsung heroes of mid-twentieth-century British verse, his life uncharted by either biography or obituary” (Fraser 2012, 50). Except for a recent entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, most information about this legendary publisher-bookseller may be found in a handful of literary biographies or autobiographical works, Moraes’s memoirs being one of the most substantial sources.

2. Francis (Frank) Robert Moraes (1907–74) was The Times of India’s first Indian editor and one of independent India’s most distinguished journalists.

3. On the medical career of Cecilia Rose Ferreira D’Monte (1875–1940), see Ramanna (2002, 190). The poet was named after her husband, Dominic Anaclete D’Monte (1858–1938), himself a doctor and a member of the Municipal Corporation of Bombay.

4. Leeming has the itinerary right but the year wrong. Both Spender’s journals (S. Spender 1985, 137–144) and his son’s memoir (M. Spender 2015, 139–140) make clear that the year was 1954, not 1953. The date is further confirmed by a detailed itinerary of Spender’s visit, published in the November issue of Freedom First, and by an account of the same visit, in the December issue. Both pieces were probably penned by Ezekiel, whose portrait of Spender opens the November issue of the journal.

5. Caetani would eventually publish three of Moraes’s poems in Botteghe oscure (“Autobiography”, “Card Game” and “Words to a Boy”). See Moraes (1958, 122–124).

6. An editor’s footnote identifies Moraes, surprisingly, as “a poet writing in both English and his native Konkani [sic]” (Pasolini 1985, 96), while Pasolini’s own mistake about Moraes’s academic affiliation passes unnoticed.

7. Moraes was the youngest and the first non-English recipient.

8. The first few years of Moraes’s life in England, spent between London and Oxford, form the latter half (chapters 7–12) of My Son’s Father, included in his collected memoirs (Moraes 2003).

9. It was Moraes who introduced Ginsberg and Corso to Auden, in the spring of 1958, when the older poet was Professor of Poetry at Oxford (Moraes 2003, 307–310). A slightly different, second-hand version of this episode is told by Moraes’s friend and fellow Oxonian, Ved Mehta (1983, 213–219).

10. Moraes’s journalism and television work form the bulk of Never at Home (Moraes 1994), the third and final volume of his collected memoirs (also included in Moraes 2003).

11. “More than 1,000 students shouting slogans condemning the BBC in Aloka, in Maharashtra, observed a ‘hartal’, a stoppage of work, to protest against the BBC’s alleged description of Chhatrapati Shivaji, a character in the film, as a ‘looter’. Frightened shopkeepers put up their shutters” (Briggs 1995, 939). See also Williams (1989, 108).

12. A second poem, “Song”, appeared in the August–September 1956 issue of Quest (Moraes 1956).

13. His collaboration with Freedom First started soon after its inception and relaxed when he became editor of Quest in August 1955; it then resumed when he edited the magazine from issue no. 327 (February–March 1980) until issue no. 365 (July 1983). According to his biographer, his editorials for Freedom First are “about the most political articles Nissim has ever written” (Rao 2000, 256). Quest ceased publication in 1976, during the Emergency, when Minoo Masani decided to suspend its publication to protest Indira Gandhi’s censorship laws, while its editor at the time, A.B. Shah, founded New Quest in its stead, allegedly to defy such laws (Chitre 2011, 651–655).

14. Unfortunately, Knightley's factual errors tend to undermine his credibility, as when in the same chapter he mentions Allen Ginsberg’s poetry reading in Bombay, referring to his companion as Gregory Corso (1997, 86–87), instead of Peter Orlovsky (perhaps confusing Ginsberg’s visit to Oxford, when he and Corso were chaperoned by Dom Moraes).

15. “Beyond the data of the senses” opens the second stanza of “The Cur”, in Ezekiel’s third collection The Third, published in 1958; see Ezekiel (1989, 95).