Author: Havovi Anklesaria
Several Contributors/
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Santan Rodrigues
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 603
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788126026487
Description
Nissim Ezekiel passed away on 9th January 2004, at the age of 79. As a poet, Critic, editor, teacher, Political commentator, he was a seminal influence of Indian Literature in English. This volume commentates, his achievements and testifies to half a century of his intellectual involvement in the literary and cultural life of Bombay and to a lesser extent of India.
Nissim Ezekiel Remembered has a panoramic scope. It is designed for the general reader and for students of Indian writing in English. The book begins with a wonderfully lively set of personal memoirs. Ezekiel’s great achievement as a lyricist is represented by a small selection from Collected Poems and a large sample of uncollected verse. The selected plays, point to a more nuanced, specific, observationist vision.
The impressive selection of prose reproduced for the first time covers a wide range of views on art, literature, politics and light, laconic odds and ends of gossip. It is opinionated in the best sense of the word and anecdotal, presenting a point of view that can be audaciously disagreeable but generally incisive and considered. The book reviews and art criticism are his greatest contribution to the cultural life of his time. They encapsulate the acute critical judgement that marked Ezekiel’s style, and the critical tenets that he established continue resonate.
The book concludes with an academic section which, it is hoped, will arouse the interest of a younger generation of students in Ezekiel and the India that he inhabited.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
Nissim, lightly, and other pieces
Personally Speaking: a series of interviews
Many Poems, two Plays, and a Short Story
The Creative Writer as Critic, and other essays
On Writers and Books
Books Reviews
Art and Artists
The Politics of Discontent: the Freedom First years
This and that
Bibliography
Contributors
Index