Introduction: After reading the story of the play ‘Hayavadana’ written by Girish Karnad we find Hayavadana as an important character. He was the product of an unequal marriage between a celestial being and a princess living on the earth. As a princess as well as the mother of Hayavadana she belonged to Karnataka. She had … Read more
Introduction: After reading the story of the novel “Heat and Dust” we know that Olivia is an important female character who had been loving the Nawab because her husband, Douglas had neglected to love her strongly. The Narrator had come to India to know about Olivia who was the first wife of her grandfather Douglas. … Read more
The Unequal Marriage of the Nawab: Sandy, the wife of the Nawab had got her education in Switzerland as well as at some other places in Europe. Though the Nawab loved his wife much, bought many precious and beautiful things for her, yet she hated purdah to live with the family of the Nawab. About … Read more
Introduction of the Poem: Philosophy was included in Ezekiel’s fifth volume of poems, The Exact Name (1965). It is one of Ezekiel’s most abstract poems. The poet is certainly interested in the real world of human beings and in the familiar manifestations of human nature, as also in human inter relationships. But one of his … Read more
Introduction of the Poem: This poem appeared in The Exact Name (1965). It outlines the method that a poet should adopt to achieve success in his chosen vocation of writing poetry. He gives the analogy of a lover and a birdwatcher here to illustrate his point. In each case, illumination or fulfilment comes through a … Read more
Connected with, and arising from the theme of alienation, is the motif of failure in Ezekiel’s poetry. “A refugee in spirit” in search of his “dim identity”, ruefully accepts his failure to identify himself with his Indian ethos and environment in an effort “to weave myself more closely into things”, “My backward place is where … Read more
Irony is the device used by Nissim Ezekiel most prominently in his poetry from Background, Casually, an early poem, which is an excellent example of this. He describes himself as a “poet, rascal clown”. As a student in a Roman Catholic school he was “A mugging Jew among the wolves. They told me I had … Read more
Nissim Ezekiel’s subject in the poem has been drawn from the spectrum of Indian life. Night of the Scorpion deals with Indian customs, superstitious, blind faith and dogmatism juxtaposed with rational thinking. Ezekiel here shuns any comment on what he faithfully records and describes. The reader is free to draw his own conclusions. The universally … Read more
Enterprise, from The Unfinished Man (1959), is one of Ezekiel’s finest poems. It has a well – marked rhyme scheme and incantory music all its own. It is an allegory of a voyage undertaken by a group of men, their efforts, failures and frustrations. A group of people undertake a voyage, moved by noble aspirations … Read more
According to M.K. Naik, a major shaping factor in Ezekiel’s poetry is that he belonged to a Bene – Israel family which migrated to India generations ago. Thus “substantially alienated from the core of the Indian ethos”, Ezekiel was acutely aware of this alienation by the fact that he had spent most of his life … Read more