: ‘A Time to Change’: How Nissim Ezekiel became the pioneer of a new era of English poetry in India #IndiaNEWS Nissim Ezekiel’s A Time to Change was published seventy years ago, in 1952. To many,

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‘A Time to Change’: How Nissim Ezekiel became the pioneer of a new era of English poetry in India #IndiaNEWS
Nissim Ezekiel’s A Time to Change was published seventy years ago, in 1952. To many, this was the first significant book of postcolonial poetry in English. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was published in England, where Ezekiel had travelled on impulse, and managed to stay nearly four years before returning to his beloved Bombay.The fuller history of these movements still awaits their evaluation, though we are fortunate in having had Raj Rao as a sympathetic biographer. For Ezekiel’s work was not simply significant chronologically – ie, written five years after Independence. Rather, it is believed that its larger importance was its disruption of a certain grandiose register of poetry in English – the favoured example here is Aurobindo Ghose whose works such as Savitri (over 20,000 lines) sought no less than the redemption of the entire human race.As said, a more comprehensive and inter-connected literary history of all poets of this era still needs to be written. For example, there are many ways of rehabilitating figures like Aurobindo, and indeed that mythic register has continued to haunt many poets. (One thinks, for example, of Ezekiel’s near contemporary, Muktibodh, writing in Hindi). Indeed, the very first lines of A Time to Change itself begin on just such a high register...Read more

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