Nissim Ezekiel birthday: Indian Government pay tribute on his 96th birth anniversary
Indian Government pays tribute to Nissim Ezekiel’s 96th birth anniversary. He was an Indian Jewish poet, actor, and playwriter in Indian literary history.
Nissim Ezekiel was born into a modestly bourgeois Jewish family on 16 December 1924 in Bombay (Mumbai) in Maharashtra.
To tribute to Nissim Ezekiel’s 96th birth anniversary, MyGovIndia today has taken its official Twitter handle and wrote, ” While some remember Nissim Ezekiel for his poem “Night of the Scorpion” where he paints a mother’s love for her children, his talents went beyond verse. Here’s to celebrating the pioneer of post-independence Indian-English poetry on his 96th birth anniversary!”
While some remember Nissim Ezekiel for his poem "Night of the Scorpion" where he paints a mother's love for her children, his talents went beyond verse. Here's to celebrating the pioneer of post-independence Indian-English poetry on his 96th birth anniversary!#MyGovMorningMusings pic.twitter.com/oqBp4thSgS
— MyGovIndia (@mygovindia) December 14, 2020
His parents were both educators. His father was a professor of botany and zoology and served as a principal in several colleges. His mother was the principal of a school she had started.
Ezekiel has been appreciated for his well-crafted diction, works dealing with common and mundane themes, an unsentimental and realistic sensibility. He enriched and enlarged Indian English literature by including familial events, skeptical societal introspection, etc.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for his collection, “Latter-Day Psalms”, by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.
Nissim Ezekiel’s collected poems were first anthologized in 1992 by Oxford India. Since then, it has published three impressions and two editions of the anthology. When read from cover to cover, the poems show Ezekiel’s evolution as a poet from the age of 28 to 62. These poems are spread over a wide spectrum and reflect the changes that Ezekiel made in his writing over time.
Most of us remember Ezekiel through his work ‘Night of the Scorpion’ which we read in high school.
For the last years of his life, he suffered from Alzheimer’s. Nissim Ezekiel passed away in January 2004 at the age of 79.
