Life & Background
Nissim Ezekiel was born in Bombay in 1924 into the Bene Israel Jewish community — one of India's oldest Jewish communities. He studied philosophy at Elphinstone College then at Birkbeck College London. Returning to Bombay he worked as an art critic, editor, and advertising copywriter while writing poetry steadily. He edited the literary magazine Quest and mentored Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, and others. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 and died in Mumbai in 2004.
Night of the Scorpion
A scorpion stings the speaker's mother on a rainy night. Peasants flood in from the surrounding area with folk remedies, prayers, and incantations — trying to locate the scorpion so its movement will disperse the venom. The father — a 'sceptic, rationalist' — tries his own cures. By morning the mother is well and says she is grateful the scorpion's poison has taken her pain rather than her children's pain.
Night of the Scorpion works through accumulation — the procession of villagers with their remedies builds a picture of a world dense with belief, superstition, and communal solidarity. The detached, observational narrator separates himself from both the folk ritual and the father's rationalism. The mother's final statement — thanking god the scorpion took her pain not her children's — is the poem's moral centre: maternal love as the one thing that transcends the debate between superstition and reason.
Why Nissim Ezekiel Matters
Ezekiel is the founding figure of modern Indian English poetry. He was the first to make Bombay the subject of sustained poetic attention. His 'Very Indian Poems in Indian English' are comic but affectionate about the linguistic exuberance of Indian English rather than superior to it. As editor of Quest and mentor to younger poets, he created the infrastructure within which Indian English poetry could develop.