Nissim Ezekiel was a poet, playwright, director of plays, university professor, art critic, literary editor, and reviewer. Born to academic Marathi-speaking, Jewish parents of the minority Bene-Israel persuasion, Ezekiel’s existence within cosmopolitan Mumbai (then Bombay) rendered complex his poetic sensibility. After a Bachelor’s degree in literature at Wilson College, Bombay, in 1947 and some political engagement with M.N. Roy’s Radical Democratic Party, he sailed to England for further studies in 1948. As a student of philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, he published his first volume of poetry, A Time to Change (1951).