Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca writes poetry that carries the weight of two inheritances at once: the ancient shipwreck legend of the Bene Israel community and the literary legacy of her father, the celebrated poet Nissim Ezekiel. Born and raised in a Bene Israel Jewish family in Bombay, she has spent four decades building her own body of work while also becoming the keeper of her father’s papers, memories, and public reputation.
Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, Mumbai. Photo by Rangan Datta Wiki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A Bene Israel Childhood in Bombay
Mendonca grew up in the close-knit world of Bombay’s Bene Israel community, the largest and oldest Jewish community in India. Family tradition traces her roots to the Konkan coast, where the ancestors of the Bene Israel are said to have survived a shipwreck more than two thousand years ago and settled among the region’s oil pressers, known locally as Shanwar Telis. She was educated at St Xavier’s College in Bombay, earning a bachelor’s degree in English and French, before completing a master’s degree in English and American Literature at the University of Bombay and a further master’s degree in Education at Oxford Brookes University in England.
Her professional life has been spent largely in classrooms. Mendonca taught English literature in Indian colleges before moving overseas, where she taught French and Spanish in private schools for years, including a long posting at Woodstock International School in the Himalayan hill town of Mussoorie. Former students there have described discovering only later that their teacher was the daughter of the poet whose lines they studied in class, a quiet inheritance that shaped how a generation of young readers first encountered Nissim Ezekiel’s work.
Writing Her Way Into the Family Trade
Mendonca has said that her own name, Kavita, meaning poetry in several Indian languages, was chosen by a father who seemed to sense what she would become. She began publishing her poems in journals including the Sahitya Akademi’s Journal of Indian Literature, the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, and the online Jewish Writing Project. Her poetry collections include Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of the Sabbath, both of which draw on her Bombay childhood, her Jewish heritage, and her decades of life abroad in England and Canada.
Her work has been recognized beyond India’s literary circles. Her poem “Advice From a Poet Father” received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024, and an earlier poem, “How to Light Up a Poem,” was nominated for the same prize in 2020. Both poems draw directly on her relationship with her father and the craft lessons she absorbed simply by growing up in his household in the Bombay neighborhood of Theosophy Hall, where he kept an office for decades.
Telling the Bene Israel Origin Story in Verse
Among Mendonca’s best-known poems is one that retells the founding legend of her own community: the shipwreck that tradition says brought seven Jewish couples to the Konkan coast in ancient times, their survival credited to a rock, their revival credited to a mistaken funeral pyre, and their integration into Indian life credited to generations who kept the Sabbath while adopting the sarees, language, and customs of their neighbors. The poem moves from ancient legend to personal history, closing with her grandfather’s move to the city and her father’s decision to write poems about the Bombay he came to love. It stands as a compact retelling of a community’s survival story, filtered through one family’s own experience of living it.
Nissim Ezekiel, Poet and Father
In October 2024, on the centennial of her father’s birth, Mendonca compiled and wrote Nissim Ezekiel, Poet & Father: A Centennial Celebration, published by Pippa Rann Books with a foreword by Dr. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg of Rollins College’s Jewish Studies Program and editing by the poet Vinita Agrawal. Nissim Ezekiel, who died in 2004, is widely credited as a foundational figure in modern Indian English poetry, and his poem “Night of the Scorpion” remains a fixture of Indian school curricula to this day. Mendonca’s memoir interweaves her own childhood memories, including long waits for her father at the family home known as The Retreat, with tributes from dozens of poets, editors, and former students whose lives intersected with his.
The book earned praise from reviewers for its candor about a childhood spent partly apart from her mother and siblings, and for the way it balances a daughter’s personal grief and love with a wider portrait of Bombay’s twentieth century literary scene. Contributors to the volume include fellow poets Adil Jussawalla and Jeet Thayil, along with scholars and editors such as Sukrita Paul Kumar, Menka Shivdasani, and the Israeli researcher Shalva Weil, giving the memoir a chorus of voices beyond Mendonca’s own.
Recognition From Fellow Poets and Scholars
Reviewers and interviewers have paid particular attention to how Mendonca’s writing addresses Indian Jewish identity directly. In one interview included in the memoir, the poet and editor Usha Kishore explored how that identity resists easy categorization within a Western frame, while Mendonca herself has emphasized that her father approached poetry as a lifelong vocation rather than a religious statement. The memoir’s interviews, conducted by scholars including Jaydeep Sarangi and Basudhara Roy, place Nissim Ezekiel’s achievement in the context of India’s broader literary history while letting his daughter speak to the more private dimensions of his life that only a family member could know.
A Life Between Bombay, Mussoorie, and Canada
Mendonca’s own geography traces a path that echoes the wider story of the Bene Israel diaspora, though hers moved through teaching postings rather than aliyah to Israel. From Bombay, she moved to Mussoorie to teach at Woodstock International School, and she later settled in Calgary, Canada, where she continues to write. Wherever she has lived, her poetry keeps returning to Bombay’s streets, its Jewish wedding customs, and the Sabbath rituals of her childhood home, carrying the community’s memory forward in English verse much as Malayalam and Marathi songs once carried it for earlier generations of Indian Jewish women.
Her years at Woodstock International School left a mark that former students still describe decades later. One, who went on to teach English herself, has recalled the strange full circle of later assigning “Night of the Scorpion” to her own tenth grade class, only to realize she had once studied under the poet’s own daughter. Another has kept a handwritten poem Mendonca’s father composed during a visit to the school, carrying it through twelve cities and three continents as a memento of that encounter.
Taken together, Mendonca’s poems, her memoir, and her decades in the classroom form a rare record of what it has meant to grow up Jewish in a majority Hindu and Muslim city, then carry that inheritance into diaspora life a second time over. Scholars of Indian Jewish literature increasingly point to her work alongside her father’s as evidence that the Bene Israel literary voice did not end with one celebrated generation but continues into the next, reshaped by a woman who has spent her own life teaching, translating experience into verse, and making sure her father’s papers and legacy remain in careful hands.
Sources: Matwaala; Different Truths. Read more about Indian Jewish literary heritage in our profile of Nissim Ezekiel and about the community’s musical traditions in our article on the Bene Israel kirtan.