Establishing presence through absence: Dom Moraes’s ambivalence towards India

Abstract

As a poet, journalist, autobiographer, and travel writer, Dom Moraes was a prolific presence in the Anglophone literary world throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Though born in Bombay, Moraes had moved to England at a young age and his very first book of poetry, A Beginning, had earned him fame in the emergent post-Second World War British cultural scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, winning him the Hawthornden Prize at the age of 19. He was equally popular when he came back to India during the 1980s, and regular volumes of his poetry and prose were published by the newly established Penguin Books India until his death in 2004. Surprisingly, in spite of being such a well-known and well-published author, Moraes’s work in general, and his poetry in particular, have strangely fallen out of critical focus. My article explores this contradictory situation of an apparently famous poet being persistently ignored by critics and anthologists. It attempts to show how this unusual situation can be traced back to a sense of bafflement that most critics and anthologists share when it comes to categorizing Moraes so as to initiate a discussion on him. It also attempts to depict how this sense of puzzlement in categorizing Moraes is connected to Moraes’s own ambivalent attitude towards India, his country of birth, which frequently vacillates between a strong sense of aversion and a feeling of deep empathy. In conclusion, the paper tries to probe how Moraes grapples with his complex sense of affiliation to and distance from India by representing his creative self and its cultural location in the form of a variety of absences — a process which makes him difficult to categorize and as a consequence challenging to discuss.

Introduction

The career of Dom Moraes (1938−2004), one of the major figures of modern Anglophone poetry, was marked by an early rise to fame. As a young student, Moraes migrated to England from India and almost instantaneously established his reputation as a promising new literary voice in the emergent post-Second World War British cultural scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This reputation was sealed by his first book of poems, A Beginning, which earned him the Hawthornden Prize when he was just 19. His second book of verse entitled Poems, published in 1960, became the “Autumn Choice” of the Poetry Book Society, the biggest poetry bookseller in the UK. This glorious foray into the world of English poetry was followed by the publication of eight other collections of poems and 23 prose books, including a biography of Indira Gandhi (1980). Besides these, he also authored three memoirs, Never at Home (1992), Gone Away (1960), and My Son’s Father (1976). His initial popularity earned in Britain did not wane when he returned to India in 1979, where both his poetry and prose continued to find regular publishers until his death in 2004.

Surprisingly, in spite of garnering such popularity both in India and in Britain, there is a general sense of oblivion surrounding Moraes, whose works have strangely fallen out of critical focus and are scarcely anthologized. As Makarand Paranjape (2005: n.p.) notes, Moraes remains “one of the least read, least anthologised, least studied, and least written about major Indian poets”. We are faced here with a contradictory situation — a famous and a highly published poet whose works have been constantly neglected by critics and anthologists. This article aims to show how this peculiar situation can be traced back to the bafflement that most critics share when it comes to categorizing Moraes and his literary output. It also explores how this sense of bewilderment in categorizing Moraes is connected with the author’s ambivalent attitude towards his country of birth, which frequently vacillates between a strong sense of dislike and a deep empathy. Finally, the article analyses the way in which Moraes grappled with his complex sense of affiliation to and distance from India. I will argue that he did this by representing his creative self and its cultural location in the form of a variety of absences.

Contradictions in the literary criticism

Critics of Indian origin have often denounced Moraes’s work alleging that he is “not quite one of India’s poets” (Telegraph, 2004: n.p.), despite the fact that he was born and brought up largely in Bombay and lived the last 25 years of his life primarily in his native country. One thing that is common to most of the critics voicing such complaints is that their characterization of Moraes is buffeted by serious self-contradictions. Eunice De Souza, like Moraes an Indian English poet of Goan Catholic background, acts as one of Moraes’s harshest critics. Taking her cue from V. S. Naipaul’s novel of the same name, she identifies him with those “mimic men”, “whose attitudes to their own people are in conformity with those of the empire builders and the Western elites, British and American” (De Souza, qtd. in Pandey, 1999: 72). According to De Souza, such people demean their native country by projecting a severely partial picture of the nation “peopled by grotesques and morons, totally incapable of doing anything about themselves or their situation” (qtd. in Pandey, 1999: 73). Such a harsh indictment of Moraes’s work is echoed by Khushwant Singh, who writes: “Dom disliked everything about India, particularly Indians. The only exceptions he made were good-looking women he took to bed” (2007: n.p.). These statements represent one of the most prevalent images of Moraes in the critical circle — the image of a betrayer whose attitude towards India is at best condescending. However, the contradiction inherent to such a critical position is soon revealed. Thus, as we read on in Singh’s essay, we note that Moraes is praised by the same author for his detailed knowledge of Indian seasons and landscape:

Dom was a complex character […] his description of the Indian countryside, the heat and dust-storms of the summers and the monsoons are lyrically beautiful. His characters come alive. Despite his ignorance of Indian languages, he was able to comprehend what they were saying in their dialects and in Indian English. (Singh, 2007: n.p.)

Thus, in the span of a single essay Moraes turns from being an India-hater and a womanizer into a “complex character” who looks at India not merely as a hunting ground for good-looking women but also with a sympathetic and sensitive vision that renders the Indian landscape “lyrically beautiful”.

Similar inconsistencies play themselves out in Bruce King’s writings on Moraes. In Jeet Thayil’s book entitled 60 Indian Poets, King writes:

Dom came to associate India with his mad violent mother and hated it. […] He was like Derek Walcott, one of those writers from the former colonies who had a better ear for the harmonies of English verse than most British poets, but, unlike Walcott, he had nothing to say about colonialism, nationalism, racism, cultural conflict, the Cold War, existentialism, or any other major political and intellectual themes of the time. (2004: 201)

Previously, in his book Three Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Moraes and Ramanujan, King had stated: “Among the three poets, Dom Moraes, the youngest, is in his themes and attitudes the most romantic and sentimental, the least concerned with India and Indianness” (2005: 19). However, these statements asserting Moraes’s detachment from India and Indianness are undermined by King himself who contradicts his own argument in another book, Modern Indian Poetry in English, in which he stresses the peculiar “Indianness” of Moraes: “Moraes has always been an outsider, only at ease among the cosmopolitan, the off-beat, the unlikely, only at home in language and poetry. Yet how Indian!” (2001: 298).

In a similar vein, M. K. Naik in his book Indian English Poetry: From the Beginning up to 2000 accuses Moraes of disowning his Indian roots by applying for a British passport: “Moraes became a British citizen, so that technically at least, he was no longer required to call India his country. […] Moraes has repeatedly disowned his Indian heritage” (2006a: 76). Yet like Khushwant Singh and Bruce King, Naik too contradicts himself in another book entitled History of Indian English Literature by applauding editors who have included Moraes within the category of “Indian poets”, because “it is impossible to think of Dom Moraes as anything but an Indian English poet and The Penguin Companion to Literature rightly describes him as an ‘Indian poet’” (Naik, 2006b: 196).

Among these self-contradictory critical voices, alternatively vilifying and iconizing Moraes, the assessment of Makarand R. Paranjape seems to be the most level-headed. Paranjape writes:

One might […] say that the overriding theme of [Moraes’]s work is his love–hate relationship with India, the country of his birth. […] While Nissim Ezekiel, his contemporary and senior, finds himself reluctantly reconciled to India, Dom stubbornly holds out. Even the titles of his books, Gone Away or Never at Home underscore this estrangement. (2005: n.p.)

Rather than two radically opposite images of Moraes as an India-hater and Moraes as the iconic Indian poet, in Paranjape’s description we encounter a figure inhabiting an intermediate position and evincing a complicatedly ambivalent attitude towards India. Such a perception is more convincing, in that most human emotions are not completely monochromatic but contain shades of grey. However, in spite of aptly capturing Moraes’s ambivalence by pointing to his “love−hate” relationship with the country of his birth, Paranjape does not elaborate on this aspect through close reference to Moraes’s work.

Although such contemporary critics as Ranjit Hoskote and Sayan Chattopadhyay are more nuanced and insightful than Moraes’s previous critics, their analysis does not evade occasional contradictions and interpretative slippages. Hoskote, for instance, in his significantly-titled obituary of Moraes, “The Stranger Who Found Belonging at Last”, surprisingly begins by applauding Moraes’s ability to feel at home, at all kinds of places, at any point of time: “belonging, to him, was a matter of being at home in a period rather than a place, the London and Oxford of his youth, and yet he could make himself at home on the road” (2004: n.p.). Towards the end of the same article, Hoskote declares the last 15 years of Moraes’s life “a time of revitalisation” and release (2004: n.p.). Hoskote seems to suggest that the Moraes of the 1990s was a man finally reconciled with India, who might have even found “a kind of belonging at last” to his country of birth, “which animated him, [and] diminished his bitterness” (2004: n.p.). Yet, if a person has the adaptability to be at home anywhere or at all places, he or she would surely stop searching for a sense of belonging or attachment towards a particular place. Furthermore, this notion of adaptability is contradicted by the claim that Hoskote makes in his “Introduction” to Moraes’s Selected Poems, in which he states that “Moraes was at home neither in India nor, finally in the UK”. According to Hoskote, it was only when Moraes subjected himself to multiple or “nth” experiences in the field of politics and journalism that he was able to liberate himself from the “imperial logic of either/or” (2012: xxvi; xxix).

Sayan Chattopadhyay (2012) begins his essay about exile and return in Moraes’s The Long Strider by outlining the historical details of immigration. Migrants felt doubly displaced from their new diasporic homes because of the superiority and idealization they ascribed to the colonial masters, and this was often followed by a quest for indigenous identity which impelled people to return homewards. Chattopadhyay gives a vivid description of an extremely intolerant post-Independence India, functioning as the nation did under ideology borrowed from the European Enlightenment and indulging in systematic oppression of ethnic and minority communities (2012: 82). He identifies the unaccommodating and anarchic nature of post-Independence India as one of the reasons behind Moraes’s journey towards England:

India, the country, in the grip of fierce nationalism, was not ready to accommodate someone like Dom Moraes, whose Eurasian birth and inability to speak Hindi (the declared national language of post-independence India), or any other “Indian” dialect for that matter, clearly segregated him as an alien. (Chattopadhyay, 2012: 83)

Conversely, on the same page of the article Chattopadhyay asserts that Moraes’s feeling of “exile” is only a “carefully constructed” strategy, most probably conceived to justify his discarding of India (2012: 83). According to Chattopadhyay, when Moraes decided to return to India on the advice of his agent Peter Grose, he was not yet ready to acknowledge “his country of origin in its full reality”. Almost in vengeance, he “sought to radically dismantle the post-independence myth of a vigorously nationalist and unified country” which had disavowed him in his childhood (2012: 84). Such statements are again contradictory as it is difficult to understand why Moraes, belonging to a minority community himself, would not be ready to celebrate or accept the idea of a united India and would rather prefer to dwell on the nation’s fragmentation. Chattopadhyay further complicates the matter by claiming that Moraes’s actual aim while writing the book Out of God’s Oven was to “‘construct’ a country which he would be able to unambiguously claim as his home” (2012: 84). Here it is implied that Moraes’s depiction of a disjointed India is as much a “myth” or “construction” as that of the united India. Chattopadhyay therefore frequently confuses reality with construction or strategy.

Such contradictions and confusion regarding Moraes’s personality are perhaps unsurprising given the poet’s personal dilemma apropos of India. The aim of my intervention is to expand on this dynamics of a simultaneous association with and dissociation from India and show how such an ambivalent relationship forms the very basis of Moraes’s writings on India. It is also my objective to examine the strategy adopted by Moraes, in the hope of escaping this sense of ambivalence. This strategy not only misleads his critics but seems to have affected his popularity and marketability as a writer.

The simultaneous association with and dissociation from India

One finds several ambivalent instances of empathy and dislike for India in Moraes’s writings. If, on the one hand, he is haunted by memories of his traumatic childhood, on the other he is nostalgic about innocent childhood Indian days and the relations left behind. To understand this ambivalence it is important first of all to concentrate on Moraes’s troubled relationship with his mother. Whenever Moraes looks at India through the lens of his engagement with his mentally disturbed mother, he sees as well as depicts the nation in a state of hopeless degeneration. Moraes’s childhood was overshadowed by the disagreements between his parents and his mother’s terrifying fits of violence. After Moraes moved to Colombo along with his parents, his mother’s fits of insanity relapsed. During one such episode his mother tried to attack Moraes with a knife. She was soon sent back to India to live with her sister but such incidents deeply affected the mind of young Moraes who by then had lost the innocence of his childhood in the dark shadows of his mother’s rage. The fear of his mother was so deeply engrained in his adolescent mind that one finds him writing in Out of God’s Oven:

In the days when I lived with my books and pets in Colombo, the only threat to my happiness had been the prospect of a forced return to my mother to India. Ever since then, I had connected my mother to India in all its aspects. (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 21)

In one of his poems, “Letter to my Mother”, Moraes equates the hated figure of his mother to that of the defeated, decayed, superstitious, and inadequate land of India: “Your eyes are like mine. | When I last looked in them | I saw my whole country, | A defeated dream | […] A population of corpses” (2012: 71). The poem is addressed both to his mother and India, a person and a country that he had tried to leave behind or forget but was unable to. Bereft of a loving, healthy, and peaceful atmosphere, the home in India fails to offer Moraes a sense of being at rest, and he is constantly haunted by a sense of unbelonging.

Despite harbouring an occasionally disparaging attitude towards India and the city of his birth, Bombay, as expressed in his poem, “Gone Away”, Moraes appears not to be someone who could easily disregard his native country. In his autobiography My Son’s Father, Moraes clearly expresses his dilemma about leaving the Indian landscape, which he greatly appreciates, and near and dear ones like his grandparents and the driver, Kutthalingam, with whom he shares a strong emotional bond:

the colours and smells of India, the emotions I had at Kanheri, the painful sort of affection I had for Kutthalingam all pulled me one way, and the new life I led abroad, with friends and work and a milieu I understood, more than I did India, pulled me the other. (1976: 163)

Among quite a few other things, fond memories of his childhood and adolescence keep him attached to India. In a poem entitled “Autobiography”, Moraes, who is doubtful of whether he has “changed for better or for worse”, looks back on his lost youth and realizes the price he has paid for growing up: “I remember my grandmother, crescent-browed, | Falling from time, leaf-light, too much alone, | And my grandfather, who was small and proud. | Tumult of images, where have you gone?” (2012: 11).

If in India Moraes was never at home due to bitter thoughts relating to his mother, in England, away from his countrymen and amongst British friends, he sometimes felt equally exiled. While enjoying a drive in his friend Julian’s car, he is suddenly reminded of his family and feels nostalgic for Indian life:

It was long since I had been in contact with family life. […] I felt a deep nostalgia for it. I thought for the first time in weeks of my mother and father and remembered the exact smell and texture of an Indian day. Driving back with my friend through the green and familiar landscape of my adopted country, I felt suddenly, and to my own surprise, a stranger. (Moraes, 1976: 213)

It should be noted here that he calls England an “adopted country” which clarifies that in fact he does not consider England to be his own country in an uncomplicated way. The peculiarity of Moraes’s position and predicament is clearly brought out through such portrayals where, while in India, Moraes yearns for his “roots” in London and while in London experiences nostalgia for India.

As Moraes was never quite ready to stay in India due to the pain and guilt invoked by the constant presence of his mother, he never bothered to learn the Hindi language which would have been required to communicate with the people around him. Moraes, who seems to associate Hindi with India, projects his unfamiliarity with the Hindi language as a disadvantage, claiming that the only vernacular he knew was “the pidgin Hindi in which [he] spoke to the servants” (1976: 9). He writes about his discomfiture with the language: “In the streets of India I felt uneasy, knowing neither the language, nor, because of not having come in contact with many Indians who were not from an English background, the people” (Moraes, 1960b: 9). For Moraes, knowledge of the English language became a passport or a medium to access a world that was different from the mundane realities of the streets of India. In addition to this, English was also the only language that could help him realize his dream of establishing himself as a poet within the British literary circle, like so many other Western-educated Indian intellectuals who had held similar ambitions before him. In settling in England, Moraes was not aspiring to something new. Several nineteenth-century poets, such as Toru Dutt and Manamohan Ghose, had done the same and, also like Moraes, at some point they had felt compelled to return to their native land in order to resituate themselves. Speaking to Stephen Spender about his dream venture during a visit paid by the poet to his family, Moraes confesses that:

I wanted to settle in England […] England for me was where the poets were. The poets were my people. I had no real consciousness of a nationality, for I did not speak the language of my countrymen, and therefore had no soil or roots. (1976: 100)

This excerpt makes it clear that the young Moraes had already developed a sense of alienation from his native country. Furthermore an incident, in which the Government of India refused Moraes his prize of a trip to America for an essay writing competition due to his lack of knowledge in Hindi, strengthened his willpower to leave the country: “A baffled, cheated feeling came over me. Now positively I did not want to stay in India” (Moraes, 1976: 100). Therefore his ambition and the dream of pursuing a writing career on foreign soil was a prime factor that inspired Moraes to dissociate himself from India. According to M. K. Naik (2006b), the correspondence of poets like Toru Dutt and Manamohan Ghose with their British friends clearly reveals their reluctance to return to India. One can discern the same dread as Moraes anxiously asserts in his autobiography, My Son’s Father: “In Europe I had positive emotions; in India I sank into the dream in which my whole country was sunk” (1976: 162). According to Moraes, India, a country of “defeated dream”, neither offered any hope for bright career prospects and nor did it provide the ambience required for the nurturance of a poetic sensibility (2012: 71). He was therefore convinced that his literary voice could only find its articulation outside India:

The talent I had was not a talent that could wake this country, so my duty to my talent exceeded my duty to the country. What my talent wanted was a defined tradition, hard outlines, soil for roots. (Moraes, 1976: 107)

Once Moraes reached England he was amazed by the skills and aptitude that he saw around him within the British literary circle and the Soho community. In a poem entitled “A Letter”, Moraes expresses his strong desire to reach closer to the mark made by his fellow British poets: “At sixteen I came here to start again: | An infant’s trip, where many knew to walk” (2012: 21).

The only language that Moraes could use comfortably while conversing and writing was English. If on the one hand his facility with the English language gave wings to Moraes’s aspirations, on the other hand his ability to communicate and bond with people despite his poor Hindi kept him rooted to Indian soil. The elite nature of Bombay’s social circles dissolved once Moraes moved out of the city and the touches of simplicity and intimacy that he felt amongst common Indians left him overwhelmed. The moment he followed his father’s friend D. G. Tendulkar’s advice and embarked on his first trips away from Bombay towards the north, east, and south of India he developed a liking for the country. In Out of God’s Oven he writes:

My dislike of India seemed to end when I left Mumbai. Nothing exposes you to India more than train travel. […] Knowing what would happen, I expected to hate it. I didn’t; I liked it. All sorts of people talked to me in a variety of languages. They offered me food, aerated drinks, and, because of my youth, advice. (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 24)

Returning to India from Colombo, through these journeys Moraes for the first time becomes truly acquainted with the Indian subcontinent. The perspective of an outsider and the position of a tourist allowed Moraes the luxury of moving about in a country without being part of it.

Although Moraes’s dreams were big he was aware of the fact that it would be extremely difficult to attain that same status as that of his fellow British poets. This was another factor that bonded him to India. In one of his poems entitled “Library”, Moraes bids farewell to his friend Geoffrey Hill, being almost certain that if they were to meet ever again, their creations would have to be filed incorrectly: “four rows of shelves | Separate Hill from Moraes. | We shall have to be borrowed and stamped | And put back in the wrong places | If we are ever to meet” (2012: 108). This shows that Moraes was conscious of the fact that although he lived in Britain and had a British passport, he would always be categorized by metropolitan readers and publishers as an Indian poet. Thus, in 1980, Moraes came back to India after his agent Peter Grose frankly counselled him: “The publishers connect you with India now” (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 26).

Although it is true that Moraes seldom addressed the problems of India directly in his poetry, he was undeniably concerned about the country’s political situation. One should not overlook his bleak description in Out of God’s Oven of the Indian political and religious scene during the time of the Godhra incident and the Gujarat riots. Yet, once again Moraes maintains an ambiguity regarding his standpoint. Moraes’s increased involvement with India is quite puzzling and one often wonders why he seems to be so concerned about Indian politics and the nation’s internal crisis when he is unsure of “belonging” to this country. Soon a sense of ambiguity creeps in as Moraes vacillates between his contempt and his concern for the decaying nation 50 years after Independence. He unabashedly professes his dislike for the pretentious urban middle-class Indians who refuse to acknowledge the drawbacks of India, its backdated caste system, the Hindu–Muslim divide, and the never-changing disparity between the rich and poor. He is quick to expose the pretentions of even renowned film-makers like Basu Bhattacharya and the film fraternity who could not do away with religious and caste divisions, in spite of the inclusive nature of their art.

Despite being a Christian, and hence belonging to a minority community in India, Moraes was always particular about maintaining a distance in his lifestyle from fellow Indians. His affinity to a British sense of existence may be deduced from his choice of dwelling when in India. In Bhopal he decided to stay at the Government Circuit House built by the British. When Moraes visited Calcutta, his friend Mani Shankar arranged a room for him at the Bengal Club, telling him over the phone: “Since it was founded by the Brits for the Brits, it should suit you admirably” (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 125). In the mornings, he preferred an English breakfast of “[o]range juice, fried eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee” to anything else (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 125). In Delhi too he chose to stay at Maurya’s, a five-star hotel highly popular among foreign delegates. His literary friend Mani Sankar and political friend Jag Parvesh both realize Moraes’s distance from the real India, and comment on his lack of ability to fathom the true nature of Indians:

These people are what you should discuss before you deal with any other aspect of India. Possibly, if you can, you should discuss it with them. But you can’t. You have nothing in common with them, not even a language. It’s a great pity. (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 129; emphasis in original)

Unexpectedly, his love of Western luxuries did not prevent Moraes from visiting humble places and establishing lifelong friendships with various people who came from extremely modest Indian backgrounds. One should not forget the durable friendship that he developed with a simple government official, P. S. Dhagat, whom Moraes affectionately called General saheb. Moreover, it is difficult to account for the self-satisfaction Moraes experienced in rescuing a young dacoit named Lachhi wrongly convicted of murder. Such friends, he confessed, “brought me back to India” (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 43). He was aware that he wasn’t always “fair” with India and often made stereotypical comments akin to those uttered by British observers (Moraes and Srivatsa, 2002: 21). His concern for the poor and minority communities motivated him to visit literary personages like Sunil Gangopadhyay and social activists like Mahashweta Devi in Kolkata, who once again clarified the nation’s indifference towards the lower castes, the tribal peoples, and women. Moving beyond the well-known mainstream problems of India, Moraes took a great interest in the struggles of social outcasts or pariahs such as the Naxalites, tribals, Dalits, and members of alternative religious groups like the Ananda Margis. Regardless of whether he considered himself to be Indian, neglect and suppression of the poor and the minorities repulsed Moraes to such an extent that he did not hesitate in raising his voice against the system and reaching out to the people in need. Probably this has more to do with Moraes’s genuine sentiments for the impoverished, oppressed, and disempowered throughout the world, rather than his allegiance to specific communities in India. Salman Rushdie writes of the universal appeal of the displaced writer, which enables “him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance” (1991: 12).

Moraes’s presence in his absences

As the above section makes clear, although Moraes spent his life mostly in Britain and India, it is problematic to label him as an “Indian” or a “Briton” because at one level he is both and at another level neither. One could argue that in England he was unavoidably an Indian, immensely talented in his craft, and in India he was almost British, a stranger to the environment beyond his elite class and to the Hindi language. In both contexts he was an “outsider”. Due to his ambivalence towards both India and Britain, he was forced to abandon any easy sense of “belonging” to a particular place. Writing in the Independent, Michael Schmidt describes him as a “poet and writer who rejected a narrow cultural identity” (2004: n.p.). Although Moraes evades available categories of cultural identification he appears to brood upon his lack of a home and to regret his inability to find a place for stability and rest. Interestingly, one of the few ways in which Moraes seems to have solved his ambivalence towards India and Britain is through his absence from both of these places. For Moraes, absence is a metaphor for life. In a poem entitled “Absences” which later lends itself to the title of a collection of three overlapping pieces of life-writing, A Variety of Absences, he sees: “a world only held together | By its variety of absences” (Moraes, 2004: 127).

The following sections of the article rationalize Moraes’s inability to call either Britain or India his home. Taking as our point of departure his equation with Britain, we find that apart from being categorized inadvertently as an Indian poet what also enhanced Moraes’s gradual discomfort in Britain was his body and skin colour. For the Western-educated Moraes, his brown-coloured body was a site of lack or inadequacy that constantly reminded him of his Indian roots and therefore hindered his complete assimilation into European society. Privileged as he was in terms of class, education, and cultural affiliations, Moraes for a long time remained unaware of the cultural shock and hostility experienced by ordinary immigrants in British life. However, certain unpleasant instances of harassment that Moraes faced at the hands of British policemen during the 1960s, amidst the furore over the assimilation of immigrant people from the former British colonies, resulted in a reality check followed by his gradual disillusionment with Britain: “I felt […] furious. England was my home. Was I to be treated like an immigrant? Then it occurred to me that I was an immigrant” (Moraes, 1992: 94). The desire to deny the inadequacies of his body and the resulting struggle with his own image left an indelible impression on Moraes’s early poems, in which he deliberately or unconsciously avoided sketching out the physical realities of his embodiment. Even if a few of his poems from A Beginning make indirect reference to the body, they are usually pictured as the white bodies of “angels” or “golden” princesses, who do not bear any resemblance to the Indian body and skin tone.

Moraes’s rejection of Britain as a home is also evident from some of his later poems like “For Peter” and “Behind the Door”. In “For Peter”, Moraes broods upon his lack of assimilation into the mainstream of British society, despite having been a student at Oxford. He compares himself to his friend Peter Levi, who came from a Jewish background and being white-skinned was easily integrated into British society, finally landing a job at Oxford itself: “All of you now have homes, Peter, not me” (Moraes, 2012: 94). Compared to Jewish immigrants, the physical visibility of migrants from the Third World is striking and it is impossible for them to blend in within a crowd. Therefore if Moraes’s ultimate dream was to be entirely assimilated into English society, his Indian body uneasily “jutted out of this imagined reality”, separating him from white people (Chattopadhyay, 2014: 315).

The other factor responsible for distancing Moraes from Britain was his unanticipated success in establishing himself as a poet and a writer in India. Initially apprehensive about the consequences of his homecoming, Moraes was to be an active writer in India for more than 20 years. Indeed, writing for the Spectator, William Dalrymple refers to Moraes as “the greatest living Indian poet working in English” (1993: n.p.). By the time he decides to settle in India, one finds a fatigued Moraes who has temporarily relinquished his attempts to join the British intellectual elite and has revived his Indian connections, more out of compulsion than willingness. This sentiment is reflected in his poem “Behind the Door” where he imagines his friends from England standing on the “western shore” and imploring him to drop his present life and join them. Moraes provisionally refuses them by stating that he has already embarked on his journey to self-discovery: “The friends I made when young | patrol the western shore. | They call me to betray | all that I have, and come | Maybe I will, some day, | but this has tired me out, | this trip to who I am” (2012: 158).

Correspondingly, a focus on Moraes’s relationship with India yields ample traces of ambiguity. Despite his brown skin colour, Moraes’s English attitude, education, lifestyle, and upbringing relegate him to the status of an alien for the majority of Indians. Moraes too, almost in reciprocation and retaliation, conveniently absents himself from India, visiting it only at rare intervals. Moraes’s absence from India at several stages of his life is made manifest in many of his poems where he writes about India as an observer and an outsider. In poems like “Alexander” and “Babur” he purposefully chooses figures who were outsiders in India and held ambivalent positions similar to his. Moraes could relate to the figure of Emperor Babur because apart from being an outsider in India due to his lineage (a mixture of Chagatai–Turkic and Mongol stock) Babur, like Moraes, was a man of letters: a memoirist and a poet in Persian and Chagatai. In the poem “Babur”, Moraes adopts the voice of Babur and acts as his confessor. If Moraes is tired due to his incessant travels, Babur too is sleepless, haunted by the horrific images of his never-ending battles. Devoid as they are of home and friends, both men ultimately find themselves “lonely in all lands” (Moraes, 2012: 133). If on the one hand Moraes is “absent” from India, a place with which he cannot sever ties, Babur too ends up burning and destroying the city he conquers. Yet both authors are physically present and “bleed” in their respective creations: Moraes in his writings on India and Babur in his autobiography Tuzuk-i Baburi, which was later translated into Persian as the Baburnama. In this new mode of existence both Moraes and Babur locate their true identity not in their body and the physical realities associated with it, but in their respective writings. Finally their writings, rather than their physical location, act as their true homeland: “If you look for me, I am not here. | My writings will tell you where I am. | Tingribirdi, they point out my life like | Lines drawn in the map of my palm” (Moraes, 2012: 133).

Moraes’s absence from both of the nations with which he could claim affiliation significantly affected his creativity. Incomplete in every sense due to his profligate self-division between India and Britain, Moraes is reduced to a stranger in these countries: “Stranger in every room, | I now no longer roam | The countries of my choice” (Moraes, 2012: 103). Incessantly troubled by questions of belongingness and cultural identity in an anti-immigrant Britain and an unfamiliar India, Moraes is soon struck down by writer’s block. The few poems that Moraes wrote and published in 1966 as part of the collection Beldam Etcetera are haunted by his freshly-minted sense of displacement, and these poems anticipate his period of poetic silence. Notably, the raw, macabre, gothic, and ironic figures sketched by Moraes, namely “Jason”, “Craxton”, and “Beldam” are the oblique self-portraits and critiques of a poet who is struggling with his aesthetic and is uncertain about his achievements. For instance, considering his poetic accomplishments to be inconsequential and insubstantial, Moraes, in “Jason”, voices his disappointment at being spurned by both Britain and India. In this poem, Moraes dons on the persona of the Greek mythological figure Jason who, being the captain of Argonauts, undertakes an adventurous journey in order to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical kingdom of Colchis. Originally a treasure, the fleece here functions as a metaphorical representation of poetic glory and fame. The fleece tugs at Jason who follows it, just as Moraes trails his poetic dreams. Moraes, like Jason, had embarked on his poetic journey to England at a “beardless” age, but has gained “nothing” even at 50: “So endlessly outpoured, the fleece | Tugged at me and I followed it […] || Our raised bows cleaved to a charred land | With breasts of salt too soft to climb | Then I was fifty, and had found | Nothing” (Moraes, 2012: 72). Here, the “charred land” that Jason beholds and the “bald black pilot” beckoning him to come ashore, pointing out the fleece from a distance, are allegorical representations of the tropical subcontinent of India and Moraes’s temporary journey back to India in the hope of achieving self-discovery and poetic adulation. However, like Jason, who on closer examination discovers a “burst quilt” instead of the fleece, Moraes’s heroic quest to poetic glory culminates in disappointment and frustration both in Britain and India.

It took Moraes a long gap of 17 years to bring out another collection of poems, in 1983, which was privately published and aptly named Absences. It is not that this 17-year poetic hiatus fixed Moraes’s ambiguity towards India and Britain. It merely provided him with the time, experience, and imaginative power to accumulate his thoughts and channel them appropriately, in the form of newer and more confident poetry. According to Hoskote, Moraes’s “imagination, always archaeological in its ability to probe into the lost empires of myth, legend and history, nourished these new poems with sparkling narratives” (2012: lx). Moraes’s colleague and friend from Oxford, Ved Mehta, who was in awe of his friend’s talent for phantasmagoria, comments:

His imagination always tried to make everything more interesting than it actually was; it was as if the worlds inside his head were more exciting than the world outside. I was convinced that his imagination, along with his tenuous hold on reality, was integral to his poetry. (2013: 302)

Referring to this break with poetry as a period of germination and poetic preparation, Moraes, in an interview with Tarun J. Tejpal, claims that though he regretted not being able to “write any worthwhile poetry for so long” he was writing “better than ever” before (1990: n.p.).

Unable to align himself exclusively with either Britain or India, Moraes transforms himself into a cosmopolitan personality travelling through time, apparently at home in all places he visits, yet truly at home nowhere. Moraes realizes, albeit belatedly, the price he has paid for living an itinerant life. Such a sentiment is expertly captured in one of his mythological poems entitled “Sinbad”. In this poem, Moraes directly addresses the sailor who like him has been a restless traveller throughout his life. Besides all his accumulated wealth and fame, Moraes implores Sinbad to recall the misfortunes of his trips, including the deaths of numerous crew members due to repeated shipwrecks. Having suffered from a sense of homelessness and in stability throughout his life, Moraes helps Sinbad comprehend the drawbacks of constant “flying over defunct countries” in terms of friendships that dwindle and emotional attachments that are reduced to “[c]old cups of kindness” (Moraes, 2012: 121). Thus emphasizing the importance of the notion of home, Moraes counsels Sinbad: “Choose your rock, seamate, stay with it | Lose your shadow, it’s of no use” (2012: 121). Yet Moraes closes the poem with a sign of fate, stating that this kind of a never-ending transit is often the destiny of those people like Sinbad and himself who “never know home” (2012: 121).

Exhibiting traits of nomadism and cosmopolitanism since his early days of study at Jesus College, Oxford, due to his acquaintance with the bohemian Soho culture of the time, Moraes chose to live a life of vagrancy, whereby he could neither hope to be accepted in Britain for what he was, nor could he reconsider returning to India, the country of his birth. Ved Mehta, in an autobiographical piece entitled “Up at Oxford” (2013), writes of the reckless behaviour and uninhibited lifestyle of the highly popular Dom Moraes. Traditionally the term “cosmopolitan” carries connotations of not belonging to any particular state or nation (Brooker, 2003: 48). If one thinks about the two branches of cosmopolitanism — cynic and stoic — then Moraes seems to be a figure who has adopted a “middle” or an “in-between” position. Speaking at an authors’ symposium in Bombay organized by the National Book Trust in December 1969, Moraes confesses: “I have a subconscious pull towards India, but I am committed to England” (Hoskote, 2012: xivi). One could draw a parallel with the philosophy of stoic cosmopolitanism, which later influenced critics like Martha Nussbaum to propose the cultivation of an ethos or a set of loyalties that would extend to the world or humanity in general without completely relinquishing the local affinities and identities. Much later, in 1998, when Hoskote met Moraes in order to discuss his new book Out of God’s Oven, Moraes rationalized his involvement with Indian politics, declaring: “I don’t feel particularly Indian, but I don’t feel particularly British either, anymore, but that shouldn’t stop me from relating with empathy as one human being to other human beings, should it?” (Hoskote, 2012: xxi). Moraes’s stance is reminiscent of the philosophy of cosmopolitanism propounded by Cynic Diogenes in the fourth century BCE, which is based on the negative claim of not being a citizen at all. Such a person denies all obligations towards any kind of societal bodies and leads an untamed and unrestricted life in accordance with the world or nature. Thus, although with time Moraes seems to have undergone a psychological evolution or transition from a sense of attachment to both India and Britain to a sense of apathy or indifference towards both these places, he is unable to completely rid himself of human emotions and sympathy for the deprived, which being a trait of stoic cosmopolitanism, consigns him to an intermediate position. Such a position allows him the flexibility to operate within what Homi K. Bhabha calls a “Third Space”, a zone of cultural diversity, where two or more cultures interact in order to challenge the fixity, purity, and originality of cultures in general (1994/2004: 54). The “Third Space” implies an escape or an absence from the trap of the binary logic of either/or. The various journalistic tours he undertook allowed Moraes to function within a liminal “Third Space” of cultural collision and exposed him to the crisis and predicaments of people lying beyond his small and relatively secure life in London. However, this lack of attachment to a geopolitical entity seems to have significantly affected his popularity, as literary compilers increasingly take spatial frameworks and geographical affiliations as their guide when preparing anthologies. In spite of trying his best to establish himself as a British poet, Moraes soon realized that the publishers and readers hardly forgot his postcolonial background. This is because the international world of publishers and academic intellectuals has devised a new method of categorizing texts written by Third World-born writers. According to Fredric Jameson,

[Third World] texts, even those narratives which are seemingly private […], — necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society. (1986: 69; emphasis in original)

Thus even ethnic autobiographies like that of Moraes would be considered to be political statements on India. Graham Huggan observes that in this age, where the marketability of a work is highly dependent on its authenticity, donning the persona of a “cosmopolitan” or a “globe-trotter” does not assure writers’ inclusion within the mainstream, as they are often considered to be mere informants of their native cultures (2001: 27). Timothy Brennan too opines that the stance of cosmopolitanism is nothing but a newer form of ethnocentrism, as it does not eliminate the disparity between the subservient and the dominant class, despite promoting a system based on “democracy” and “pluralist inclusion” (1997: 38). As such, no matter how hard Moraes tried it was not possible for him to completely escape or evade the labels of postcolonialism. In India, his memoirs and Collected Poems were published by Penguin India, but here too his recognition and acceptance was gradual due to his formal UK citizenship and his reputation compromised as it was by hostile criticism. For instance, although A. K. Mehrotra, the editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, includes Moraes’s poems in his anthology, he pertinently states: “for nearly three decades Moraes’s readers, too, saw him as an ‘English poet’, and even though this has now changed, the foreignness of his verse has not gone away, nor can it, nor would he want it to” (1992: 91). Thus, unable to categorize Moraes geographically, several other compilers of anthologies have left this rare talent alone.

Even in death Moraes’s ambivalence towards both India and Britain remains unresolved. On the one hand, Moraes, who traced the travel route of Thomas Coryate, a seventeenth-century traveller who undertook an adventurous hike from his village, Odcombe in Somerset, to India, is unable to reclaim England as his home. On the other hand, his preoccupation with a British figure like Coryate, even in the last few years of his stay in India, gestures towards his failed reconciliation with the country of his birth. Moraes died in Bombay and was buried in the city’s Sewri Christian Cemetery. Simultaneously, a requiem was organized by his friends on 19 July 2004 at the church of St Peter and St Paul in Odcombe, in keeping with his last wish to return to Somerset. This affirms that Moraes remains, even posthumously, what Rushdie would call “at once plural and partial” (1991: 15; see also Bhattacharya, 2008: 190). He remains divided or fragmented, and hence to an extent absent from both these places. Ultimately, it is Moraes’s ambivalence towards both India and Britain which acts as the fertile soil out of which his creativity sprouts. If one searches for Moraes, he can be found at home only in his writings.