Homing in: Dom Moraes and the felt community of the dissociated in India

ABSTRACT

Prominent anglophone Indian writer Dom Moraes (1938−2004) has usually been categorized as a committed anglophile and his work dismissed for upholding what is seen as the warped and misconstrued perspective of a colonial empathizer. Born and brought up mostly in Bombay, Moraes moved to England for education in 1955. This article will trace Moraes’s initial dissociation from India and his repeated returns to argue that his 20th- and 21st-century travel memoirs about India constitute a history of his reconciliation with the subcontinent. In contrast to the usual criticism of Moraes as a poet, the article explores his body of Indian travel-writings, revealing an aspect of his identity that is affiliated to India through his association with the felt community of dissociated Indian minorities. We suggest that in sharing the sentiment of dissociation from a singular, majoritarian image of India, Moraes establishes his belonginess to India as a minoritarian Other.

KEYWORDS:

• Dom Moraes
• India
• felt community
• return migration
• self-fashioning
• majoritarianism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is a case of acculturation, not assimilation (Bauböck [1998] 2018, 40). Moraes’s mother tongue being English and his elite, westernized upbringing help explain his dissociation from sections of native Hindi-speaking Indians. For examples of cultural assimilation and acculturation underlying anglicization in Indian Writing in English, see S. Chattopadhyay’s (2022) elaboration on Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Anglophilia (95–96).

2. Cynical cosmopolitanism usually implies the understanding of being a citizen of the world with no particular affliation to a specific region/country. See F. Nussbaum (2010) and A. Appiah (2015).

3. S. Chattopadhyay (2012) argues that the complexity of Moraes’s prose, due to his being “doubly exiled” (83), projects his sense of rootlessness within the context of sociocultural “reconstruction of identity” (83). Upon Moraes’s return, he says, “India became a problematic space for Moraes, as it signified for him both a country of exile and the home of his childhood” (83).

4. B.R. Nayar (1968) notes that in the early 20th century, “Tilak in Maharashtra urged Hindi as a substitute for English as a common language, and Gandhi from Gujarat saw the important role that Hindi could perform both as official language and link language” (302). See also R. Sadana (2012).

5. The Notting Hill crisis of 1958 was a series of racially driven riots in Notting Hill in London. This had a negative impact on Moraes, challenging his sense of England as a home space.

6. Metcalf (2003) discusses the government’s perception of Urdu as a foreign language in India, yet it was the language of a section of Indians, one that was born in the Indian subcontinent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Durba Mukherjee

Durba Mukherjee is assistant professor of English at Gokhale Memorial Girls’ College, Kolkata. She was the recipient of University Grants Commission (UGC) Research Fellowships in 2014 and 2017 respectively. She received her doctorate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 2022. Her doctoral thesis studies the writings of Indian middle-class authors such as Santha Rama Rau, Ved Mehta, Dom Moraes, Amitava Kumar, and Samanth Subramanian, and their engagement with India through the lens of migration and physical return. She has published her research in Life Writing and Studies in Travel Writing.

Sayan Chattopadhyay

Sayan Chattopadhyay is associate professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He received his doctorate degree from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He served as the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD; German Academic Exchange Service) guest professor at the University of Heidelberg in 2022 and was the recipient of the 2010–13 Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship. His research has been primarily in the area of Indian middle-class self-fashioning and its literary manifestations. He has published in leading scholarly journals such as Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Prose Studies, and is the author of Being English: Indian Middle Class and the Desire for Anglicisation (2022).