One Black Englishman: Dom Moraes, the
Contradictions and Dilemmas of a Cosmopolitan
Nomad

*Un Anglais à la peau noire : Dom Moraes, contradictions et dilemmes d'un nomade cosmopolite*

Manon Boukhroufa-Trijaud

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OpenEdition
Journals

Édition électronique

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/24866

DOI : 10.4000/15k4h

ISSN : 2101-0609

Éditeur

UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes

Édition imprimée

ISBN : 978-2-37747-580-3

ISSN : 1639-6073

Référence électronique

Manon Boukhroufa-Trijaud, « One Black Englishman: Dom Moraes, the Contradictions and Dilemmas of a Cosmopolitan Nomad », *ILCEA* [En ligne], 61 | 2026, mis en ligne le 26 janvier 2026, consulté le 26 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/24866 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15k4h

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 26 janvier 2026.

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# One Black Englishman: Dom Moraes, the Contradictions and Dilemmas of a Cosmopolitan Nomad

*Un Anglais à la peau noire: Dom Moraes, contradictions et dilemmes d'un nomade cosmopolite*

Manon Boukhroufa-Trijaud

## 1. Introduction

<footnote n="1">1 Dom Moraes's life began in 1938 in Bombay and ended in 2004 in Mumbai. In his lifetime, India gained its independence, invented itself as a new nation and entered the contemporary globalised world order. The city of his birth changed its name and even though it remained the economic capital of the country and the gateway to India, it fell prey to the twenty-first century nativist policy of the Shiv Sena and BJP.¹ The chronology of Dom Moraes's life and his geographical itinerary from Bombay to England, and from Europe to Asia, gives us a privileged glimpse into the changes of the second half of the twentieth century. Through his prose writing, he tried to capture those changes but it also allows us to see how he positioned himself as a nomadic intellectual in those challenging years.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 In this paper, my aim is to explore how the dislocation of the British Empire after the wave of independences in Asia led to the metamorphosis and the reconfiguration of anglophone identities. Through the example of the life and work of the Indian poet and writer Dom Moraes, I want to show how the British identity built on the relationship between Great Britain and its empire expands into a multiplicity of anglophone identities. Dom Moraes's geographical and artistic itinerary exemplifies these transformations. If at first, he had no doubt he belonged to the British upper-class and that his journey from India to England meant returning home, his journey back no longer followed the patterns of traditional colonial itineraries. It was from Europe,</footnote>
which he explored extensively, chronicling its upheavals in the aftermath of the Second World War for the American press, that he finally went back to Asia, and it was in Hong Kong that he was able to reconnect with his native homeland and to reinvent his defunct sense of cosmopolitanism.

3. I will first study how, through the editorial history of his work and the radical evolution of his critical reception, Dom Moraes was first seen as a dazzling new voice of English poetry and is now considered a venerable mentor of Indian poetry. It is paradoxical that early in his career he was celebrated as a rising star of the London literary scene and quickly integrated in the canon of English poetry but that now he is seen exclusively by contemporary critics as an Indian poet whose work is rooted in the fabric of the country. I will argue that the key to this paradox lies in his prose writing, his three autobiographies and his journalistic work, which he wrote for decades when he found himself unable to write poetry. Then I will study how Dom Moraes's own sense of Englishness is largely built on him being educated among the cosmopolitan elite of the British Empire: moulded by the English literary Victorian canon, and by an Oxford education. I will show how he soon realized that his idealized British identity was more precarious and imbalanced than he imagined as he became typecast in the racially tensed Britain of the 1960s. Finally, I will show how by finding a place in the international world of the Anglophone press, he transformed this sense of Englishness by writing for different anglophone newspapers and audiences and how in Hong Kong, he invented a sense of cosmopolitanism rooted in the Asian space.

## 2. Prose writing as the key to the paradox of Dom Moraes being an English and an Indian poet

4. At the age of 16, Dom Moraes was sent to England to study at Jesus College in Oxford. He did very little studying and preferred to mingle with the Soho bohemian artistic elite. With the benevolent patronage of the poet Stephen Spender, he was published in *The Encounter* and was even sponsored to Oxford. His father's connexions and funding enabled him to weave his own web of sociability and enjoy the interlope life London had to offer. Rapidly, he published his first volume of poetry and was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1958. He became the youngest recipient of the literary prize and was celebrated as a rising star of English literature. It even convinced the reluctant Oxford deans to reconsider dismissing him from the college due to his lack of attendance. Even though he spent most of his time in London, he did take some advantage of Oxford. He met T. S. Eliot, studied under W. H. Auden, he had drinks with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. By the time he graduated he felt completely English. He was expected to go back to India but he felt no sense of returning home. Accompanied by Ved Mehta, another western-educated Indian he had met in London and who would later become an important figure of *The New Yorker*, he embarked on the hippie trail from Kathmandu to Calcutta. This adventure he narrated in the travelogue *Gone Away* was a parenthesis in his otherwise settled English existence, and this stay in India was just a visit.

5. It is hardly surprising that Dom Moraes considered himself, and was seen by critics, as an English poet. He wrote his poetry in England surrounded by English artists, and was published and celebrated by the English literary establishment. He published his first four volumes of poetry in English in the 1960s which led to his work being selected in
anthologies of English contemporary poetry such as the *Penguin Modern Poets 2* of 1962, which signalled his importance by placing him side by side with Kingsley Amis and Peter Porter. He achieved recognition and fame in England when nobody knew him in India. It is only thirty years after his first volume was published that his work travelled to India and was made available there. Penguin India published his first *Collected Poems* in 1987. Editorially speaking, his work was rooted in the British publishing landscape and existed outside of the Indian canon.

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Furthermore, in the early decades of Indian independence, Dom Moraes's success in England and his rapid incorporation in the English canon were seen as lacking nationalist fervour or even as anti-national and pro-colonial. This was reinforced by the fact that he felt at home in the English culture and was indifferent to the post-independence celebration of a lost glorious Hindustan. The Indian writer Khushwant Singh declares that Moraes is "an Englishman, [who] spoke no Indian language" (2007) and Bose accused him of "[having] become virtually an English man" (1963). This "committed anglo[philia]" gave him in the eyes of the Indian literary critics "the warped and misconstrued perspective of a colonial empathizer" (Mukherjee, 2024). The dismissiveness of the early critical assessments of his work reflects the nationalistic bias of literary criticism in India which questioned the Indianness of English well into the 1980s.

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It is not before the early nineties that his work became available in India. If a first volume of poetry, aptly entitled *Absences*, was published by Selprint in Bombay in 1983, it is thanks to his connection with Penguin India, based in New Delhi, that his *Collected Poems* were published in 1987, followed in 1990 by *Serendip*. His work appeared in two major books defining the contemporary canon of Indian poetry: poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's *The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets* (1992) and critic Bruce King's *Three Indian Poets*. Bruce King was the first western academic to open the critical field of the contemporary Indian anglophone scene, therefore his naming Dom Moraes alongside Nissim Ezekiel and A. K. Ramanujan introduced him in the canon of Indian contemporary poetry. Finally, his book of poems *Serendip* received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1994, thus definitely inscribing his name in the Indian literary pantheon. Since then, Dom Moraes's work has always figured in all the major anthologies dedicated to Indian poetry.

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This reclaiming of Dom Moraes as an Indian poet continues to occupy contemporary critics. I believe that, however well-intentioned those efforts might be, they are sometimes quite exaggerated. For instance, I do not think Sarayu Srivatsa's analysis of Dom Moraes's "outsider identity" makes him the champion of "the impoverish, the oppressed, the disempowered, the advocate of the marginalized, the castaways" (2019)—he was after all a rich, educated, upper-class man that, notwithstanding the empathy he could have, had nothing in common with oppressed tribal people, nor do I believe that Moraes's interest in marginalized communities in India can be read as "an empathetic reconstruction of an alternative Indian identity within the context of his divergent upbringing in a Goan Christian, anglicized home" (Mukherjee, 2024: 72). I would argue that this interest must rather be read in India's specific contemporary political context. Moraes came back to a city and a country that were no longer enthralled by the possibilities of a federal, secular Indian democracy but one that was in the grips of nativist and populist divisions and whose narrow and violent sense of self opposed his pluralistic view of society.
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More interestingly, poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote published Dom Moraes's *Selected Poems* in the famous *Penguin Modern Classics* collection. This critical edition aims at a younger and more contemporary readership in the wider anglophone world. By placing him alongside the canonical names of world poetry, some of whom he knew and considered his peers, Ranjit Hoskote attempts to escape the dialectic of English vs Indian and connect his poetry to the wider canon of anglophone poetry. Ranjit Hoskote's work opened twenty-first century criticism to reassess Dom Moraes's work through the "lens of cosmopolitanism" (2004). However, I would argue that this cosmopolitanism must be understood as a sense of self but not as in R. Battacharya's vision of Moraes's "cynical cosmopolitanism": "at home only in his writing" (2018: 15), which reduces him to a sort of *blasé* writer belonging nowhere. I would also agree with Ranjit Hoskote that from English poet prodigy to Indian poet and mentor, one can only understand this metamorphosis by looking at his prose writing as he underlines in his introduction to the Modern Classics edition: "the majority of his prose works are organically and compellingly related to his vision and articulations as a poet" (2012: xvii). The key to his singularity, or even marginality, lies precisely in the body of prose work that has not yet been compiled. It was written during the poetry writing block before his "redeeming marginalized" Indian writing, and after he had left behind his life in England and not yet invented a place for himself in India, at a time when he had a profession instead of a vocation.

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However, as Abhrajyoti Chakraborty puts it in the magazine *Caravan* (July 2019), it is unfortunate that "his essays and reportages have vanished in the limbo of [India's] literary scene" and that his large and diverse body of prose work has not been as carefully curated as his poetic one. This is why I chose to focus on the three volumes of his memoirs: *Gone Away, My Son's Father*, and *Never at Home* and on the articles I could find in the archives of some media he worked for, such as *The New York Times* or *The Observer* and the BBC. The columns he was commissioned to write, mostly for Sunday magazines, produce immediate snapshots of events and people and can act as revelatory of his own predicament. In the retrospective narration of his memoirs the precious information one gets gives more insights into the personal connections that mattered to him. The archival work of his journalism is still to be done. Speaking Tiger, a small publishing company based in Delhi, has been active in reissuing his prose work in India and a series of volumes were published posthumously, edited by Sarayu Srivatsa, such as *Under Something of a Cloud* and *Where Some Things are Remembered*. However valuable, those books lack an editorial perspective. The subtitle "travel writing" that accompanies them is rather vague and obscures the different nature of each piece as does the choice of dates mentioned for each piece which refers to the date of the events accounted for, not to when they were published.

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My argument is that his sense of identity and belonging shifted as he witnessed the changes in the post-war world order and the altered identities of the post-colonials. I agree with Jeet Thayil that Moraes built through "the wandering of the world" his posturing as an observer (2016). I would argue that his cosmopolitanism can best be understood in his belonging to the world of the anglophone press. An international anglophone journalist who, even though he might need an interpreter, carved a space for himself wherever he was: distant but close, empathetic but not compromised with a singular perspective on the world, aware of the expectations of his readers. It is this scattered and still invisible part of his work that bridges together the English and the
Indian periods. It is in his cartography of places and encounters, and in his constant shifts and refashioning of perspectives in the quick sands of the vanishing British Empire and the reconfiguration of a new world order that lies the mystery of Moraes's identity.

### 3. Understanding Dom Moraes's sense of Englishness

12. The Bombay poetess Eunice de Souza reads Moraes's sense of Englishness "in conformity with those of the empire builders and the Western elites, British and American" (1978). It can be understood in terms of class and in the global vision of a Western world with English as its master language. Moraes did belong to the Indian bourgeoisie of which he was the third generation, an elite that was educated in the British culture and language. He came from a Catholic family, was educated in a Jesuit school and then went to Oxford as his father had done before him. The sense of Englishness he had acquired, although disputed in the unstable context of pre-independence India, was cemented after he arrived in the England of the 1950s and found a home in the elite where he could somehow belong. Dom Moraes gives his definition of an Englishman as "someone who lives in England, speaks, and writes in English and adheres to English social and cultural codes". Most of all, the sense of Englishness that defines him is his family legacy and the frame of reference for his formative years that led him to literary success. Not only does he adhere to English social values but he was seen as British by his compatriots and the British establishment.

13. Benedict Anderson has written about the ambiguity of the terms British and English that Moraes alternatively uses, their apparent redundancy is in fact a clue to their ambiguity. It does not hint at a reductive geographical reality but at a much larger imperial reality: "Victoria Von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Queen of England and late in life Empress of India. Actually, her title is more interesting than her person, for it represents emblematically the thickened metal of a weld between nation and empire" (Anderson, 2006: 88). Therefore, Britishness is linked to Englishness in a double colonial strategy. Simon Gikandi highlights this paradox as he speaks of "the multiplicity of Britishness" (1996: 29) which integrated originally the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish as Britons in the imperial discourse and gave them a common colonial identity. In the 20th century, Britishness is connected to a larger imperial character and it subsumes everyone under the common condition of crown subjects under British rule. Therefore, as Krishna Kumar puts it, "it could not afford to be too closely identified with any one ethnic group identity" (2001: 43).

14. It is particularly true of the Indian elite as British Rule relied on the Indianization of its administration which necessitated the Anglicization of India. It was decided as early as the 1820s to establish "a thoroughly English educational system" (Anderson, 2006: 91) to educate the future civil servants of the British Empire. Dom Moraes's father, Frank (1907–1974), accounts for this paradoxical situation in his memoirs, *Witness to an Era*. He explains how Indians and Britons coexisted and collaborated. He tells how his family was part of the local establishment and how his own father, a civil engineer, collaborated to the building of the country's infrastructures. He underlines however that if they lived side by side with the British, they never had intimate contact with them. The result of Anglicization was that "about 50 percent of Indian civil service was
Indian at the outbreak of the Second World War" (1973: 5) and that it is within this new Indian middle class, whose nationalism came in contradiction with the old notion of British rule, that the second generation of nationalist anglicized Indians, to which Frank Moraes belonged, emerged.

15

The Victorian canonizing of the English language, also tellingly referred to as the Queen's English, and its culture (history, literature, sport) must be understood as a tool for the integration of colonized subjects into a consistent idea of Englishness through schools and colleges (Kumar, 2001: 49). If Dom Moraes's grandparents were Goan Portuguese Catholics who spoke Portuguese, Konkani, and English and never set foot in England, their son, Frank Moraes, only spoke English, had a Jesuit education with prescribed textbooks "that had a strong imperialist flavour often wildly incongruous and out of date" (1973: 18). Frank Moraes's irony denotes his clear understanding of the paradox of his own upbringing and this distancing shows what Simon Gikandi analyses as "the colonized subjects' capacity of *dédoublement* from this imposed identity" (1996: 40). Frank Moraes was a Westernized Indian. After his years as a student at Oxford and at a London law school, he became a junior assistant editor of *The Times of India* in 1936. However, it still had a segregated staff canteen and an exclusively British lavatory, and he was excluded from the daily morning conferences, elements that he wryly describes as "a few imperial hangovers" (1973: 44). He could only truly find his place as a top journalist and chief editor in the Nehruvian era.

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Dom Moraes's sense of Englishness springs from his belonging to this colonial anglophone elite which is his family's legacy. Therefore it is rooted in his sense of language and his familiarity with British culture. English was the only language that he spoke and he spoke it in the manner of the British elite. His social standing was then made clear to the person he was speaking to. His Oxford education obviously fashioned his relationship to the language and his taste for it. It can be felt for example in his mastery of wit in an article entitled "A Walk on London's Wild Side" published in *The New York Times* in 1970 when he describes the policemen patrolling the streets of Notting Hill: "They have the typically stately, arrogantly calm mode of ambulation which the British constable shares with the Arabian camel. Their lips curl a little in contempt, like those of camels, at the people they pass." During a visit in Edinburgh, where he met with some Scottish poets, he talked about of their "endless disputes" (1992: 52-53) over vernacular language versus English language solved by their drinking and he states his view of the centrality of the English language in which they argue.

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This familiarity and ownership he felt towards the language is rooted in the fact that his entire imaginary life and frame of reference was nourished and built around the canon of English literature. Dom Moraes described in *My Son's Father* his rather solitary childhood spent in the world of adults. His mother became mentally ill very young and was violent towards him, therefore he used to spend most of his time with his father tucked in a corner of his office or tagging along all over Asia for reportages. This gave him a front row seat to the changes of the world order in the aftermath of the Second World War and the emergence of India as a Third World leader but most importantly it also gave him a lot of time to read. English literature and poetry became his refuge, a way to fill his solitude, to find solace from his mother's violent outbursts and to occupy his time while his father was working. Very early on, he was a voracious reader and had at his disposal his parents' library and free rein to explore it. Therefore, when he left
for Oxford in the 1950s, he was not only following the very well-established tradition for westernized Indians' children, but experienced it as a way to connect to the core of Englishness. This feeling of belonging was validated by his success among the London literary bohemia. The Hawthornden Prize came as a confirmation of his Englishness. His success as a poet included him among English poets and inscribed him in a tradition that he claimed for himself: "Most of my youthful heroes, Eliot, Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, George Barker were people I knew or my friends" (1992: 5).

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With all that in mind, we can better understand Moraes's words: "I thought of England as my real home from which I had been exiled by events beyond my control. I had a number of friends, some close and nearly all English. The girls I slept with or lived with were mostly English; the mother of my son was English; I owned a house in London. To all intents and purposes, I had taken root" (1992: VIII). The dynamic of exile and putting down roots evoked here is entirely conditioned by the colonial heritage of the dream-England mentioned by Rushdie (1991: 18) but at the same time his rationalised discourse claims a paradoxical liberation from the historical contingencies of colonialism. In his second autobiographical book, *My Father's son*, Dom Moraes explored the differences and the disjunction of those two very different periods in his life (his Indian childhood and his young adult years in England) and the tensions between his British and Indian identities. He explained that he had always felt very much like England was home, and he stated that he had finally found the place he belonged to, and established his identity as an English poet. The public stance he took in 1961 and the personal consequences it had are a perfect illustration of these tensions. Indeed, in 1961, he publicly protested the annexing of Goa by the Indian authorities and, after the commotion it created, renounced his Indian passport. His belief that the Goans should have had a choice in the matter made him very popular there but he found himself vilified by the Indians in the United Kingdom. This polemic was of limited consequences for him since he was eligible to a British passport which he would retain until his death but it revealed the stance of a privileged member of the anglophone elite.

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However, Dom Moraes was not immune to the changes in the British society of the 1960s. He was becoming more and more aware that many saw him as a stranger: "It was difficult for me to accept that my English friends saw me as different from themselves in any way; I didn't see them as different from me" (1992: 56). He was painfully aware that he could not escape his alterity even in the midst of the British establishment he felt he belonged to: "the colour of my skin was not English but my mind was" (1992: 43). Chakraborty tells an anecdote about how Dom Moraes came to meet Naipaul through Francis Wyndham, editor at the British publishing firm Andre Deutsch. The latter felt Moraes and Naipaul had "a lot in common" but Moraes dubiously underlined that the two of them could not be further apart, one being a Trinidad novelist and him being an Indian poet and gave the editor this euphemistic answer: "Why should I waste this poor man's time because he was at Oxford a couple of years before me?" while understanding that indeed they had nothing more in common than their brown skin. Moraes was aware he was becoming increasingly typecast: as a writer, when he was invited to a meeting of "coloured writers" organised with V. S. Naipaul (1992: 56) but also as a columnist, when he was sent to report on the Notting hill riots and later the Bradford incidents or asked to write a piece on the Asians immigrants from Kenya on the assumption that he was able to connect with Asian immigrants because he was himself seen as one Other. The gradual restrictions to
immigration in England in the 1960s contradicted “the strategic disavowal of post-colonialism” that was staged for example in the Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1965 (Low, 2013: 107–108). Being identified as “coloured” in the 1960s created a single category of racialised people, “communities of suffering”, which erased the different origins and subsumed everything in a single category (Webner, 2015: 234).

20

Dom Moraes’s several personal experiences as a racialised Englishman were paradoxical even though his speaking the English of an Oxford man allowed him to escape the treatment reserved to the discriminated coloured. They made him conscious of his unescapable alterity: “England was my home. Was I to be treated like an immigrant? Then it occurred to me that I was an immigrant, and that I knew very little about how other immigrants lived. I felt suddenly very guilty about this” (1992: 94). After his Oxford years, he turned to journalism and the nomadism it implied to explore Europe and the world. Through his journalism and autobiographical writing, he tried to make sense of the changes of the time and elaborate a place of his own inside it. It was only much later in life that he could resume his work as poet and integrate the anglophone poetic scene of Bombay, rooting himself again in a completely different Indian context. The production for the BBC of an episode of the series *One Pair of Eyes* under the title “One Black Englishman” underlines the new awareness of his double-sided identity, the insider-outsider double face he was finally acknowledging in the context of growing xenophobia and racism.

## 4. A new-found sense of belonging in the world of the Anglophone press

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If it is undisputable that Dom Moraes’s vocation was poetry, one could say that his profession was to be a prose writer. Following the advice of his Oxford tutor, according to whom journalism is an honourable profession for an Oxford man as long as he works for the best papers, Dom Moraes settled into journalism as a way to make money. Poetry had given him some public fame but it could not earn him a living. Right out of Oxford, he then embarked on a double life: poet by night, journalist by day. Comparing Naipaul to Moraes, Chakraborty underlines: “Novels and poems brought them fame, but it is the nonfiction they wrote, partly to make ends meet, and partly to make sense of themselves in a world of empire and endless wars, that made them notorious” (2019). If writing non-fiction was first and foremost seen by Moraes as a way to use his talent to make ends meet, it is significant because it contributed to make his voice familiar to his contemporaries in a way that literature could not and it gave him the possibility to question his own position in the world and how the world saw him. Dom Moraes never considered journalism as a compromise. He writes: “Outside poetry, my public occupation suited my nature” (1992: 39). One could argue that he found in nonfiction writing not only a paying job but also a certain degree of self-fulfilment. And indeed, one article after the other he crafted for himself a uniquely fitting part of go-between. He was keenly aware when writing his stories of who spoke, from where, and to whom.

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He used the tensions and the contradictions of his insider/outsider position to carve a place for himself in the world and to suit his complexified identity. His pieces were always commissioned so he knew exactly who he was writing for and his mastery of English wit, anecdotes, character-sketching and storytelling really blossomed in his pieces that were mostly long, sometimes even serialized articles. He was also able to
switch audiences with ease. He chronicled the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961 for *The Times of India* and then went to Algeria to capture the revolutionary mood for the BBC. He wrote articles about Bombay and Delhi for *The New Yorker* staging himself as an urban intellectual puzzled by the contradictions of Indian modernity, as well as some sophisticatedly picturesque pieces of travel advice on Goa, Madya Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan at the bequest of the Indian government to attract Western tourists. Not only did journalism enable him to complexify his understanding of the anglophone world but it also provided him with a new crowd to belong to. The collaborative dimension of his work as a journalist and the enjoyment he derived from team work are key to understanding how he managed to overcome the loss of his idealised English roots. He travelled accompanied by a translator, a guide, a cameraman or a photographer. He talked with colleagues from other newspapers, shared tips or stories around nightly drinks. After the solitude he felt because of his estrangement from the London poetry scene, he found himself a whole new category of friends from the international English-speaking world of the media. He was exhilarated by this new-found sense of belonging to the worldwide diverse community of the anglophone press (1992: 19). He found new peers and mentors, the diversity of which exemplifies the nature of this world and the influence it had on Dom Moraes. Studying three figures that were instrumental in shaping his professional itinerary helps define his vision of his work as a journalist.

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His father was a major influence and an occasional adviser for his son. However they had very different ways of practising journalism: one was anchored in a national scene and very aware of his role as commentator and analyst of his country's destiny when the latter was more of a wanderer. Frank Moraes made his mark on Indian journalism and the anglophone press. He was an experienced field reporter, and the first Indian war reporter in Asia during World War II. He was a keen analyst of the political situation at the national and international levels. His position as editor in chief of *The Times of India* and then of the *Indian Express* saw him closely connected with the Nehru government in Delhi. He remains until today a respected voice of the Indian press as he was a firm believer in the necessary role of free press as the fourth power of any liberal democracy. From the early 1950s, he published numerous books analysing the contemporary issues of India and Asia: Nehru's biography in 1956 or Yonder One World: A Study of Asia and the West in 1958 for example. In his book about Africa, *The Importance of Being Black: An Asian Looks at Africa* (1965), he questions the feeling of cultural superiority and colour consciousness of Asian settlers. In his memoir, he defines himself as a political analyst with a liberal perspective, a westernized Indian who chose to finish his career and his life in London. Dom Moraes's journalism is of a very different nature. He did not share his father's rootedness in the Indian press and his commitment to one paper, neither did he share his in-depth, complex, and accurate political analysis.

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Dom Moraes chose to be a freelance journalist. Money was a constant drive that influenced his relationship with the media (newspapers and television). Indian papers did not pay much whereas British papers and the BBC or American papers gave him assignments that were well retributed. Therefore, Dom Moraes chose to freelance both as a columnist for newspapers and as a script writer for TV series. James Cameron (1911–1958) played a key role opening the world of the English and American press to him. He became his mentor and substitute father figure. He was a journalist at the *Daily Express*, a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a war correspondent in
Korea and later in Vietnam for *The New York Times*. In 1960, he recommended Moraes to be the scriptwriter and director of a TV series about India for Granada which was a foundational experience for Dom Moraes. Despite his distaste for being typecast, there was a lot of money at stake so he reluctantly accepted the job. He realized he was an Indian who knew nothing about his birth-country and had to rely on interpreters and Indian advisers. Furthermore, he was seen as Indian by the Indian crew who did not understand the tolerance he received from the British crew while they themselves were ostracised. The series, entitled *Mighty and Mystical*, reflects the kind of clichés those programmes spread at the time. Moraes’s uneasiness and confusion were mitigated by the success he earned in the profession and the money he earned for the job. If, in England, he felt typecast to cover the racial riots for the British papers, *The New York Times* regular assignments allowed him to cover various subjects from the arrival of Asians from Kenya and their difficulties at getting admittance, to the decline of the English working class or the question of old age in England, on which occasion he met an old soldier who reminded him of Rudyard Kipling and with whom he felt he could relate more than with the Pakistani migrants he met.

Two more fundamental experiences are worth mentioning in Dom Moraes’s journalistic career and his itinerary back to Asia. The covering of the Eichman trial in Israel in 1961 enabled him to meet another of his professional mentors, Patrick O’Donovan, who was a foreign correspondent for *The Observer*. Moraes was the youngest press correspondent there and the only Indian and his personal experience resonated with that of the Israelis of diasporic origin that he befriended there, especially the poet Carmi with whom he felt a particular kinship based on their shared love for poetry. Also, Moraes saw his assignment for *The Evening Standard* on cricket, for the 66th Commonwealth series, as an opportunity to open to a different kind of journalism, but it turned out not to be as light and entertaining as he expected. He met and interviewed the South African player Basil D’Oliveira who had fled apartheid and had been naturalised English. His selection in the national team caused England’s exclusion from matches taking place in South Africa and placed on the front pages the necessary banishment of South Africa from international sports. Confronting the “racialist” attitude of a former Oxford Blue cricket reporter who thought neither D’Oliveira nor Moraes “belonged here” and later meeting South African exiles in London who saw Indians as more racist than whites caused him to wonder what “the colour of his mind” was (1992: 70). This formula encapsulates the predicament of the eponymous “One Black Englishman” as he is finally defined before his return to India.

However, his return to India, supposedly to write a book about it, was a culture shock to him. While staying at his father's in Delhi he was expected to behave as the little master he once was by the servants, who thought he would stay permanently and dutifully take care of his father. The inadequacy of his westernized democratic attitude to his own Indian servant ends up as a story for *The New York Times* entitled "An Indian Expatriate Rediscovers India". The discordance he experienced in his birth country is further portrayed in his second *One Pair of Eyes* BBC film *Return as a Stranger* in which he combined interviews with a few childhood friends in Bombay (most had left for top jobs in Australia, America, Singapore) and stories of former immigrants who had returned wealthy but inadequate, with electric appliances and no electricity to work them (1992: 149). Portraying himself as a stranger in the BBC film gave him a certain distance. He still considered this exploration of India as but a tardy visit. He was never an immigrant therefore it was not about returning home for him. Conversely, defining
himself as an Indian expatriate in his article remained highly ambiguous. If he could be
seen as an Indian, he had no cultural ties with India and he felt cornered when
expected to behave as one. Moreover, his status as expatriate was contrary to the
British passport he owned and the Englishman he claimed to be. This confusing
situation was settled once Asia became his new frontier and he started working in
Hong Kong for the newly created *Asia Magazine*.

27 The millionaire press entrepreneur R. V. Pandit who owned the magazine *Imprint*, a tool of the American soft power in India, was spreading his influence to the whole of Asia by selling his new Sunday magazine to English papers all over Asia. It covered Manila, Malaysia, Okinawa, Korea, Bangkok, Borneo, Guam, Saigon, Hong Kong and China. It was run by a crew of journalists based in Hong Kong and printed in Japan every week. The editorial team was headed by an American who had spent twenty years as editor of *Time/Life* in South America, and involved English, Australian and South African professionals who would each in turn travel around Asia with photographers picking stories and doing interviews, finding “fillers and lead stories” (1992: 149). Being integrated in the circle of the Far East press meant he was no longer freelance but part of a team and responsible as sub-editor of the weekly rush to bring the magazine out. It also meant being out of India and the gathering tensions around Indira Gandhi’s political domination.

28 This responsibility gave new meaning to his work as a journalist. Subediting as the English expert kept him busy at the paper's offices in Hong Kong. He and his colleagues also travelled around Asia in what he calls a shuttle service. In Indonesia his expedition under General Suharto's dictature to the island of Buru where political prisoners were kept (among whom was Pram Ananta Toer) gave him “the most effective piece of journalism [he had] ever written as a journalist” (1992: 257). Published as an entire issue of the magazine, it was relayed by *The Sunday Telegraph* in London and Amnesty International based an effective campaign on his testimony. He paid several visits to the Philippines, interviewed Ferdinand Marcos just before the martial law of 1972. His experience of Vietnam in 1972 pointed at the particular bitterness of black soldiers: “the blacks were more apt to communicate with [him] than with [his] colleagues because of [his] colour” and he was aware that “the people they were fighting were in their own country and had a cause. The Americans had none” (1992: 226-227). The visit he paid the isolated Dani people in New Guinea turned into an entire issue of the magazine and a small book entitled *The People Time Forgot*. He picked more anecdotal stories in Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, fillers on food, costumes, colourful characters or places. The variety of people and cultures opened new perspectives and new relations in his world that so far had been dichotomised by his English-Indian dual identity. He was quite proud of the knowledge he acquired during his time in Asia. All over Asia he also got to meet “left overs from a departed day”, “expatriates of one kind or another” who “had been absorbed into Asia” and provided him with stories (1992: 209). Combining the liberal approach of a westernized journalist with the curiosity of an anthropologist, he explored Asia as a world apart. During a sales tour in Australia, where he met poets and writers and a cricket champion, he realized that “[he] had not been near Western civilization for some time: one could hardly call Hong Kong and Singapore exemplars” (1992: 214).

29 Moraes spent two years (1971–1973) in the British colony of Hong Kong with his Franco-Indian wife among expatriates of all nationalities and with close connections to
the colonial elite and the rich Chinese community who made their material life easy. Far East Asia opened a new work-field and asserted his reputation as a journalist but he clearly did not belong there. His later commission as literary consultant for the United Nations Fund For Population Activities (1973–1976) took him to New York with trips to India, Africa, and South America to produce a report on overpopulation and family planning entitled *A Matter of People*. For the two books of essays he edited *From East and West* and *Voices for Life*, he was no longer a journalist and no longer a poet. He was in a “financially profitable rut” (1992: 307). After the episode of writing a book on Ms Gandhi, the end of all links with the UN, he finally returned to Bombay to write press articles for a living and go back to poetry, writing in a city teaming with important poets. When he became the mentor of a few young ones, it confirmed the return of the gift and his renewed involvement in the city of his birth.

30

I would argue that thanks to his experience as a columnist and prose writer, Dom Moraes continually shifted perspective, adjusting it to the readers he addressed. Writing for an American, English, Indian or a wider Asian audience allowed him to fashion his singular point of view and question his location in the world. With his reports on local events in England and his most significant assignments in Europe, he expanded his previous writing experience to story writing and strategies to meet and interview people, learning the job from other journalists. As a journalist arriving from England, he could explore the Indian subcontinent, a vast territory mostly unknown to him. Finally, he enlarged his European-centred scope with his Hong Kong editing job and later, collecting and recording the world's transformations in Asia and Africa for the UN. In his autobiographical books, he records and comments on his nomadic life and his positioning as an artist and intellectual in this reconfigured world—as the titles of his two autobiographies, *Gone Away* and *Never at Home*, point to. It is because Dom Moraes remained forever at home in the English language and relentlessly pursued personal connections with people all over the Commonwealth that he managed to give a new meaning to his Britishness.

## 5. Conclusion

31

The exploration of Dom Moraes's life and work gives us a vivid picture of the reconfiguration of Asia and Europe after the Second World War and the wave of independences and the transformation of the relationship between the UK, India, and Hong Kong during the Cold War period. Through his autobiographic and journalist writings, he develops a unique and personal sense of cultural location across societies and continents while being a keen observer and promoter of cultural transfers between those localities. Moraes was never a fiction writer, his poetry and his prose are the location where he could express his contradictions and dilemmas. Whether as a poet or a journalist he staged the different masks (as he puts it) that were necessary to his Dasein. His three autobiographical memoirs are precious recordings of his identity-building in the post-colonial and Cold War context. His wide-ranging prose work as a journalist needs to be gathered and explored in the future.

32

Poetry gave Moraes the official recognition he needed to confirm his Englishness and provide him with a sense of belonging, but nevertheless it also allowed the intimate expression of his traumatic and solitary childhood and his feeling of alienation from his birth-country. As such, it was a lonely experience which ended with him being the John
Nobody of his third book. The regular despair he felt over his vanished gift for poetry lasted more than twenty years. It is no surprise that Bombay, his birth-town and vibrant poetry scene in the 1980s, brought back the duende² he had lost. Mentoring young poets and participating in local poetry events renewed his sense of place even if he remained displaced as an English-only speaker with a British passport belonging to the privileged class of the city.

33

His many years of prose writing, meant to provide him with a livelihood poetry could not, placed him in a circle of “wanderers”, all educated English speakers belonging to the Western world and at work in the expanding world of the post-war media. The experience of team-work with photographers and camera crews and the regular meetings with colleagues kept him busy. He got involved in the world affairs as a witness to its smaller and sometimes bigger stories. The triangular perspective (Europe-America-India) he navigated on for his various assignments later included the whole of Asia, a conflict-ridden space of the Cold War years where he claims he did his best piece of work as a journalist. There he found an enlarged professional scope with the comfortable back-up of colonial Hong Kong. As a journalist, he reported on a variety of circumstances which confronted him with the inescapable “Other” or the “never quite the same” he was in England and in India. Although he claimed a posture of neutrality disengaging himself from the issues at stake, he could not but be affected with the sense of exile reflected in the title of his last memoir *Never at Home*.

## BIBLIOGRAPHIE

*ANDERSON Benedict (2006), *Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism*, London: Verso.

*BOSE Buddhadeva (1963), “Indian English Poetry”, S. Spender & D. Hall (eds), *The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry*, London: Hutchinson.

*CHAKRABORTY Abhrajyoti (2019), “Dom Moraes, Neglected Non-Fiction”, *Caravan Magazine*, 1st July, <https://caravanmagazine.in/literature/dom-moraes-neglected-nonfiction> (11 May 2025).

*GIKANDI Simon (1996), *Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism*, New York: Columbia University Press.

*HOSKOTE, Ranjit (2004), “The Stranger Who Found Belonging at Last”, *The Hindu*, 13 June, <www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/the-stranger-who-found-belonging-at-last/article28527065.ece> (23 December 2020).

*KUMAR Krishna (2001), “‘Englishness’ and English National Identity”, D. Morley & K. Robins, *British Cultural Studies*, New York: Oxford University Press, 41–55.

*LOW Gail (2013), “At Home: Discoursing on the Commonwealth at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival”, *The Journal of Commonwealth Literature*, 48(1), 97–111.

*MORAES Dom (1957), *A Beginning*, London: Parton Press.
MORAES Dom (1960), *Gone Away: An Indian Journal*, London: Heinemann.

MORAES Dom (1961), *The Mighty and the Mystical*, London: Granada.

MORAES Dom (1965), *Collected Poems 1955–1965*, New York: Macmillan.

MORAES Dom (1965), *John Nobody*, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.

MORAES Dom (1968), *My Son's Father*, London: Secker & Warburg.

MORAES Dom (1968), “One Black Englishman”, *One Pair of Eyes*, episode 22, directed by Francis Megahy, London, BBC.

MORAES Dom (1970), “A Walk on London’s Wild Side”, *The New York Times*, 13 September.

MORAES Dom (1970), “The Passing of the British Working Class”, *The New York Times*, 5 April.

MORAES Dom (1992), *Never at Home: An Autobiography*, New Delhi: Penguin Books.

MORAES Dom (2012), *Selected Poems*, edited with an Introduction by R. Hoskote, London: Penguin.

MORAES Dom (2018), *Where Some Things Are Remembered*, edited by S. Srivatsa, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger.

MORAES Frank (1973), *Witness to an Era*, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

MUKHERJEE Durba & CHATTOPADHYAY Sayan (2024), “Homing In: Dom Moraes and the Felt Community of the Dissociated India”, *Journal of Postcolonial Writing*, 60(1), 69–83.

RUSHDIE Salman (1991), *Imaginary Homelands*, London: Penguin.

SINGH Khushwant (2007), “Requiem to Dom Moraes”, *The Tribune, Saturday Extra*, 13 October, <https://www.tribuneindia.com/2007/20071013/saturday/above.htm> (16 November 2019).

SOUZA, Eunice de (1978), “The Expatriate Experience”, C. D. Narasimhaiah (ed.), *Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature*, New Delhi: Sterling Publishing, 339–345.

SRIVATSA, Sarayu (2019), “Introduction”, Dom Moraes, *Under Something of a Cloud: Selected Travel Writing*, edited by S. Srivatsa, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, VII–XXI.

THAYIL Jeet (2008), *60 Indians Poets*, London: Penguin.

THAYIL, Jeet (2016), “Dom Moraes: A Poet’s Progress”, R. Chaudhuri (ed.), *A History of Indian Poetry in English*, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 223–234.

WEBNER Pnina (2015), *Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multiple identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism*, London: Zed Books.

## NOTES

1. Shiv Sena is a regional right-wing Hindu nationalist party founded in Maharashtra (India) in 1966. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is an Indian right-wing nationalist party. Both parties promote Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist ideology.

2. Duende: spirit; passion or inspiration not devoid of risk.
## RÉSUMÉS

L'exploration de la vie et de l'œuvre de Dom Moraes nous donne une image vivante de la reconfiguration de l'Asie et de l'Europe après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, de la vague des indépendances ainsi que de la transformation des relations entre le Royaume-Uni, l'Inde et Hong Kong pendant la période de la guerre froide. À travers sa poésie, ses écrits autobiographiques et journalistiques, il développe une approche personnelle de la localisation culturelle à travers les sociétés et les continents tout en étant un observateur attentif et un promoteur des transferts culturels entre ces localités.

Moraes est né en 1938 à Bombay au sein de l'élite politique et culturelle indienne anglophone. Son enfance est marquée par la lutte pour l'indépendance de l'Inde, la chute de l'Empire britannique et la fragmentation de l'Asie du Sud qui s'ensuit. Puis, à 16 ans, il est envoyé en Angleterre pour étudier au Jesus College d'Oxford. Il choisit de se mêler à l'élite artistique bohème de Soho et, après une ascension fulgurante, devient à 18 ans le plus jeune lauréat du prix Hawthornden (1958), ce qui fait de lui une étoile montante de la littérature anglaise. Dès lors, les tensions entre son identité britannique et son identité indienne et sa position d'outsider/insider dans le pays qu'il s'est choisi vont inévitablement émerger.

Il se tourne alors vers le journalisme pour explorer le Royaume-Uni et le sous-continent indien. Il est également correspondant de presse au procès Eichmann en Israël. Il quitte son champ d'action centré sur l'Europe pour Hong Kong, puis pour l'ONU, collectant et enregistrant les transformations du monde en Asie et en Afrique. Ses écrits autobiographiques lui permettent de questionner sa vie de nomade cosmopolite et son positionnement d'artiste et d'intellectuel dans ce monde reconfiguré — comme le soulignent les titres de ses deux autobiographies, *Gone Away* et *Never at Home*.

The exploration of Dom Moraes's life and work gives us a vivid picture of the reconfiguration of Asia and Europe after the Second World War and the wave of independences and of the transformation of the relationship between the UK, India, and Hong Kong during the Cold War period. Through his poetry, his autobiographic and journalistic writings, he develops a unique and personal sense of cultural location across societies and continents while being a keen observer and promoter of cultural transfers between those localities.

Moraes was born in 1938 in Bombay among the Indian political and cultural anglophone-educated elite. His childhood was marked by the fight for Indian independence, the fall of the British Empire and the fragmentation of South Asia that ensued. Then, at the age of 16, he was sent to England to study at Jesus College in Oxford. He chose to mingle with the Soho bohemian artistic elite and after a meteoric rise to success, he became at 18 the youngest recipient of the Hawthornden Prize (1958) and was identified as a rising star of English literature. Thus, tensions between his Britishness and Indianness and the outsider/insider conflict inevitably emerged.

He then turned to journalism to explore the UK and the Indian subcontinent. He was also witness to the Eichmann trial in Israel. He left his European-centered scope for Hong Kong and later for the United Nations, collecting and recording the world's transformations in Asia and Africa. His autobiographical writings allowed him to question his cosmopolitan nomadic life and his positioning as an artist and intellectual in this reconfigured world—as the titles of his two autobiographies, *Gone Away* and *Never at Home*, point to.
## INDEX

**Mots-clés** : Dom Moraes, non-fiction, Inde, littérature anglophone contemporaine

**Keywords** : Dom Moraes, non-fiction, India, contemporary Anglophone literature

## AUTEUR

MANON BOUKHROUFA-TRIJAUD

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

https://idref.fr/262074338

Sorbonne Université
manonbt@aol.com

Manon Boukhroufa-Trijaud wrote a doctorate thesis on the contemporary anglophone Bombay poetry scene entitled *Bombay, ville-paysage, dans la scène poétique de la ville des années 1950 à nos jours* at the Sorbonne (2021). She studies the transformation of postcolonial identities in the 21st century through the evolutions of poetic, editorial, and translation practices in the urban artistic scenes of contemporary Asian megalopolises. She is currently a teacher in English literature (PRAG) at the department of Littérature française et comparée at Sorbonne Université.en