Chronicles of young India

Ratna Raman

I was reluctant to review a PDF copy of Gone Away because PDFs are far less fun to read. One cannot turn the leaves in a PDF version. Neither can one go back and refresh a memory nor re-read earmarked sections on a whim. Having engaged both with Moraes’ well-crafted prose and elegant poetry, and Jerry Pinto’s vibrant translations and introductions earlier, I eventually got around to reading this nuanced memoir that opens a window to the India of the late 1950s.

Possibly addressed by Dom Moraes to Henreita nee Audrey Wendy Abbott who lived in England, Gone Away recounts his travels in India between August and November 1959. He arrives at his father’s house in Bombay. The confounding beauty of the city in the monsoons, both its squalor and the opulence of nature unveil itself alongside a longish list of distinguished Indians whom he interacts with, partly because of his literary precocity and also because of their long association with his father, Frank Moraes, an articulate journalist and author during a very exciting period in India’s political history.

Dom is all of 21, well-travelled and an Oxford graduate when he returns to Bombay. He meets Mulk Raj Anand, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre and also goes looking for alcohol and finds it in dubious breweries, in spite of ostensible prohibition, pointing out how the rich in Bombay live close to the aristocratic sea, while the poor huddle in the interiors. He lectures at odd colleges, strikes up acquaintance with a black student and records for us the racism assimilated in the ethos of our new republic that young black men in India were subjected to as far back as 1959.

Moraes’ travelogue is also significant because it gives us the poet’s eye view: providing details from the Indian cityscape and draws our attention to the zeitgeist of the early decades after Independence. Moraes travels to New Delhi and meets Prime Minister Nehru. He captures the occasion with candour, which dots his narrative as he provides a perspective that tells the whole truth, with little sentimentality, precision, and is peppered with humour that is situational and occasionally self-deprecatory.

Moraes travels with Ved Mehta to Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim, providing new insight into the inaccessibility of the North eastern states to the rest of India in the twelfth year of Indian independence.

All through his travels, Moraes interacts with the local poets and literati and introduces us to various gifted Indians, ranging from MF Husain and Krishen Khanna at Bombay, Ved Mehta, Khushwant Singh and Nirad C Chaudhuri at New Delhi, Jamini Roy and Buddhadeva Bose at Calcutta.

This memoir is a delightful read and is both unpretentious and urbane. Moraes’ account of India’s friction with China and India’s relationship with Nepal at the end of the 1950s is compelling, especially in the context of the new tensions on the borders. Recording public disquiet over China’s infractions in 1959, Moraes mentions that General “Thimayya had asked that the Indian troops on the NEFA border should be supplied with automatic weapons, as they were inadequately armed in case of Chinese attacks. This request Krishna Menon is said to have refused: then came Longju, when inadequately equipped and outnumbered Indians were put to flight by the Chinese” Indian foot soldiers, caught in the cross hairs of war continue to be ill equipped, even to date.

Moraes also meets the Dalai Lama who had taken asylum in India to escape the unrest in Tibet. Then a young man, the Dalai Lama offers through his translator an accurate analysis that has a great deal in common with our times: “There are two great forces in the world today. One is the force of the people with power, with armies to enforce their power, and with a land to recruit their armies from. The other is the force of the poor and dispossessed. The two are in perpetual conflict, and it is certain who will lose.”

Moraes’travels continue to Calcutta, Gangtok and Sikkim where the Chinese army’s presence is strongly indicated and the Indian state is not providing enough information. Chronicling a readable narrative about independent India’s first decade, Moraes’ love for India, anticipates his eventual homecoming.