The Hindu : Front Page : Dom Moraes dead

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Thursday, Jun 03, 2004

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Front Page

Dom Moraes dead

By Ranjit Hoskote

MUMBAI, JUNE 2. The celebrated poet, Dom Moraes, who had been suffering from cancer for several years, passed away at his home in Mumbai this evening. Having refused to submit to the rigours of diet and treatment demanded by his affliction, Mr. Moraes decided, in the words of Dylan Thomas, a poet with whom he shared a love for the archetypal myth and the richly arcane word, that he would "not go gentle into that good night." Instead, with the sentence of extinction hanging over him, he travelled widely across India, a country that was both intimately familiar and forbiddingly strange to him, and producing several books in collaboration with Sarayu Srivatsa, his companion on these geographical journeys that were also expeditions into a complex self.

Throughout his life, Mr. Moraes was alternately attracted and repelled by India, its people, its culture: this tension afforded him one of the most vital impulses of his art, the others being a sense of abiding loss, a search for redemptive love, and a feeling of being permanently in exile, no matter where he went. By a strange paradox, Mr. Moraes travelled far more widely in the jungles, deserts and backwoods of India, in the course of his varied career as a journalist, writer of travel prose and director of documentary films, than many of the critics who attacked him for what they saw as his Westernised contempt for Indian customs and his colonial attitude of aloofness from local realities.

Mr. Moraes was born in Mumbai, then Bombay, in 1938. His father was the journalist and writer Frank Moraes, who became the first Indian editor of The Times of India after independence. Mr Moraes' childhood was exceptionally rich in experience, since he followed his father on his journeys through South-east Asia, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand. That childhood was also shadowed by the dissensions between his parents, and the gradual descent of his mother into a mental illness that would culminate with her confinement to a care institution. Poetry announced its claim on Mr. Moraes very early: his first poems were written at the age of 12, and came in a stream when he went up to Oxford. At home, Nissim Ezekiel gave him bracing advice on tone and direction; in Britain, which would soon become more of a home than India, W.H. Auden offered him praise and Stephen Spender published his poems in Encounter. The Parton Press in London brought out Mr. Moraes' first book of poems: he was 19, and the book bore the appropriately workmanlike title, A Beginning. It won him the Hawthornden Prize for the "best work of the imagination" in 1958, and Mr. Moraes remains the first non-British winner of this prestigious award, as well as its youngest recipient.

Mr. Moraes became established as a serious poet with his third volume, John Nobody (1960) and followed this with a chapbook, Beldam & Others (1967). He then passed into a phase of poetic silence, during which he felt the energies of mystery and lyric had deserted him; he could not shape thought and image into verse, although he remained haunted by the memorable characters he had created, the sinister gardener, the innocent prince, the wizard trapped in glass, the innocent sinner, the self-mortifying saint. In these years of exile from poetry, Mr. Moraes edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York, covered the first mass-media trial (that of the Nazi death-camp commandant Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem) and several wars, spending time in Israel and Vietnam and working for the United Nations. During the 1980s, Mr. Moraes returned to the city of his birth, and gradually, the poetic impulse returned. Even while he kept up an astonishingly prolific output as a columnist for the daily newspapers, he wrote accomplished poems that were all the sharper for his prolonged dormancy. These have since been brought together in his Collected Poems (1987), while his more recent poems have appeared as Typed with One Finger.

Mr. Moraes never quite overcame his repugnance at the regressive features of Indic culture, the bigotry and violence of the sub-continent's social formation. Towards the end, even as he regarded the rise of majoritarian intolerance with horror and thought the country's future bleak, he achieved a certain compassionate equanimity towards its people, a positive sense of identification with their struggles and aspirations. In a reciprocal gesture, the literary culture that had long rejected him, to the extent of excluding him from anthologies of Indian literature, recognised him with awards, and more importantly, with a revival of serious attention in his writing.

The Long Strider is the title that Mr. Moraes and Ms. Srivatsa gave to their book on the 17th-Century English traveller and mystic, Thomas Coryate, who visited the court of the Emperor Jehangir and died in Surat. Considering the distance that Mr. Moraes covered, from his early position of self-declared alienation from India, and his intricate negotiations with the conditions of home and elsewhere, self and the other, this would serve as a fitting description of his own life. Mr. Moraes was a poet who nurtured his gift despite the workaday demands of prose, who fought his inner demons and gave a candid account of these encounters, and who distilled these struggles into haunting phrases and compelling images. His candour, just as much as his brilliance, will ensure that he is remembered by generations of readers of poetry.

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