Reconstructing the history of exile and return: A reading of Dom Moraes’s The Long Strider

Abstract

Throughout his life the celebrated Indian English poet Dom Moraes had suffered the dilemma of being doubly exiled. His Eurasian origin had exiled him both from his motherland India as well as from an England which he vainly tried to make his home. This article focuses on his last book, The Long Strider (2003), co-authored by Saraya Srivatsa, where Moraes revisits this idea of exile and homecoming through a double narrative relating the fascinating history of an Englishman named Tom Coryate who actually “walked” from England to India in 1613 to visit the court of Jahangir. This is interwoven with Dom Moraes’s own journey tracing the footsteps of the pioneering Englishman. Apart from exploring the manifold routes of and movements between home and exile, this travelogue/history/fiction also offers interesting insights into key postcolonial concerns such as the colonial gaze, the process of narrativizing the Orient, and the process of constructing history. The article looks at the relationship between Moraes’s text and the long tradition of “postcolonial” narratives of exile and homecoming scripted in India since the 19th century, when a profound sense of cultural displacement had been brought about by colonization. It also analyses the changed dynamics of the process of homecoming that The Long Strider presents in the context of the last few decades, when repeated ethnic clashes and mass killings seemed to put the very idea of India under erasure.

Keywords:

• India
• exile
• home
• history
• travelogue
• nation

Notes

1. To the Indians whose worldview and value system remained beyond the pale of the European mission of cultural colonization, the Europeans remained not only strange but even “non-human”. Thus Tapan Raychaudhuri writes how during the first decades of the 19th century the European Francis Hamilton Buchanan discovered that “the Nayars of Malabar had persuaded their womenfolk that the Europeans were a species of hobgoblin, with long tails used for sexual union” (Raychaudhuri 23).

2. The radical nature of this transformation was felt chiefly by Hindu society in that it was the Hindu middle class which was most exposed to western influence. Among the Muslims there had been no such large-scale cultural displacement, as, in general, they had been reluctant to open up to western education (see Majumdar 366–70).

3. This revivalist movement was largely Hindu in its nature. The Muslim community did experience a sort of revivalism later during the early decades of the 20th century, when it was associated with the Khilafat movement. This was, however, a pan-Islamic movement rather than a nationalist one.

4. Delhi was the backdrop against which the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom took place. In retaliation for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s murder by her Sikh bodyguard, more than 2700 men, women and children belonging to the Sikh communities were killed and several thousand more displaced (see Kaur).

5. In 1992 a large mob of armed Hindus demolished the Babri mosque in the city of Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh, claiming the site to be the exact birthplace of Lord Rama.

6. On 27 June 2002 the Sabarmati Express train was stopped forcibly and passengers – mostly Hindu men, women and children – were burnt. In retaliatory violence, hundreds of Muslims were killed in the Godhra city of Gujarat, with numerous mosques and dargahs burnt (see Cooper).

7. In the Kandhamal district of Orissa, right-wing Hindu extremist groups such as the Bajrang Dal and Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP) attacked and killed numerous Christians in retaliation for the killing of the VHP leader Swami Lakhsmanananda on 23 August 2008.