Dominic Francis Moraes was born in Bombay, the only son of Francis (Frank) Robert Moraes and Beryl D’Monte. His father was one of the most prominent and respected journalists of post-independence India, the editor of major newspapers such as The Times of India and the Indian Express, and the author of important books on South Asian current events, including two biographies of Jawaharlal Nehru. His mother was a pathologist, a clinical researcher at the Cama Hospital for Women and Children, and the daughter of doctors. Both parents belonged to Roman Catholic families, Goan on his father’s side and East Indian (i.e., from Bombay) on his mother’s. The boy grew up in a house where Indian nationalists, intellectuals and artists were frequent visitors, and where some of them (like the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, and the English poet Stephen Spender) had the opportunity to read and appreciate his juvenile poems and short stories.
By the time Moraes, following in his father’s steps, went to Oxford in the fall of 1956, he had already lived in Sri Lanka (during Frank Moraes’ editorship of The Times of Ceylon), visited Australia, travelled to France, Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, and experienced the first, traumatic symptoms of his mother’s mental illness. Through Spender, he had met E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and in Rome, Princess Marguerite Caetani (publisher of the influential international literary journal Botteghe Oscure) and the writers Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Oxford provided the opportunity to pursue some exciting extracurricular activities such as organizing readings by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and to cultivate long-lasting friendships not only with the poet Peter Levi and the Indian writer Ved Mehta, but also with W.H. Auden, the then University Professor of Poetry, and the American poet Allen Tate. However, it was in London’s bohemian quarter of Soho that the slender, self-absorbed, charming “boy poet” from Bombay made the more formative friendships—with painters Francis Bacon and Lucien Freund, photographer John Deakin, and poets George Barker, W.S. Graham, and David Gascoyne, among others. In Soho, Moraes also met his first wife, the artists’ model Henrietta (born Audrey Wendy Abbott in Simla), as well as the bookseller and publisher David Archer, both legendary figures in their own ways. In 1957, David Archer’s Parton Press published Moraes’ first poetry book, A Beginning, which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize one year later. At twenty-one, Moraes was the youngest and the first non-British to receive a prize that had honoured, among others, Graham Greene, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, and Vita Sackville-West. A Beginning was followed by Poems and the travelogue Gone Away: An Indian Journal, both published in 1960, while in 1962 Moraes featured with Kinsley Amis and Peter Porter in the second volume of the series Penguin Modern Poets. Three more poetry collections came next—John Nobody (1965), Beldam Etcetera (1966) and Poems 1955-1965 (1966)—of which the latter introduced Moraes’ work to America, where the collection was widely and positively reviewed. These books revealed a gifted poet (and also, in the case of Gone Away, a prose stylist of great talent and originality) and together they established Moraes’ literary reputation in England and, to a lesser degree, across the Atlantic. In India, on the other hand, despite his early inclusion in P. Lal’s 1969 Modern Indian Poetry in English, Moraes would be perceived chiefly as a British poet until his repatriation in the late 1980s—something that may explain his prolonged absence from poetry anthologies and his eccentric position in debates about Indian literature in English. Soon, a series of editorial and journalistic assignments overtook the typical engagements of a young, award-winning literary author (such as readings and radio appearances, interviews and book reviews). For the next two decades, Moraes would be constantly on the move: reporting from Israel (the Eichmann trial and the Six-Day War), Algeria, East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh), Vietnam, Indonesia and other armed conflicts around the world, editing and contributing to newspapers and magazines around the world, and working as a television writer and documentarian, both in Britain and elsewhere. His television work is most significantly represented by two episodes of the popular BBC series One Pair of Eyes— One Black Englishman, 1968, and Return as a Stranger, 1970—which focused on Moraes’ experiences as an outsider in Britain and in India respectively, as well as by two documentaries on India, Mighty and Mystical (1961) and India: The Bewildered Giant (1970). In Israel, Moraes befriended a number of writers and artists and developed an appreciation of local culture, which resulted in his translation of T. Carmi’s The Brass Serpent and other Hebrew poets. However, despite his impressive literary output in the late 1960s and 1970s (an autobiography, a collection of essays, an account of East Pakistan, a study of human population, commissioned volumes on Karnataka, Goa and Bombay, a book on Madhya Pradesh and a portrait of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, plus hundreds of reportages, feature articles and book reviews), his creative work suffered a long dry spell which would end only after his return to Bombay in the early 1980s. His personal life, too, went through a series of dramatic changes. After his early, bohemian relationship with Henrietta, in the early 1960s Moraes married Judith Anne St. John, a young Englishwoman from an old Buckinghamshire family. The two lived briefly in southern France, had a son (Francis), then moved back to London and the borough of Islington, where Moraes, (in One Black Englishman) depicted himself as on the verge of committing to a life he felt his own—or so he believed at the time. When the television episode was aired in December 1968, the three of them were in Kathmandu, in the middle of a long and arduous trip to India and Nepal that put a strain on the young family and would eventually lead to its dissolution. While Judith moved back to Islington with their son, Moraes, who was in Bombay, reconnected with a childhood friend, the actress Leela Naidu, who became his third wife . For the rest of the decade, “never at home” meant first, a job in Hong Kong as managing editor of Asia Magazine (1971–73), then a consultancy for the United Nations Population Fund (1973–76), based in New York but requiring extended travel in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
In early 1982, back in Bombay and still looking for a home (“where, I don’t know yet”), Moraes slowly, tentatively, excitingly found the poetic voice that had eluded him for the past seventeen years. In 1983, he published a handful of new poems in a limited edition, privately printed in Bombay. It was Moraes’ first poetry book to appear in India. Four years later, the newly-established Penguin Books India brought out Collected Poems, 1957–1987, which marked a reversal in his fame: it was hardly noticed in England, but introduced Moraes’ poetry to Indian readers and initiated a long relationship with the newly-established firm. The same year, 1987, also saw the publication of two more books that show Moraes’ latitude and comfort as a feature writer: a biography of the Indian cricketer Sunil Gavaskar and an account of the circumnavigation of the globe by the 37-foot yacht Trishna, sailed by members of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers. The next decade began with a new volume of verse (Serendip, 1990) and a second autobiographical book (Never at Home, 1992), as well as with a relationship with the architect and writer Sarayu Srivatsa, who became Moraes’ partner for the next fifteen years and eventually his literary executor as well. In April 2002, Moraes was diagnosed with cancer and was told that he had six months to live. Incredulous and worried about how this would affect his travel and book projects, he underwent surgery but refused any medical treatment or strict regimens. Over the next two years, he oversaw the publication of one more volume of verse (Typed with One Finger, 2002) and two nonfiction books co-authored with Srivatsa— a collection of pieces that reflect their complementary experiences and perspectives on India (Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, 2002), and an account that retraces the voyage of Thomas Coryat from the village of Odcombe in Somerset to the court of the Mughal Emperor Ja hangir (The Long Strider: How Thomas Coryate Walked from England to India in the Year 1613, 2003). Additionally, Penguin brought together Moraes’ three memoirs (Gone Away, My Son’s Father and Never at Home) in A Variety of Absences (2003), and his published poetry in Collected Poems, 1954–2004 (2004). In the absence of a definitive, critical edition, this final volume, together with Ranjit Hoskote’s introduction to his 2012 selection, represents the most comprehensive overview of Moraes’ poetic achievement to date.
This achievement spans half a century and is defined by an earlier and a later period separated by a seventeen-year hiatus. The first period began when Moraes was still in his mid-teens and peaked in London when he was not yet thirty. His first three books are characterized by a fluid formalism, with a preference for regularly-rhymed stanzas of four or five lines, and a Romantic imagery loosely inspired by medieval legends and folklore, in which the warps of mythological and literary references criss-cross with the wefts of private feelings, emotions and traumas to weave a personal tapestry populated by kings and queens, princesses and knights, wizards and pipers, prophets and warriors, dragons, unicorns and other fantastic figures. This combination of Christian, Arthurian and folkloric suggestions (with a touch of Kipling’s fairy tales) permeates A Beginning, while Poems presents a more overt (and critical) autobiographical perspective in such poems as “A Letter” (“Almost I can recall where I was born: / The hot verandas where the chauffeurs drowse, / Backyard dominion of the ragged thorn, / And nameless servants in my father’s house, etc.”) and “Gone Away” (“My native city rose from the sea, / Its littered frontiers wet and dark, etc.”). Poems also introduces a dedicatory practice that features more prominently in John Nobody and beyond, together with a penchant for symbolic figures (The General, The Laird, The Watcher, Prophet), mythicized literary characters (Hamlet, Ophelia, Jason, Sinbad, Merlin) and epic undertakings (conquering hordes, continental invasions). The elegant, ostinato leitmotifs of these poems probe into the darker recesses of human achievement and underlying passions, ambitions and delusions, revealing the deceptive and destructive idealism of Man. On account of their universality, these elegant and carefully- crafted exposés programmatically avoid geographic, cultural or historical identifiers. At the same time, the legendary and mythological style provides a suitable environment for sublimation, as suggested by the contrapunctual presence of monsters (literary and otherwise), violence and latent horror (“Vivisection”, “Craxton”, “Razor”, “Gladiator”, “Monsters”, “Minotaur”) throughout Moraes’ poetry, something for which his early experiences as a war correspondent and his later exposure to communal violence in India, may account only in part, and superficially at that. The hidden source of Moraes’ repressed anger, which he sublimated into poetry of controlled and delicate elegance, is much closer to home, as it has to do with his mother’s mental illness and the impact it had on his childhood and youth. This traumatic experience is described at length in My Son’s Father, while in poetry it makes its first, explicit appearance in “Letter to My Mother”, a blunt, blank verse plaint that represents a striking departure, in form no less than in content, from Moraes’ previous work. Written around the same time as his memoir (which may have triggered the poetic outburst), it was first published in Poems 1955–1965 (1966) and Beldam Etcetera (1967), the two collections that conclude Moraes’ earlier period.
By the time he regained his voice, Moraes’ journalism and travel writing had virtually overshadowed his poetic achievement, although his experiences as war correspondent, roving reporter and documentarist effectively broadened his poetic vision and scope. Indeed, some of the landscapes, the events and the situations depicted in such poems as “Message”, “Mission”, “Kinshasa”, “Tribals” and “Gondwana Rocks” are real rather than a product of the poet’s literary imagination, and some of them (or other similar) are indeed described in Moraes’ war reportages and travel books. Even a more “visionary” poem like “The Newcomers”, more typical of Moraes’ earlier period, provides details—like the plumed cranes—that help situate the events geographically, if not historically. Next to these “field poems” are poems inspired by historical figures such as Alexander, Babur, and many others and events such as the Viking world of “Barrows”, the British’ arrival in Bombay in “1668” and so on, but their handling, purpose and ultimate meaning is consistent with Moraes’ approach to his mythological heroes, literary characters and legends, which is introspective and imaginative (and occasionally moral)—that is, metaphorical rather than metahistorical or political. Overall, Moraes’ later period confirms a mild, mid-century aestheticism and Englishness supported by a sound sense of form and a technique that are most impressive when less evident. A case in point is represented by “Windows”, an intricate and reference-packed poem in which splinters of a life (“the bored wars, / Departures and arrivals, / Forgotten contests with insanity”) are woven into the fabric of an ordinary day with a nonchalance that obliterates—but relies upon—the skilled use of enjambement and internal rhymes. More often though, these and other devices, combined with a complex imagery, an erudite diction and an excellent command of the poetic line, “bring off” the poem without truly addressing or exposing its innermost motive. Only when this formal apparatus is internalized, downplayed or minimized does Moraes’ poetry attain the clarity of expression, the eloquence and the profundity of meaning necessary to succeed in sublimating his demons. This happened first in “Letter to My Mother”; then increasingly in his later period (more often in poems addressed to women with whom he had a close relationship, or to close friends from the past); and ultimately in the final section of Collected Poems 1954‒2004, the last book Moraes prepared for publication which includes poems written in 2003‒04. Here, and especially in “After the Operation”, which is a sequence of twelve variations on the sonnet form representing a distillation of personal experiences and literary tropes, spontaneously summoned and candidly exposed, Moraes finally dropped all his masks and formal concerns to achieve a purity of expression, and a density of meaning, in a concatenation of verses that are the most straightforward, explicit and revealing—and also contain some of the best poetry—that he ever wrote.
In the last two decades of his life, Moraes the poet regained the lead over the journalist and travel writer, and his reputation in this regard only grew after his death. At the same time, his poetic influence—as opposed to his recognition and appreciation as a poet—remained limited and superficial, and perhaps it could not have been otherwise, given the generational and cultural difference between this English-educated, poised formalist and his younger admirers and votaries, whose models were mostly American, modernist (and after), and included popular literature, music and cinema. Eventually, his canonization as a poet, and his association with Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan as one of the “founding fathers” of modern Indian poetry in English, did to his non-poetic work what his long creating block had done to his poetry in the 1970s and 1980s: it diverted critical attention from a significant body of work that was seen as primarily journalistic and “secondary”. Only recently has this attitude begun to change, and a serious interest in Moraes’ journalism, travel writing, and memoirs seems to be shaping up appears to be steadfastly emerging. However, despite two recent volumes of selected travel writings and prose pieces (2018–20), followed by reprints of his autobiographical works (2020), Moraes the columnist and editorialist, the war correspondent and feature writer, the book reviewer and (occasional) literary polemist is still largely unknown, mostly because this rich and diverse body of work remains undiscovered, buried in hundreds of libraries and publications around the world, waiting to be properly catalogued, collected and assessed for a fuller understanding—and a better appreciation—of the poet and writer as a whole.
Dom Moraes died on June 2nd, 2004, and is buried in the Sewri Christian Cemetery in Mumbai, although the final resting place he had wished for was some 7000 kilometers (or 4300 miles) away, in Odcombe’s St. Peter and St. Paul’s churchyard. There, a headstone in yellow Jaisalmer stone marks a memorial service held on July 19th with the simple words: Dom Moraes who followed Thomas Coryate’s footsteps and returned home. The reference to Coryat, who did not return but died in Surat, Gujarat, simultaneously stresses and understates the ambiguity of the word “home”, which crops up throughout his poetry and prose. Here is a stanza (and a half) from “John Nobody”:
Last August in the Valley of Jezreel,
Homesick, I dreamt about Trafalgar Square.
But in the Square today, I dream of hawks,
Of doelike girls, the sun, endless delay,
Bullocks and Buicks, statesmen like great auks,
And I grow homesick for an Indian day.
Conversely, a poem describing an ethnographic encounter in the field (“Tribals”, from Collected Poems, 1957-1987) ends:
Humidly the horned shadows
Flap, and drums drone.
But I, in the crowded meadow
Through trampled air inhale
Cold spidery smells of stone
From English waterfalls.
And at the end of his memoir Never at Home, whose title itself is revealing, Moraes, musing over his future, candidly admits “I am waiting to be at home; where, I don’t know yet.”
I thank Sarayu Srivatsa for additional information and clarifications about Moraes’ life and death, as well as for granting permission to quote from his work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry
A Beginning. London: The Parton Press, 1957
Poems. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960.
John Nobody. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965.
Poems 1955-1965. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
Beldam Etcetera. London: Turret Books, 1966.
Absences. Bombay: Selprint, 1983.
Collected Poems, 1957-1987. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1987.
Serendip. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1990.
In Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2001.
Typed with One Finger: New and Selected Poems. Calicut, Kerala: Yeti Books, 2002.
Collected Poems, 1954-2004. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2004.
Selected Poems. Edited by Ranjit Hoskote. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2012.
Translations
- Carmi. The Brass Serpent: Poems. Translated from the Hebrew. Athens, Ohio: The Ohio University Press, 1964.
A Chance Beyond Bombs: An Anthology of Modern Hebrew Peace Poems. Edited by Haya Hoffman. Translated from the Hebrew by Dom Moraes and Aryeh Sivan. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998.
Nonfiction
Green Is the Grass. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1951.
Gone Away: An Indian Journal. London: Heinemann; New York: Little, Brown, 1960; New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2020.
My Son’s Father: An Autobiography. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968; Speaking Tiger, 2020.
From East and West: A Collection of Essays. New Delhi: Vikas, 1971.
The Tempest Within: An Account of East Pakistan. New Delhi: Vikas, 1971.
A Matter of People. London: Andre Deutsch, 1974.
The Open Eyes: A Journey Through Karnataka. Bangalore: Government of Karnataka, 1976; New Delhi: Lustre Press, 2005.
A Family in Goa. Goa: Damodar, 1976.
Bombay. New York: Time-Life, 1979.
Mrs. Gandhi. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Little, Brown [as Indira Gandhi], 1980.
Answered by Flutes: Reflections from Madhya Pradesh. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1983.
Trishna. Bombay: Perennial Press, 1987.
Sunil Gavaskar: An Illustrated Biography. Madras: Macmillan India, 1987.
Rajasthan, Splendour in the Wilderness. New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1988.
Never at Home: An Autobiography. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1992; Speaking Tiger, 2020.
[With Sarayu Srivatsa] Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002.
A Variety of Absences: The Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.
[With Sarayu Srivatsa] The Long Strider: How Thomas Coryate Walked from England to India in the Year 1613. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.
[With Jatin Das] The Summer in Sweden: The Journey of a Painter and a Poet. New Delhi: Embassy of Sweden, 2011.
Where Some Things are Remembered: Profiles and Conversations. Edited by Sarayu Srivatsa. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2018.
Under Something of a Cloud: Selected Travel Writing. Edited by Sarayu Srivatsa. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2019.
Edited volumes
Voices for Life: Reflections on the Human Condition. New York: Praeger, 1975.
The Penguin Book of Indian Journeys. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001.
References
Chakraborty, Abhrajyoti. “Tall Tales: Dom Moraes’s Neglected Nonfiction.” The Caravan: A Journal of Politics & Culture, vol.11, no. 7, July 2019, pp. 82-91.
King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005 (1991).