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

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.