Zitationsvorschlag
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Dom Moraes: A “Traitor” Who “Fractured” India or an Anglicized Middle-Class Empathizer Who Felt with the Marginalized?
ABSTRACT Dom Moraes (1938–2004) is a significant presence within the field of post-independence prose writings about India. However, he has often been misinterpreted as a “traitor” and an upholder of colonial discourse or, at best, a poet who was solely able to express his sensibilities through poetry. Such criticism of Moraes does not take into account his extensive engagement with India and Indian self-fashioning that can be found in his larger literary career, which also consists of a significant volume of his memoirs. Moraes spent his lifetime travelling across India, from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, documenting his experiences. A nuanced chronological reading of his self-fashioning that forms a major strand in these texts reveals his affiliation to India through a sense of association to the felt community of the marginalized in India. Looking at his notions of individual habitus and class dispositions, this chapter argues that it is, ironically, through this mutually shared feeling of dissociation from a majoritarian image of India that he reclaims his own Indianness.
KEYWORDS Dom Moraes, felt community, habitus, self-fashioning, travelogues
