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.