Life & Background
Dominic Francis Moraes was born in Bombay in 1938, the son of Frank Moraes, one of India's most distinguished editors, and of a mother who was a pathologist and who developed severe mental illness during his childhood — a presence in his poetry throughout. He travelled with his father as a boy, met Auden, Spender, and Eliot in England, and published A Beginning at twenty while at Jesus College, Oxford, winning the Hawthornden Prize — the first Indian and the youngest recipient. He spent much of his life abroad, working as a war correspondent in Israel, Algeria, and Vietnam, writing for the UN in New York, and producing documentaries. He published no poetry for nearly two decades from the mid-1960s. He returned to India in 1980 and wrote prolifically in his last twenty years, refusing treatment for cancer near the end, and died in Mumbai in 2004.
Letter to My Mother
A poem addressed to the poet's mother, whose mental illness has separated her from him. The speaker recalls her before the illness and then the years of institutions and of a house in which she was present but unreachable, and admits the fear and resentment a child felt at a mother who did not recognise him. He describes writing to her without being able to say anything true, and the guilt of having left the country and the family. The poem does not resolve into forgiveness or into accusation; it stays with the fact of a relationship that was never repaired and that cannot now be, and with the recognition that the writing itself is the only place the two of them still meet.
Moraes worked in a strict, formal English lyric — regular metre, exact rhyme, a diction learned from Auden and the English 1930s — and that formal control is what makes the personal poems bearable: the confessional material is never allowed to become confessional in register. His characteristic subject is displacement, and it is unusually literal in his case, since he wrote in English about an India he kept leaving and lived in an England he was never of. Critics have divided over exactly this: Indian critics have called his idiom insufficiently Indian and rootless, and his defenders read the rootlessness as the actual subject rather than a failure to have one.
Why Moraes Matters
Moraes is the outstanding formalist of Indian English poetry and its first international success, and the Hawthornden Prize at twenty makes him a standard biographical fact. He belongs, with Ezekiel, Kolatkar, Mahapatra, and de Souza, to the generation that established Indian poetry in English after independence, and his work is the strongest case in the recurring examination question about whether Indian English poetry must be rooted in Indian material to count as Indian.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Beginning1957
- Poems1960
- John Nobody1965
- Beldam and Others1967
- Absences1983
- Collected Poems 1957–19871987
- Serendip1990
- Typed with One Finger2003