316
VICTOR ANANT
It was after these events, in the early years of independence,
that most of my generation began to tum towards England. A
curiously self-analytical tremor may be detected in writers pub–
lished abroad since 1947. The theme of national aspiration and
a national cause is relegated to the background. We have, instead,
themes of individual aspiration and self-propaganda. There is,
for example, the bizarre self-mockery and pungent satire against
holy men in Mr. G. V. Desani's
All About Mr. Hatter;
there is
the unexpected homage paid to dear departed British liberal
humanism in Mr. Nirad Chaudhuri's
Autobiography of an Un–
known Indian;
the delicious drawing-room anguish incorporated
into the themes of Indo-British romance in the work of Miss
Santha Rama Rau, Miss Kamala Markendeya and Dr. Bala–
chandra Rajan ; but the important, significant trend in this new
range of articulateness is the
distance
now created between the
individual Indian and India. Alienation has arrived in Bombay,
Madras and Calcutta.
In 1952, when I left India for England, I was certain I was
a Briton,
even
in the coloring of my skin. (Did not my mother
say she had found a "very fair" girl for me whom I should marry
before I left?)
If
independence has resulted in self-consciousness,
and self-consciousness in alienation, I was sure England would
make me a whole man again. (I did not know it then, but I
assumed there was some superior merit in not being split.) There
were, of course, practical reasons which I did not deny myself;
the difficulty of earning a living in India, with the prevailing
grimly nationalistic mood; the numerous attractions of a Welfare
State; visions of sexual freedom; good, English beer. But this
materialistic pill was coated with a liberal amount of ideological
sugar.
First, I thought of my relationship with the English language.
I had already begun to write when I was fourteen, and could not
use any Indian language to express myself. My first effort was
a poem, and I mention it here because it has interesting psycho–
logical undertones. It was addressed to a girl who had turned me
down for another boy and the poem was charged with sexual
contempt for her, treating of her as a prostitute.
