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VICTOR ANANT
the language or be killed by it. This is what, I think, Nabokov
means when he calls
Lolita
his "love affair with the English
language." His sensual strangeness forces him to indulge self–
consciously in every kind of exploration of a child love, and he sees
depths the natives do not see. By a cathartic process his explor–
ation of a language becomes a profoundly personal mode of sex,
and he shocks even such wide-awake and liberal natives as Mr.
Philip Toynbee.
Secondly, I was disturbed by the fact that an imperial power,
concerned mainly with economic aggression and not, in the old
sense, with any proselytizing purpose, should inspire religious awe
in me, born and brought up as a Brahmin.
In
the fifth century
A.D. St. Thomas, a Syrian Christian, arrived in Kerala and
founded a church. Today twenty per cent of the people of Kerala
are Christians. Vasco da Gama came with the Pope's blessings on
his voyage of discovery in the fifteenth century and landed on the
West coast. Today Goa is still finnly Catholic and in the stern
grip of Portuguese imperialism. But except for children of British
parentage (and Naga tribesmen) there are no Christians to speak
of in the rest of India. I wondered what strange power the
Church of England possessed that it could make me feel Christian,
stir in me a protestant conscience, even though I was not a con–
vert in any ritual sense.
Thirdly, I could not help feeling that the political victory
belonged to Britain and not to India. Thinking again of French
and Portuguese possessions in India, there seemed to be a mag–
nanimity of vision and much human charity in the manner in
which Britain had transferred power to Indians. Only the moral,
surely, recognize morality? Moreover, what better evidence of
Britain's victory than that the new republic remained, of its
own volition, within the Commonwealth, recognizing the Queen
as head of it?
It
is only after seven years in London-broken by a one–
year return to India-that I see how false my reasoning was,
that I have never been, and can never be, a Briton, and that
if I had then been able to look deeper into myself I could have
seen my real motives.
In
these seven years I have lived largely
