Aubrey Menen: Being Comfortably Out of Place

Perks of Not Belonging

Reading Aubrey Menen convinces you of what might feel paradoxical: freedom does not emerge from belonging to a community, clan, race, nation or even a friends’ group. As Menen remarks in his collection of essays – drawn from his travels and his candidly examined past – “For the young to mistrust one’s friends is the beginning of wisdom.” While the young might like to think of themselves as “bold” and “original”, they might blind themselves to how their “originality” has been shaped by peer influences. To truly be distinct requires a withdrawal from the sociality imposed by schools, colleges, workplaces or families. It also requires a nomadic outlook, so that you can gaze at your own origins – city, nation, caste et al – as a tourist might. With curiosity and bemused distance.

Hybridity as a Mixed Blessing

Menen, who died in 1989 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, had the good fortune of not feeling tethered to any place. Born in 1912 to an Irish mother and Nayar father, he was raised neither in Ireland or in Kerala, but in England, when the island nation possessed a vast empire and an inflated sense of itself. Considered “Eurasian” – a tad below “Anglo Indians” (which some defined as having a British Dad, Indian Mom) – Menen could not don the smug superiority of his white schoolmates. At the end of World War I, he was thought to be a Turk because of his brown complexion. Despite his British accent and mastery of English ways, he was jeered at on the streets.

The shame of being Eurasian was also reinforced at school. His English Headmaster, with a condescending kindness, said that Jesus loved him, implying that others couldn’t. His position in Kerala was also tenuous. To begin with, the Nayar household had disinherited his father when they heard about his marriage to the Irish Alice Villet. Later, when his mother and he visited his formidable Nayar grandmother, Alice was isolated in a smaller house on the property, since her very presence in the main house was considered defiling.

Culture Shock Everywhere

When a palanquin-borne Aubrey was ferried into the matriarch grandmother’s presence – she who famously bared her breasts in formal meetings, and considered women who wore blouses or other finery “Jezebels” – she assured him of his Nayar superiority. Of how his friends in England should look up to him as an “example”. Strange, because his English Headmaster had imparted a similar message about his English grandness.

He was to absorb, too, how manners and customs were relative. In the Nayar home, folks ate in secluded corners, privately. The idea of eating together, of watching another’s mouth masticating food, was considered abhorrent. Despite these differences, he might have stayed back in Kerala, if he wasn’t instructed to drink a cup of cow’s urine – a necessarily ritual, apparently, wash off his problematic parenthood. He returned to England, where his Headmaster urged him to play ball games. At the end, he was torn between both clans: “I determined that I would remain independent of both groups, and that I would be myself.”

Visiting A Petulant Maharaja

As an adult writer, he encountered a descendant of Shivaji, a royal who seemed anguished that he wasn’t educated enough, civilized enough, or British enough. He apologized for his vulgar tastes and lack of conversational savvy, though that didn’t stop him from talking nonstop. Menen comforted him with the idea that England no longer possessed the kind of Englishmen the Maharaja might be hankering to imitate (perhaps, it never did!). He also couldn’t help noting, somewhat acerbically, that a king who could have been content with his lot – a wife, a splendid palace, horses, a factory producing pottery – lamented what he had not. Perhaps, that wasn’t an English or Indian trait, but a universal one.

Fakirs, Faith and Fertility

He met fakirs in Benares, who were unbothered by the British empire. Some performed uncanny feats – like hanging from a pole, driving a hook through their chin. Some were serious, some blithe. “Indeed both may be equally holy: saintliness is the most chancy of professions.” Big Tim – a tall fakir, walked naked with others in a procession. Some tucked flowers into their hair, others covered their bodies with dung or ash. “It was a fertility rite.” At the end of the procession, the fakirs sat down and childless women touched their “organs of generation”, hoping for an elusive blessing.

The Bloomsbury Illusion

In England, he bumped frequently into the Bloomsbury Set and wasn’t taken in: “They were as well-bred as racehorses; they even spoke in a whinny. It was known as the Bloomsbury accent and it was most ingenious. It enabled one to say modest and self-effacing things in a crushingly superior way.”

An Inward Journey

Eventually, he sent all his papers and books to a man called Herman Gottlieb at Boston University, to embark on a deeper quest – to find the “I” that had fueled all his writing. Confining himself to a small apartment in Rome, tucked beyond two Piazzas and a sunlit courtyard, he began to investigate himself. He started with the Upanishads and offbeat Hindu ideas: “One of those ideas is that the only way of meeting violence is to do nothing about it, but to go on quietly minding your own peaceful affairs.”

Peeling himself like one would an onion, he sloughed off each layer: “Not one of us believes that we are what the world has made us, and nothing else.” The housewife, the middle-aged executive, the fading musician – they could all be something else and more, given a chance. Realizing that we are not our upbringing or schooling or work experience or circumstances, we arrive at nothing, “the space within the heart.” Menen claimed to have arrived at The Tranquil Eye, a space inside himself that he was able to retreat into anywhere and at any time: “The man who has found the space within the heart is like one who sits in a theatre watching the rehearsal of a play. Suddenly the director calls upon him to take one of the parts. He goes onto the stage, he takes his script, he reads the lines as best he can. He goes back to his seat, as calm as when he left it.”

References

Aubrey Menen (Introduction: Jerry Pinto), A Stranger in Three Worlds: The Memoirs of Aubrey Menen, Speaking Tiger Books, 2025