Aubrey Menen's search for identity

The soul of humanity lies in contradictions.

- AMRITESH MUKHERJEE

We are as charged with kindness as beset with cruelty, as quick to judge as yearning to be heard, and as mindless in existence as reflective in every moment.

Aubrey Menen, the British writer whose satirical retelling of the Ramayana, Rama Retold was banned in India in 1955, was a man who knew how to capture those contradictions. It feels fitting, then, that his two autobiographies, republished recently, have polar perspectives on identity and nationality. Or perhaps, as Menen might say with a wink, it's all part of the fun.

The first, Dead Man In the Silver Market, scans the political and cultural theatre of his lineage, exposing the vanity of national pride and the illusion of inherited superiority. In contrast, The Space Within the Heart, written in 1970, withdraws into stillness, inspired by the Upanishads, to interrogate the meaning of existence itself. One looks externally. The other excavates and excavates until there's nothing left.

Published in 1953, Dead Man in The Silver Market begins as an excavation of Menen's mixed heritage: Born to a Kerala Nair father and an Irish nurse mother, a "Eurasian." As he wades through memories of caste and empire, he begins to see the overlap between cultures that claim to be irreconcilable. Whether it's his orthodox Nair grandmother or his English headmaster, both want him to set an example. Both want him to live up to the ideal specimen (whether as a Nair descendant or a British kid).