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Czeslaw Milosz: Lest we forget
Shastri Ramachandaran

HE was a poet, a witness, ever in exile. And exile is a recurring theme in his vast repertoire of works-poetry, novels and essays-that abound in the autobiographical. Till his passage into eternal exile, on August 14 at the age of 93, Czeslaw Milosz, the Lithuanian-Polish writer, was both conscience and witness to a tumultuous century where he survived the horrors of both Nazism and Stalinism. Yet he was distrusted by communists as well as anti-communists, Catholics as well as atheists, for he had been all this, but much more too-a liberal in an illiberal world, an exile in an ethno-centric world, where memory, love, beauty and humaneness were a passionate preoccupation.

The best known work of Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980, is The Captive Mind, published in 1953, some two years after he defected from his native Poland where he worked for the radio and later in the diplomatic service.

In a way, the acclaim the book received was only to be expected, coming as it did from an East European who had served and then fled his country to seek refuge in the West, first Paris and then the USA; and the book was a devastating indictment of the totalitarian ideology.

However, to me, the most unforgettable work of Milosz, whom the 1987 Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky described as "perhaps the greatest poet of our time", is his autobiographical novel Native Realm: A Search for Self Definition published in 1958. For nothing torments the exile as much as his quest for identity, and recognition and acceptance of the identity for cultural membership in society.

To be in exile is to be homeless, stateless and bereft of a cultural refuge where emotion can find root.

The human condition of exile and loss/search of identity is the dominant metaphor of our times-be it the Jews who suffered the Holocaust, the Palestinians who are banished from their homeland, the native Indians who have been coercively "secularised" on the American continent or, nearer home, the Muslims of Modi's Gujarat who are refugees in their own country.

The diasporic communities that have left or been forced to leave their native land and adopt another country-be it for political or economic reasons-are akin to the once reviled and persecuted Jews.

In a study on ethnicity in Britain in the mid-1990s, an Oxford don had dubbed Asians as "Jews" with a "Jewish" future. With anti-Semitism having to be repressed for reasons of political correctness, there is a transfer of contempt from the Jews to Asians, Blacks and, of course "Islam"—where a religion and nation are made out to be one and the same.

Any reflection on the condition of exile and the crisis of identity of vast sections of humanity brings to mind what Milosz wrote about the Jews in his Native Realm: A relatively recent acquisition was the idea of a Jew as a man who dresses, eats, and lives like everyone else, but who uses a different language. The hostility toward him doubtless involved a resentment at the breaking of caste barriers: he violated the code that everyone ought to "know his place".

Some 45 years after he observed this scorching truth about our "civilisation", there are more of these new "Jews" condemned to a "Jewish future", who are denied their identity and dignity of self, with no hope of home or homeland.

His metaphor has particular resonance in India and recalls to mind the first poem Milosz wrote in English, in 1969, To Raja Rao, the author best known for his The Serpent and The Rope.

Raja, I wish I knew the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept the place I was in

in the one I longed for freedom,

It is a fitting epitaph for the world that has survived Czeslaw Milosz.

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