A Stranger in Three Worlds: Tracing Aubrey Menen's search for identity

A Stranger in Three Worlds: The Memoirs of Aubrey Menen

by Aubrey Menen

Published by Speaking Tiger

280 pages  ₹499

  The soul of humanity lies in contradictions. 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).  

With biting wit, Menen maps the universality of exclusion. The British oligarchy, for example, was “a small number of families who between them shared all the seats in Parliament, all the Offices of the Crown, all the high posts in both the universities, all the bishoprics, both archbishoprics, all other wealthy ecclesiastical positions, and all sinecures whatsoever... and as a caste system it far surpassed anything devised by the Indians... or the subtlety of the Chinese.”  

Then there’s the Jibaro nation, of Puerto Rico, whose every member “is devoted to the national task of cutting off the organs of generation of their male enemies.” He similarly writes about his Indian family, which firmly adhered to caste hierarchies and traditions, believing “the Hindus were undoubtedly the most civilised race on Earth.” The details may differ, but the impulse to dominate recurs. 

As the book’s opening line goes, “Men of all races have always sought for a convincing explanation of their own astonishing excellence, and they have frequently found what they were looking for.” It signals what’s to come — a fearless and farcical examination of pride, prejudice, and the grand delusions nations peddle. 

From the narrow lanes of London to the rain-lashed forests of Malabar and the sacred ghats of Benares, Menen identifies the shared delusion of grandeur and collective virtue. He writes in the concluding chapter: “There are no national virtues. We are alone, each one of us. If we are good, we are good ourselves. If we are bad, the virtues of others will not make us better. We cannot borrow morals. They are ours or they do not exist for us.”   

That inquiry into finding his identity goes deeper in The Space Within the Heart, as he secludes himself in a Roman quarter. He writes about the Upanishads and his experience reading them, a text, “though reverenced in the West, really not much read in India. The average Indian prefers the Bhagavad Gita, a beautiful poem in which the Lord Krishna teaches us the noble lesson that we must do our duty to society.”  

Menen peels away at himself slowly, like one unlayering a metaphorical onion: Discarding the inherited judgements, the caste labels, the expectations carved by society’s hands. What remains is his innermost self, what the Upanishads call the atman,  or as he calls it, “the space within the heart.” Yet, unlike so many spiritual memoirs, there are no epiphanies here, no cinematic awakenings. Only stillness. Through dialogue, he demonstrates his interactions with his atman:

  “‘And what do you see now?’

  ‘It is no solution to the problem.’

  ‘There is no solution in other people at all. You find it in yourself, or nowhere.’”

  The Space Within the Heart circ­les, meanders, sinks, and surfaces — each fragment peeling back another layer of Menen’s life — his first love, a mother’s disturbing affection, his journey through the Catholic faith. Woven into these are passing conversations and cerebral reflections, like cigarette smoke curling around a dinner table, wry recollections of his contemporaries, from V P Menon to Maynard Keynes. 

Read side by side, these autobiographies map a mind in flux, refusing to belong, to settle, to perform. While Dead Man in the Silver Market is a sharp satire about the hypocrisies of caste, empire, and inherited pride, The Space Within the Heart asks who we are without the scaffolding of identity. A rare vulnerability and clarity of thought marks both works. Both are written with the conviction of someone who knows that to be honest is to be precise. 

We live in accelerating times: Nationalism rising on the back of insecurity, our lives fragmented by screens and schedules, our thoughts outsourced to algorithms. We scroll, consume, and compete, barely stopping to breathe. In such times, Menen’s writing urges one to step back, reevaluate priorities, embrace our contradictions, and find a space uncolonised by noise: The space within the heart. 

The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. 

Instagram/X: aroomofwords