India, Oct. 11 -- While books by writers such as EM Forster and Rudyard Kipling continue to find readers, others who were once popular or controversial have drifted to the fringes of public attention. JR Ackerley, Nirad C Chaudhuri and Aubrey Menen are in the latter category.Their writings are so rooted in their eras that their concerns and characterisations may seem wayward to contemporary readers. The gaze with which they describe India and its people can occasionally be Orientalist. And yet, their being relics of bygone times makes them fascinating. Born in London in 1912 to an Indian father and Irish mother, Aubrey Menen went to college in the UK and subsequently moved to Italy, where he became a full-time writer. He converted to Catholicism and was later inspired by the Upanishads to discover his "true self". Speaking Tiger Books has now compiled two of Aubrey Menen's memoirs, Dead Man in the Silver Market (1953) and The Space Within the Heart (1970), into an omnibus edition titled A Stranger in Three Worlds. The former work pokes holes in patriotism and its pretensions, whether of the English, the Indians or others.Menen infuses the weightiest of issues with irony, resulting in several laugh-out-loud moments. He mocks ideas of propriety by highlighting how they differ across regions. Consider this example from Malabar: "She [his paternal grandmother] rarely spoke to anyone who was not of her own social station and she received them formally: that is to say, with her breasts completely bare. in her view, a wife who dressed herself above her waist could only be aiming at adultery." However, when divergent worldviews interact, they could equally well result in consensus rather than conflict, as Menen demonstrates in an essay on the last nabob in India. He writes about a swimming pool that was reserved for Europeans. Even as the English defended closing it off to Indians, the latter were sympathetic to the decision. They would not have entered the pool anyway, fearing caste pollution. The synergy of racism and casteism kept everyone satisfied. Menen describes the situation thus: "All told, the pool performed its function - which was to inflame the Englishman's racial pride while cooling his skin - without causing much bad blood." Menen is at his best in airy, satirical reflections. But when it comes to matters more grave, his writing can falter. Consider the essay The Dead Man in the Silver Market, where he recounts witnessing a British soldier killing an Indian civilian in broad daylight and later meeting him at a party. One might expect such an incident to provoke biting censure. Menen offers banal commentary. While reflecting on morality, he cites what we might now consider a truism: that most people make judgements from the standpoint of the group they belong to rather than from objective principles. To illustrate this moral relativism, he shares a hypothetical example: "We cannot tell if a Masai tribesman is a good fellow or not. If he cuts off the hands of a rival tribe and piles them in a triumphal heap, we can say it is not a thing we would do ourselves, but we are quite open to the suspicion that if we were Masai, we might." Ascribing this behaviour to the Masai, even if in a thought experiment, is unwarranted, more so when he could have resorted to real-world examples. Belgian colonialists in what they called the Congo Free State severed the hands of workers if they did not meet rubber collection quotas. This is not to castigate Menen. It is easy to invoke contemporary ideals and pontificate in retrospect, but much harder to accurately trace the contours of the world one lives in. In fact, as I read the book, I felt a growing fondness and empathy for him. Given how others defined him according to their preconceptions - the Pope once told him he was Indian rather than English - his preoccupation with finding one's true self is understandable. This could not have been easy for someone at the intersection of many identities in a world that preferred neat categories and labels. It would have been more admirable, however, if he had extended the same sympathy to others, as he did to himself....