Conundrum resolved: The story of James and Jan Morris

Fakir S. Aijazuddin This open space in your newspaper should not become a cemetery. Yet, persons whose lives deserve celebration are passing on with such frequency nowadays that a tribute to them here is unavoidable. Hence, another piece,  in memoriam .
This is for the Raj historian Jan Morris, who died on 20 November 2020. Jan Morris led a full life, in fact two lives, for midway, at the age of forty-six, in 1972, James Morris changed gender. He recounted the experience of that improbable transformation in a searingly frank book  Conundrum  (1974). He was put to sleep as a man in a hospital room in Casablanca, and woke up as a woman. The next forty-eight years were spent as Jan Morris.   Initially, James Morris was married to Elizabeth. They shared five children. He served in the British army, studied at Oxford and then achieved distinction as a journalist. In 1953, he pre-empted his colleagues by breaking the news of the ascent of Mount Everest. That luck continued. During the Suez crisis of 1956, he exposed the secret collusion between the British, the French and the Israeli governments to invade Egypt. In 1982, Morris saw more clearly than Mrs Margaret Thatcher the sterility of the Falklands War, her imperial claim to islands 8,000 miles away from mainland Britain. It was the jingoistic opposite, the very antithesis of  Pax Britannica , Jan Morris’s expansive trilogy on the British raj.
 Morris authored over forty books, from  Coast to Coast  (1956) to  Thinking Again  (2020). One manuscript –  Allegorizings –  lies with Morris’ publisher, to be printed now that she is dead. Morris, although labelled as a ‘travel writer’, preferred to be remembered as a chronicler of ‘people and places’. She loved cities with an almost physical passion. Her book on her alma mater  Oxford  – the city of dreaming spires – is at par with Evelyn Waugh’s evocation of that stone crucible of learning in his novel  Brideshead Revisited .  Her tribute to Venice – that city awash with canals – is a modern rival to John Ruskin’s  The Stones of Venice , published a century earlier.
Morris as James in his  Venice  (1960) admitted a young man’s infatuation with Venice – ‘the loveliest city in the world, only asking to be admired’ by him, ‘a writer in the full powers of young maturity, strong in physique, eager in passion.’ Twenty years later, Morris, this time as Jan, returned to Venice to write  The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage  (1980). She draped it with an imperial mantle: ‘Rome apart, theirs was the first and the longest-lived of the European overseas empires.’    Morris visited almost every major city in the world; her inimitable essays on each became her  Journeys  (1984). She visited Pakistan, certainly once. She refers to the ‘mammoth hangar built at Karachi in 1930 to house the doomed airship R101’; the Holy Trinity church (now the Anglican cathedral), built in 1855 to replace the temporary ‘Divine Shed’; and ‘the delightful Frere Hall, a display of Gothic pinnacles, buttresses and stained glass…a Victorian monstrosity.’