The England that he had previously only encountered through its literature now confronted him as a reality, and he developed a “migrant’s-eye” view of the center from the margins. Thus the erstwhile colonial subject came to develop his own anthropology of the culture of the colonizers. He sought to survive the medieval gloom of Oxford by making common cause with the displaced migrant minority—with the rebel enclaves of demobbed young veterans and national servicemen, Ruskin College trade unionists, and scholarship boys and girls from home and abroad. 12 So far as the dominant forms of British culture were concerned, in this context, as he put it, “What I realized, as soon as I got to Oxford, was that I could never be part of it.… I could study English literature on the page, but I could never be part of that life.” That ambivalent feeling stuck with him throughout his life, and many years later he would still say, “I don’t belong anywhere anymore. Britain is my home, but I’m not English.” 13 This, however, was far from being any simple matter of regret. As he put it when speaking at a conference on the question of identity in London in 1987, “My own sense of identity has always depended on the fact of being a migrant.… [Now] I find myself centered at last. Now that in the postmodern age you all feel so dispersed. I’ve become centered: what I thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience.… Welcome to migranthood!” 14