India: A Million Mutinies Now - pg. 159

In the colonial city they were further isolated by their language; and they were to live on the streets until they died out. The idea came to me, when I was quite young, seeing those destitutes, that we were people with no one to appeal to. We had been transported out of the abjectness of India, and were without representation. The idea of external enemy wasn't enough to explain what had happened to us. I found myself at an early age looking inwards, and wondering whatever the culture - the difficult but personal religion, the taboos, the social ideas - which in one way supported and enriched some of us, and gave us solidity, wasn't perhaps the very thing that had exposed us to defeat.