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BOOK
REVIEW
A cynical,
idealistic melange
Out of God's Oven:
Travels in a Fractured Land, by Dom Moraes
and Sarayu Srivatsa
Reviewed by Jason Overdorf
 Honesty, they say, is its own reward. And it's a
good thing, too, because it rarely wins many friends. In
his latest book on India, Out of God's Oven, poet
and journalist Dom Moraes wields candor like a bludgeon,
confessing at the outset: "In 1980, [my return to India]
had sounded like a prison sentence ... I sympathized
with the poor, but too many of them existed. India had
the most brutally stupid middle class in the world."
Critics from that disparaged group have
responded in kind, taking Moraes to task for his
pessimism, his anglophilia and, generally, for writing
like a foreigner. The small praise given Out of God's
Oven has been parceled out to his co-writer Sarayu
Srivatsa, a woman whose relationship with "home" is less
ambivalent. But it is a mistake to accept either
writer's pose - charitable ingenue or cantankerous snob
- too readily. These are devices, and terrific ones, for
examining what the writers refer to as "terrible
landmarks in Indian history". The pairing of the cynic
and the optimist gives these "travels in a fractured
land" a dramatic urgency, as grim event after grim event
threatens, by education, to make the lark more and more
like the owl.
The book's title, which derives
from a story Srivatsa's grandmother told her to explain
India's oppressive caste system, captures the essence of
that struggle between innocence and experience. The
first men the gods made were burned dark brown in the
gods' hot clay oven, grandmother says. They became the
Shudra, the pariah. Once the gods perfected the recipe,
they made the beautiful, fair Brahmin. If I am a
Brahmin, the young Srivatsa asks her grandmother, then
why am I so dark? Just as Moraes' brutal sincerity is a
mask for a great love, as emerges in his portraits of
his many friends, Srivatsa's sunny optimism is a
terrific foil, also, for cutting sarcasm.
Based
on six years of nearly constant travel, Out of God's
Oven captures the issues gripping contemporary India
more completely than recent books with comparable
agendas (Mark Tully's India in Slow Motion and
William Dalrymple's Age of Kali come to mind).
The book neither panders to the foreigner's obsessions
nor caters to his ignorance. At the same time, Moraes
and Srivatsa both "write like foreigners" to the extent
that - unlike too many Indian journalists - they never
neglect to provide the background necessary to
understand the events they describe. But where a foreign
correspondent like myself might be content muckraking
(India is corrupt! Hindus kill Muslims!), they have the
luxury of being able to go beyond sanctimonious outrage
to more complex analysis.
In a book of
remarkable scope, the two writers address many of the
seminal events of Indian history of the past three
decades, ranging from riots by Dalits (formerly
untouchables) in Bombay, to the cooperative movement
that empowered village women by granting them control
over the marketing of the fruit of their labors, to the
battle of communist Naxalites with Bihar's upper-caste
landlords, to the various tragedies caused by an
enduring religious mania. Though the timing of its
release prompted publishers to market Out of God's
Oven as a prelude to the deadly Gujarat riots, it is
far more than an investigation of the persecution of
Indian Muslims or Hindu fundamentalism.
Despite
those numerous strengths, however, the book suffers from
an over-reliance on informants who share the
sensibilities and background of the authors. These
interviews - spirited exchanges between the like-minded,
to be sure - generate some terrific lines: "An Indian
was not part of a team; he was part of a mob"; "The
greatest freedom we have received from Independence [was
the] freedom to talk"; "Corruption is an offshoot of
hypocrisy, the habit of lying to oneself"; "Politics is
the only profession where you do not need any
qualifications." But the eloquent expression of
consensus does not result in many new insights about the
others: the fundamentalist thugs, the devoutly
religious, the desperately poor.
Nevertheless,
though it's peopled with too many talkers and not enough
actors, Out of God's Oven is not completely
without heroes: a teacher at a convent school combating
the messages of religious hatred her students absorb
from their parents; a 72-year-old writer who has lived
among the poorest villagers of North Bengal, fighting
their causes for 25 years; a man who takes in
illegitimate children, mad and destitute women. But the
overall feeling is that India has just too many
tragedies. "I am tired, so tired," says one of these
good souls. "If I had an alternative, do you think I
would be doing this? Can I just leave everything and run
away? They have no one else. So I continue. I have no
choice. And I am so tired."
This is not the
familiar quirky, mystical India that churns along, in
chaos, yes, but never in collapse. It's a vision of a
lighted bomb, the fuse sputtering fast. And the writers
offer no solution, which means that in its darkest
moments, the book seems to echo the novelist who tells
Moraes: "I couldn't help you much. I think as you ask
questions about India, you will find many people like
me, who will point out what is wrong. That is, of
course, glaringly clear. But I don't think anybody will
be able to point out a way to make it right. If he
could, he would be a leader, and India's tragedy is that
it has none."
Out of God's Oven: Travels
in a Fractured Land, by Dom Moraes and Sarayu
Srivatsa, Penguin Books, December 2002. ISBN:
0-670-04943-3. Price: US$9.43. 400 pages.
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