Book Review: Out of God’s Oven - Travels in a Fractured Land

Out of God’s Oven was first released way back in 2002 and a revised and updated edition was published in 2023. The book has been written by Dom Moraes (who passed away in 2004) and Sarayu Srivatsa. Dom, a much-acclaimed writer and poet of Goan descent, hardly needs any introduction and his talent for writing needs no endorsement beyond the many paeans that have already been sung in his praise. His memoirs – My Son’s Father, Gone Away and Never at Home – make for an interesting read. Sarayu, who has co-written this book with Dom, is a former professor of architecture at the Bombay University, has authored both fiction and non-fiction, and one of her earliest books – Where the Streets Lead – is on our must-reads list.

According to the publisher’s note, Out of God’s Oven is ‘one of the most prescient books published in India in decades,’ and is an essential read in order to understand why the country is ‘at the edge of a precipice almost eight decades after it began its experiment with democracy.’ ‘In this perceptive and provocative study of Indian society, the authors examine how, even after years of democracy, India has remained a deeply divided nation, a ‘fractured land’ where, in addition to the old inequities of caste, class and gender, there are new challenges posed by the rise of both religious and market fundamentalism,’ it says.

In the preface to the 2023 edition of the book, Srivatsa tells us the book’s title comes from a story which her grandmother once told her, in which God makes clay men and puts them in a kiln to bake them to life. Depending on how they turn out, these men are allocated a particular caste; the one who’s baked to perfection gets to be a Brahmin, the one who comes out burnt becomes a Shudra, and so on. ‘During our travels for this book between 1996 and 2001, Dom and I met a large variety of people [from all walks of life] and everywhere we found evidence of a deeply divided society, a society where modernity did not extend to civic life, to interpersonal relationships,’ she says, adding that nothing much changed even in the third decade of the 21st century, with the country still being guided by old-fashioned ideas of ‘purity’ and righteousness. ‘The only difference is that bigotry and communal hate, which earlier lived in the shadows, has now been legitimised and is displayed proudly and viciously,’ says Srivatsa.

Across 450 pages, there are eight chapters, four each from Dom and Sarayu. Each chapter comprises anywhere between one to five stories, most of which are based on the authors’ travels across the country, travels across, as the title says, ‘a fractured land.’ This isn’t a conventional travel book though. In fact, it’s hard to pigeonhole the book in any particular or any specific category – it is, instead, its own thing, a work of brilliance and an eclectic mix of journalism, socio-political discourse that’s sometimes caustic and at other times detached, succinct observations on how India functions within its unique framework of caste and religion, and sharp-eyed commentary on the lives of ordinary Indians across its extraordinary cities.

During the course of their travels, the authors speak an impossibly diverse range of people – sociologists, politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists, artists, poets, publishers, filmmakers, economists, professors, writers, godmen and others. And with the conversations that ensue, what emerges is a patchwork quilt of images of the country, many familiar, some disturbing, yet others surprising. It’s also an oral history of sorts – an oral history of India, and the thousand stories behind how it functions. The stories the authors find in the many different ‘Indias’ that exist within India; from temple-town Thanjavur to Ahmedabad and memories of 2002, from the broad, tree-lined avenues of Delhi to the salty, sweaty streets of seaside Mumbai and from the bhadralok’s Calcutta to Patna, Bhopal, Chandigarh and Chennai.

Notably, wherever he goes, Dom is the perennial outsider. He writes about India as an outsider, as someone who’s almost not an Indian himself. After travelling across the country for a year, he says he was convinced there are three Indias. ‘One was found in the cities and I disliked it. One was quite separate, found in the villages. I pitied it and wanted to love it, but it puzzled me. The third India no longer existed and perhaps never had, but might have been beautiful if and when it did. But I still didn’t feel I belonged to any of them,’ says Dom, who, in his writing, seems to be forever saddled with a colonial mindset – something he was never able to let go of. For what it’s worth, we’ll note here that he was a vocal critic of the Indian army’s takeover of Goa when the Portuguese were sent packing in the early-1960s, and by his own admission he disliked most urban Indians he ever met. This, he used to say, was because they were obsessed with money and success, suffered from a false sense of importance and boasted about themselves and about India. Make what you will of that, but his regressive notions of India and his anti-India/anti-Indian bias does permeate the pages of this book – at least the chapters that Dom has written – and this has an ‘arrogant brown sahib’ whiff about it that’s unpleasant.

Thankfully, Sarayu seems to have no such hangups about the country and takes a much more measured approach in her writing, which is stylistically different from Dom’s but equally competent. In fact, she seems to have a much better and a more real ‘connect’ with the country and its people and subsequently, in some ways, anchors the book with the chapters she has written. This is also because her character sketches, based on the places she visits and the people she meets during the course of her travels, are more real – more human – than Dom’s, which are sometimes reduced to mere caricatures, his own personal interpretations of the real person.

To sum up, despite a few hiccups this is an absolutely outstanding piece of work – one doesn’t come across a book like Out of God’s Oven every day. At the peak of their writing powers when they wrote this book, Dom and Sarayu have put together an exceptional treatise on India and the mysterious ways in which it works. Or, sometimes, doesn’t. The meetings with people and the conversations on which the book is based are an intriguing mix of the profound, the ordinary and the banal (which is we suppose how it must be for any 450-page book), but the pace is even, the tone is consistent and, above all, the authors are able to always keep it interesting. Highly recommended.

Out of God’s Oven is available on Amazon