The art of 'literary journalism'

The latest book on the late Dom Moraes’ writings, Dom Moraes: Where Some Things Are Remembered: Profiles and Conversations, carries a blurb by Amitav Ghosh, who declares Moraes the “greatest prose stylist”. Superlatives aside, there is a curious phrase in the promotional material supplied by the publisher; it describes the book as a collection of the “finest literary journalism”. Whether or not Moraes is the finest, there cannot be a more apt phrase than “literary journalism” to describe the essays collected in this book. 

Moraes wrote striking profiles of the people he met but he staked his own identity in those pieces. This is what makes his writing, his journalism, so exquisite. At the end of the book, we realise we’ve read a profile of Mr Moraes as much as we have read profiles of Indira Gandhi or Lalu Prasad Yadav. This is also the difference between the journalism now — both objective and sensationalist — and the journalism Mr Moraes practised. There is no space for the vulnerability of the reporter in the former, and Mr Moraes’ own vulnerability is at the centre of his writing. Sarayu Srivatsa, the editor of this book, writes that Mr Moraes had told a journalist that “[H]e was a stranger to the country, was an outsider” while she was “a complete insider” as they were promoting their co-written book Out of God’s Oven. Mr Moraes’ self-fashioning of himself as the outsider is the hallmark of his writing but there is something more than this projection of his personality. He did not simply ask how much he is an outsider to India, but how much of an outsider is India to itself? The portraits of his father, Frank Moraes, and his profile of Jag Pravesh Chandra, explain this. 

Frank Moraes was one among the first two Indians to become the assistant editor in the British-owned Times of India. Neither of them were allowed to access the same privileges of “ingestion and excretion”: they were not invited to lunches or given keys to the lavatory that the English editors used. But the staff wanted an end to this and the management apologised. “My father never forgot this as long as he lived,” writes Moraes fils. When Frank became the Indian editor of the same paper after the British company was sold to the new Indian proprietor, Dalmia, they met for lunch but ate on separate utensils, one earthenware and the other silver. The former was then broken lest Frank polluted Dalmia’s caste. “The incident with Dalmia was another incident he never forgot. It was the first indication he had of what independent India might turn out to be like.” 

Mr Moraes turned personal anecdotes about his father into the larger story of transformation from colonial power to independent nation, but one that transformed racial prejudice into caste prejudice. The portraits of those who gain power in the independent nation, from important journalist-proprietors like R P Goenka, or politicians like Indira Gandhi, offer a bleak vision. But in his profile of Jag Pravesh Chandra he saw some hope of a working democracy. Chandra believed that India can only be understood by those who have lived here. This is naive provincialism. “What he meant by Indian did not exclude Muslims or other minorities, but it excluded me. He felt affectionate towards me, but amused: exactly the way I did, the other way around.”

Another quality of Moraes’ own writing is his ability to bring out the tragedy of power and life. The last house that his father lived in as “the only monument left to my father’s loneliness”; they met like “furtive lovers, at restaurants or hotels”; Indira Gandhi, having lost the election, is “the small, famous figure in a pastel saree, once ruler of the very dust churned up by these buses”. The tragic is never too far away from the comic, and Moraes shines here as well. When Mrs Ali from the Congress explains how great the party has been for her constituency, Badayun Zilla, the details don’t hold up. She says, “It is a Muslim village...my parents and grandparents were all born there and they had always done a lot of good work for the village… It is constantly flooded in the monsoon, it has no railway connection, no schools, no industries.” The quote ends and Moraes quipped, “I wanted to inquire about the good work her ancestors had done, but forebore.” Another striking quality of his writing are his similes, almost always drawn from poetry. Jag Pravesh Chandra is “Whitman’s sea captain”, he grabs Moraes’ arm “like a cousin of the Ancient Mariner”. There is something quintessentially Moraesian about the similes, possible because of his own vocation as a poet.      

Describing the room he would meet Indira Gandhi to interview her for her book, he wrote, “I had the strange sense that I was not in the room at all, but an observer peering down a telescope from some chilly star.” It is not just a telescope that determines the quality of the observation but the eye that looks through it, and Moraes had the finest journalistic eye, matched in equal measure by his hold over his pen.

Dom Moraes:

Where Some Things Are Remembered: Profiles and Conversations

Sarayu Srivatsa

Speaking Tiger; Pages 188; Price: Rs 599

 

The reviewer is a research scholar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. He tweets at @souradeeproy19.