Asia in the Raw

...Asia in the Raw Earth Below, Heaven Above: A Portrait of India By Carolyn North Strauss Scribners 180 pp $6 95 Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature", author, "Mohandas Gandhi" The amateurishness of Carolyn North Strauss' writing is the only explanation for the extraordinary contrasts between the excellent and appallingly bad passages in Earth Below, Heaven Above, between her shrewd portraits of people observed externally and her inhibited failures to project internal states of mind It also explains the book's pointlessly disjointed structure Someone-and knowing the tricks of publishers' editors I hesitate to blame the author-has subtitled Mrs Strauss' work A Portrait of India This misleading label is likely to irritate any reader who picks up the volume under the impression that it paints a picture of India at this time of crisis, after yet another war with Pakistan and yet another spurt of confidence in the Nehru dynasty In fact, it offers no comprehension at all of India as a total entity, no sense of the nation's politics, no real feeling for the society's complex structure, nor even the slightest hint that Mrs Strauss ever intended to explore any of these areas necessary to ' a portrait " What she presents m apparently semifictional form is the tale of one young and ill-informed American woman's experiences in a very limited comer of India, the campus of a Westernfinanced institute that she describes as "an oasis of culture and modern technology in a desert of teeming poverty, superstition and crowded darkness " The description is the kind of clue no professional writer would leave lying around for his critics, in one stroke Mrs Strauss reveals the bounds of her understanding and the breadth of her good nature, as well as the necessary limitations of her book Indeed, her story unconsciously exposes the atrocious arrogance of those who go to a foreign country with a sense of the superiority of the values they carry with them-not in the talk of "teeming poverty," which can be objectively observed, but m the reference to "superstition and crowded darkness" that any Victorian missionary would have approved Mrs Strauss' ethnocentric attitude dominates the whole action of Earth Below, Heaven Above, which is split into two loosely connected parts The first, "Earth Below," concerns the involvement of the anonymous heroine-like the author a visiting professor's wife who has become, out of sheer goodwill, an amateur nurse and midwife-in one of those uncelebrated tragedies that recur by the million m lands where welfare services are derisory and destitution is an accepted condition of life When the elder son of one of the servants on campus falls ill and dies in the town hospital, a series of non-lethal but even more agonizing misfortunes ensues The cost of the drugs used in the vain effort to save his life has wasted away his sister's dowry, and his pregnant wife assumes in her teens the stigma of Indian widowhood Mrs Strauss is at her best depicting m vivid detail the poverty endured by Ram Dulare's family She is at her worst attempting to convey the mounting hysteria of the white woman involved in a culture she does not understand, doing harm when she thinks to do good (If she had not taken Rudra to the hospital where expensive drugs did not save his life, his sister's dowry would not have been consumed and she at least would have been married ) Eventually the professor's wife drives herself to the point of hallucinating a vision of Death as a white-clad presence in the servant's hovel The pattern of hysterical delusion is carried into the second half of the book, "Heaven Above," a description of a visit by the heroine, her husband and some Indian friends to a Hmdu temple beside the Ganges There musicians play their ragas in celebration of Siva, "the Destroyer," following a highly ritualized tradi tion, while the heroine has her occidental hallucinations of Siva dancing before her and finally receives a revelation of excruciating triteness "That was what I had to learn from the music-that I could never see the whole thing, that I would never understand To know profoundly that I had to live, and live deeply every moment of my life, but never, never would I understand why " One does not have to go to India and write a book about it to reach such a banal conclusion, the 19th-century English essayist Walter Pater expressed the whole idea far more effectively without stirring far from Oxford Yet when Mrs Strauss pursues her natural talent for con crete description and avoids the bland abstractions of Eastern "wisdom" streamlined for Western ears, she can produce evocative passages that even Pater might have enjoyed reading and that would strike a bell of recollection in the mind of any India hand This, for example "By the headlamps of our jeep we could make out the hazy outlines of trees, which sparsely punctuated the side of the road, and the flat plains which disappeared into darkness on either side For a while we passed some solitary cyclists-grizzled men making their long way towards the morning market in the city, their cycles spilling with sacks of okra and white radishes They pedaled with slow, steady strokes, pulling their bicycles along the road, breathing puffs of steam into the cold night air But soon we left them behind also, and with the last few points of village fires in the distance behind us, we jolted into the darkness of the pitted road before us Wells of darkness closed behind us On either side of us stretched the unbroken expanses of the Ganges River plains, which are alternately flooded and dried into powdery brown dust with the seasons Now, in winter, the earth was crusted over-hard as a stone and as dry-and its pitiful covering of yellowed weed lay sharp upon it The air above was cold and rasping " That is India, Rudyard Kipling would recognize it, and so would E M Forster But much of the rest of Earth Below, Heaven Above is the kind of emotional nonsense those we once called lady writers produced in the heyday of the Raj Why have I spent so much time over what is, at best, a half-success' I have done so for two reasons First, the book is an extreme example of the kind of schizophrenic reaction Americans and Canadians as distinct from the British, who have a tradition to protect them-experience on their first contact with Asia in the raw a sharp perception of its physical reality, a rejection of its apparent indifference to suffering, combined with a grasping after its delusory spiritual pretensions Second, I am incensed that Western publishers should encourage their writers to perpetuate-merely because current Orientalist fads have made it seem profitable-the kind of sham Eastern religiosity educated Indians despise and pious Indians regard as an insulting parody of their beliefs With her talent for evocative narrative, Mrs Strauss might have written a short classic on India as authentic as Sehora Calderon de la Barca's Life in Mexico Fashion diverted her, and the result is an affectations and unsatisfying work of a kind that has become too familiar of late...