Skip to main content

Religious Sins

Book Review
Order your copy Here

There are two types of religion: one which enables us to see the divine in others and the other which is about power, bullying, self-delusion, expediency and psychological consolations.  What we usually see around us is the latter type.  Such religion destroys the genuine religion.  M P Baby’s novel, The Snake Crucified, shows us both the types with a brilliant plot. 

Chacko is a Pulaya (low caste) Roman Catholic living in Karuvankode, a primitive village in Kerala.  Though he is Catholic officially, Chacko practises the ancient religion of his caste.  He is a sorcerer and there is a snake which helps him in sorcery.  The snake reveals the truths to him.  The snake is a kind of god for him.  He does not hesitate to give the Holy Communion (the sacred bread and wine from the church) to his snake.

It is Father Sebastian Maliyekkal who assists Chacko to give the Communion to the snake.  Father Sebastian is an “oversexed” priest who enjoys sexual relationships with nuns as well as lay women.  He has a motive in assisting Chacko to fulfil his desire to give the Communion to the snake.  He will get Chacko’s help in return when he needs it. 

Father Sebastian is a popular Charismatic preacher and counsellor too.  He has led hundreds of Charismatic retreats, healed the sick, performed miracles in the name of Jesus, and counselled hundreds of people to sound health of body and mind.  But there is a devil within him.  Chacko, on the other hand, is a more honest human being.  His religion may be primitive and serpentine but his spirituality is genuine: he won’t harm anyone, he won’t do what his conscience knows is wrong. 

Sister Ajitha cannot accept Chacko’s religion.  She asks Chacko to mend his ways and be a good Christian.  She will, however, come to know more shocking secrets about Father Sebastian soon which will cost her her very life.  The plot moves to a climax of many murders.

Davis Jacob, Chacko’s son who is also a prominent journalist, along with his fiancée Nisha, is on an investigation to find out who killed his father and what led to his mother’s death.  Davis and Nisha move in and out of the narrative seamlessly bringing the various elements and characters together into a gripping narrative.

The plot is immensely captivating.  However, the novel suffers from a very serious drawback.  The language is atrocious.  There are too many grammatical and spelling mistakes and occasionally the reader is left baffled by what the sentences mean.  There are many infelicitous expressions too.  Taste a sample:

But she (Sister Ajitha) used her step strong to Father Sebastian.  She decided to resist the bond of her orbit…. He bathed in an ocean of sweat…. Face went perfect grotesque. Eyes were pools death swam in.”

A good editor would have made the novel really brilliant.


PS. The novel was given to me for reading by a colleague of mine who is a friend of the author.

Comments

  1. Dear respected sir...
    Your review on my humble work is really heartwarming. In spite of having been written in a language of mediocre quality, it finds its way directly into the hands of people like you.Recw

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...