Skip to main content

Moral Dilemmas in a metaphorical Black Hole

Dr Jose Maliekal SDB
 

Dr Jose Maliekal SDB is a thinker, professor of philosophy, social activist and a Catholic priest. He has written a book, Standstill Utopias, based on his doctoral thesis. His observations on reality tend to be keen and profound. Hence his views on my writings are of much significance to me personally. He has been magnanimous with his review of my novel, Black Hole and I am thrilled to present the review below. 
*****

Literature is an introduction to where and how we live and the challenges that face our time and society. In many ways, literature is an introduction to who we are, or ought to be, as people. It helps us to be ‘critical insiders” to borrow a leaf from U.R. Ananthamurthy, a doyen of Indian literature (Kunal Ray, The Purpose of Literature, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-purpose-of-literature/article36167231.ece). Being a critical insider would mean not being a spectator to all what is going on around us. As human beings, we are just not spectators, but players in the game of reality and its interpreters.

While going through the short but insightfully crafted novel, Black Hole, written by Tomichan Matheikal, I found myself coming face to face with the manifold challenges that face our time and society, especially in the socio-political and the economic field where there is a heady mix of politics and religion, that too in an unholy nexus.

From the metamorphosis of the patriot Kailashputar, into Kailas Baba, who found himself becoming the founder of the Devlok Ashram, and the story of the expansion of the Ashram, into a mammoth commercial venture, in tandem with the struggles of India, to free herself from the colonial yoke, a tragicomedy unfolds.

The author, wielding his pen, with ease and poise, born out of his vast erudition of literature, philosophy and history, through masterly strokes of frame tales, paints for us portraits of the protagonist, the many deuteragonists and the tritagonists in the unfolding drama. He weaves a tapestry of silhouettes of persons in moral dilemmas, on the one hand and unscrupulousness of conscience, on the other, and the saga being unveiled, veering itself into a black hole, caving inward, under its own weight.

Only that the black hole is not the just the timespace of Delhi alone, the land of self-exile of the young Ishan Salman, fugitive from himself, and from Fr Joseph, his benefactor-antagonist, emblematic of the mushrooming godmen/women and soothsayers of our motherland. The black hole is the everydayness, where we find ourselves facing our own Agniparikshas and our own Kurukshetras, searching for footholds, without realizing that “We live in an administered world” (Theodore Adorno), of palace intrigues, where we are mere pawns and puppets. And where we embrace “Religion, the opium of the people” (Karl Marx).

Earlier in my carrier, as a social activist and teacher of philosophy, moving along with a dance troupe, in the villages of East Godavari in Andhra Pradesh, conscientizing people on socio-economic evils, we were confronted by the ubiquitous village drunk, with one question, “All this farce, you are into and about, is it about Bhukti (struggle for survival and   fulfilment of material needs) and Bhakti (devotion)?

This tension between Bhukti and Bhakti runs throughout the life of the nation. It accounts for the imprisonment of Ishan Salman Panikkar, the rapist who did not rape, Salman Lahiri, the comedian, who did not crack a joke and Fr Stan Rosario, the terrorist of compassion. At play here is the Derridean spectre of the Invisible-Visible enemy of the terrorist, an essential recipe for the imaginary of the enemy construction, under the Fascist metanarrative rubric of the Hidnurahtra.

Taking a cue from Irwing Howe, who has delved into the character of novels, I consider Black Hole to be standing at the intersections of the political and the historical. Any novel, worth its name, has to evoke a discourse of politics of representation and politics of recognition. And I presume, Black Hole would be no exception. And I dream that it would join the ranks of Mahasweta Devi’s renowned short story, Draupadi, Bama’s Karukku, Sukirtharani’s poems (Ray, The Purpose of Literature) and Perumal Murugan’s Madhorubhagan, finding themselves in and out of academic syllabi and their authors being silenced, for like them, it smells of life, in flesh and blood. Life, with its bare crudity and nakedness, is always disruptive, lending itself to reversals, resisting co-optive hegemonization.

We could and should expect from the thought-leader/public intellectual novelist, that is Tomichan Matheikal, even more of his creations, of the genre of the Homo Dialecticus (Human, the Resister). 

***


An interview of mine with Dr Maliekal can be read here: Interview with a Missionary

Black Hole e-book is available exclusively here.

The paperback is available exclusively here


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia] One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion . A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.  That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How...

Water as Weapon

A scene from Kerala The theme chosen for their monthly blog hop by friends Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed is water, particularly because March 22 is World Water Day. It is of vital importance to discuss the global water crisis because as the motto of Delhi Jal Board says: Jal hi Jeevan hai , Water is Life . The crisis is only going to become more and more acute as we move on. With a global population clocking 8.5 billion by 2030, the demand for fresh water will rise sharply, especially in urban areas. The climate change, particularly rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and erratic rainfall patterns, will add significantly to the problem. Ground water is getting depleted in many countries. Consequently, water is likely to be a strategic asset in the near future. Powerful individuals, corporations, and nations may use it as a weapon in several ways. Rivers can be blocked with dams and water supply to neighbouring nations can be manipulated. Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam o...

Broligarchy

A page from Time Broligarchy is a new word I learnt from the latest issue of the Time magazine one of whose lead stories is titled ‘ American Broligarchy ’. Wikipedia teaches me that ‘broligarchy’ is “a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men (occupying leadership roles in the tech companies and tech-enabled businesses).” The Time article informs us that Trump’s greatest “bros” are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three men who were given the most prominent seats, ahead of Cabinet members, at Trump’s Presidential inauguration. These wealthy businessmen play crucial roles in Trump’s way of governing America. They pump a lot of unregulated money into politics for their own selfish reasons. A menacing outcome is an unhealthy (for the public) expansion of presidential power with fewer checks on the Congress. The Time laments that this “would be a recipe for more corruption under an...

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

Love Affair of Pearl Spot

AI-generated I am not fond of fish. Fish doesn’t taste like fish, that’s the reason. We get adulterated fish most of the time. In Kerala, my state, traders are reported to use formalin for preserving the freshness of fish. Formalin is used for preserving dead bodies by embalming. You will find me in a fish stall once in a while, though. My cats want fish occasionally, that’s why. Not that they are particularly fond of it. For a change from the regular pellets and packaged wet foods, all delivered promptly by Amazon. Even cats love a change. Most of the time, the entire fish that I buy is consumed by my cats. So much so, Maggie and I have come to think that fish is cat food, not human food. People may have different reasons for not eating any particular food. One of the most endearing reasons I heard recently is that fish is a symbol of the voiceless. People commit atrocities on fish, this person said [I forget who – I read it a couple of weeks back on Magzter]. They suffocate it ...