Book Review
Title: A Thousand Cuts: An innocent
question and deadly answers
Author: T J Joseph
Translator: Nandakumar K
Having read the Malayalam original of this book, I
turned to my mobile phone to catch up with the latest news. The first headline
that Google gave me is: Darul
Huda Islamic University comes out against Literature Festival in Kerala.
This book is written by a college professor whose palm was chopped off with a
hatchet in 2010 by a group of young Muslim terrorists. He was attacked brutally
while he was returning from Sunday church service. He was stabbed in many
places and some of the wounds were near-fatal. His palm was chopped off and
thrown away.
This book, written originally in
Malayalam, tells us why the professor was attacked so inhumanly and how it
changed his life quite radically.
What provoked the terrorists was a
particular question that the professor had set in the Malayalam question paper
for the undergraduates of his college. It was an internal exam and there was no
reason why the question paper should have drawn any outsider’s attention. A
particular Muslim student, a girl, seemed to be offended by the use of the name
‘Muhamad’ in the question. It was a question meant for checking the students’ knowledge
of punctuations. Hence it was a dialogue in which every imaginable punctation
mark appears. It happened to be a dialogue between God and a Muhamad. The
conversation was taken from a book prescribed by the university for the students.
But the original conversation is between God and a lunatic. Professor Joseph
changed the word lunatic to Muhamad since the God in the dialogue was specified
as Allah and the dialogue employed Islamic lingo.
The girl whose religious sentiment
was hurt thought that the professor was insulting her community’s prophet by
using his name. Religious sentiments are the most fragile things in the world
nowadays. It appears that they are just waiting to be hurt. Even education
doesn’t take away that fragility from the minds of certain people.
The girl didn’t mean to bring any
harm to the prof, of course. The book never blames her. In fact, Professor
Joseph goes out of his way to exonerate her. Some extreme elements in her
community, criminals in religious garbs, took up the mission of redeeming the
honour of their prophet. The question remains how such elements came to know about
a minor question in an internal examination of a particular college in the
city.
The answer is obvious: hurts to religious
sentiments are far too contagious.
In some religious communities they
are more contagious than in others, that’s the only difference.
And so the entire community in
question rose up to protect the honour of their wounded prophet. There were
rallies and protest marches and hate speeches which ended in a fatwa. Fatwa in
Kerala? Is this an Islamic state? Prof Joseph wondered.
He would soon have a lot more things
to wonder about.
His management which consisted mostly
of Catholic priests turned out to be much more brutal than the terrorists. Instead
of defending him, they asked him to go into hiding.
They could have defended him easily.
He had explained to them the details regarding the question which was meant to
be a humorous dialogue between God and an inane believer.
Would I have used that conversation
in a question paper? I asked myself as I was reading Prof Joseph’s reasons some
of which sounded perfectly rational. The answer that rose from the depth of my
heart was: No, I wouldn’t use such a dialogue. Because I know that most
religious people have neither common sense nor a sense of humour to absorb such
pokes and nudges. It is best to leave religion out of academics altogether.
Religion should be confined to private prayer rooms and public places of
worship. It should never be brought out anywhere else – not even to the
streets, let alone schools and colleges.
Prof Joesph did make a mistake. But
the price he paid for that rather unwitting mistake was never justified. What
his management did to him was worse still. The book is a narrative about all
these, mostly about the terrible and terrifying atrocities perpetrated by his
own church on the prof. The bishop of the diocese to which the college belongs
and the entire clerical administration colluded with the Islamic bigots and the
corrupt police to ensure that the prof was projected as the villain of the
entire episode. The intention was to save the church from all the possible
fallout of this volatile situation. Instead of making the entire management
look like anti-Muslim, make one man the villain – scapegoat, in fact.
The management suspended Prof Joseph
first. When the terrorists were not chuffed with that and they chopped off his
right palm and inflicted severe injuries all over his body, the management
dismissed him from the post so that he wouldn’t even be eligible for his
retirement benefits which he would have got soon. When the man needed support
the most, he was abandoned completely by his own management which was very
religious.
The professor’s wife committed
suicide eventually out of depression. The most painful cut for him out of all
the thousand cuts.
The first part of the book, consisting
of over 300 pages, reads like a suspense thriller. The first hundred pages tell
us how he became a fugitive, running away from the police, because that’s what
his management had suggested. Then comes his surrender to the police and how
the police converted that surrender into a risky capture of a runaway criminal.
How farcical can tragedy be, you will wonder many times as you read these
pages. And there’s much black humour in Joseph’s writing. There’s more bathos
than pathos. There’s irony aplenty. And a lot of paradoxes too.
Part two, which tells about the
author’s childhood and youth, is quite short and not as interesting. This part
is meant to round off the autobiography since that is what the book is supposed
to be. His is a very ordinary childhood and youth. The concluding pages bring
the terror of the initial pages and the present life of the professor together
into an appropriate conclusion.
At the end, you the reader will be
left with the question: who are the real villains in the professor’s life – the
terrorists of another religion or the priests of his own religion. As I was
pondering on that question, Google hurled the headline to my face: Darul
Huda Islamic University comes out against Literature Festival in Kerala. I’m
still pondering: who are the villains?
There are a lot of benevolent people
in every religion as the author makes it clear in the book. A few Catholic
priests extended support and consolation to the professor in spite of the official
stand of the church. The ultimate tragedy in religion is that the number of good
people in it is extremely small.
The Malayalm version which I read |
xZx
Oh, don't get me started on organized religion. The book sounds harrowing. It's an important story.
ReplyDeleteIt is a disturbing book, no doubt. But the author has mellowed down the darkness.
DeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteA harrowing read... but not so much as for the author having experienced it... YAM xx
The man went through veritable hell.
DeleteRemember reading the harrowing news. Religion and tragedy are intertwined.
ReplyDeleteThis prof's wife says at one point in the book: 'How nice it would have been without religions!' And that's so ttue.
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ReplyDelete