A Thousand Cuts

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.