The Rediff Special /Venu Menon

'For all we know, someone could have dreamt up Jesus'

Imagine Jesus lacking in elementary hygiene, an unwashed wanderer in a sandy wilderness, his beard and hair caked in dust and sweat, a repelling odor emanating from his armpits and loins.

Imagine Jesus as a scruffy inhabitant of a parched and arid land called Palestine, where men and women, deprived of water, find sexual stimulation in their body odorous.

Imagine Jesus as young man wrestling with the temporal dilemma of whether to get rid of his lice-infested beard or not.

This is the pre-messianic Christ portrayed in a short story by Malayalam writer Paul Zachariah, which has rekindled the debate on the classical conflict between the artist and religious orthodoxy.

The story, titled Kannadi Kanmolavum, which appeared in a Malayalam journal recently, drew angry protests from a Catholic bishop and a couple of lay organisations.

Bishop Soosapakiam of the Latin Catholic diocese in Thiruvananthapuram denounced the story on ground that it denigrated Christ and hurt the sentiments of the Christian community. "The writer has crucified Jesus again," the bishop is on record as saying. He described the story as the product of a perverted mind.

Zachariah traces the inspiration for his story to Luis Bunuel's film Milky Way which depicts Christ toying with the idea of removing his beard. He develops this into the central theme of his story where Christ is terrified at the prospect of confronting his temporal visage in a barber's mirror and flees to find solace in the lap of his childhood friend Mariam.

This is not the first time that the Church establishment in Kerala has had to contend with unflattering portrayals of Jesus. In a messy controversy that erupted nearly a decade ago, Church leaders cracked down on playwright P M Antony for his treatment of Christ.

The bishops's campaign led to official action and the eventual banning of the play. Antony struggled against the forces of the Church and State, but suffered a setback when he was jailed for life for complicity in a murder case, a charge that he described as a frame-up. Last year he won a reprieve and was released.

Zachariah acknowledges that he is better off than the hapless Antony. "I am protected by my middle class context. I have a job and financial security, which Antony did not."

The writer's crusade against the forces of religion and State can bring in it wake a severe backlash. But it can also boost sales. Zachariah has displayed down the years a marked appetite for controversy. Most of his themes are provocative and subversive to Christian orthodoxy. His critics accuse him of orchestrating controversies in connivance with friends in the media to create a market for his books.

Still, Zachariah is a game iconoclast. The son of an agriculturist from Palai in central Kerala, he has little respect for holy cows. He abhors cult loyalty. In the past, he has been embroiled in a war of words with the likes of film-maker Adoor Gopalakrishnan and playback singer Jesudas. "Independent thinking on issues is viciously put down, particularly in Kerala," he points out.

Zachariah is unrepentant in his portrayal of Christ. "My job as a fiction writer is not to reproduce the biblical Christ. I have to find fresh ways of approaching this 2,000-year- old man who has been covered over by all kinds of fancy adjectives and overstatement. After all, Christ was a man like anyone else, with two hands, two feet, a nose and a mouth. A man who got dirty, who needed a bath and a shave."

He identifies his use of language as the basic cause for the controversy. He explains: "I have shown a Christ who is like you and me, who happens to sweat, wear dirty clothes and, unlike you and me, lacked the facility to have a daily bath or wash his closets because he lived in desert area. I wanted to show a Christ who was natural to his surroundings, who could not have transcended the limitation of water. For this I have used language that is not poetic, lyrical or romantic."

Zachariah debunks the standard portrayal of Christ in Malayalam fiction. "I feel that the so-called post modernists like O V Vijayan have tended towards an extreme romantic mode of writing, taking the language back to poetry instead of moving into a more matter-of-fact masculine prose, which is how fiction is written all over the world."

As a writer, Zachariah does not recognise a Christ falling within the framework of history or theology. Jesus exists in the domain of the writers's imagination. "What is the guarantee that the events mentioned in the Bible are historical? For all we know, someone could have dreamt up Jesus," he says.

At least one lay organisation echoes this view. The Fisherman's Development Programme and Study Centre is non-governmental organisation that works among traditional fisherfolk, a preserve of the Latin Catholic Diocese. Says Professor M Stephen, who heads the organisation, "Jesus Christ is not a historical personality as claimed by the different Christian denominations around the world. There is no scientific and historiographic evidence to show that a person known as Jesus Christ was born and brought up in Nazareth or Israel. Christ is myth akin to Krishna or Rama in Hindu mythology."

Church representatives are quick to disagree. Says Father M K George, vice-principal of the Loyola College, Thiruvananthapuram, "Secular history makes a clear reference to the existence of Christ. That is an indisputable fact." On artistic freedom, he says: "As a Christian pastor, I would say that the writer is free to write what he likes. But the writer is also a member of the community, so he should take into account the sensitivity of the community as well."

The writer's reply is that the reader has the option not to read him. The priest answers that the reader cannot decide that until he has read the work of the writer. The debate is self-proliferating.

A work that is controversial is at risk of being judged in terms of the controversy that surrounds it, and not on its literary merit. This applies to Zachariah's story as well. Its core sequence shows Christ flinching before the barber's mirror. The mirror symbolises the pull of narcissism. It forces him to flee.

The image of a fugitive Christ torn by self-doubt is hardly compatible with the resplendent moral hero at the Bible. Clearly, art has declared war on theology.

What will happen to a god if I write something about him? Gods are above these things'

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