The Early Revolutionary

Pravachakanmarude Randampusthakam (2007), Kerala Sahitya Akademi awardee, Benyamin’s first Malayalam novel, retold Jesus’ life from a different perspective. Over the last decade and a half, the author has made a name for himself with his hard-hitting books. He continues to be best known in the world of English readers for Goat Days. Its English translation was long listed for Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and was recently made into a searing Malayalam movie. His most recent book The Second Book of Prophets seems a return to the start as it is a “secular narration of the life and times of Jesus Christ”.

Following the beheading of St John the Baptist by Herod Antipas, this book follows the troubled role Jesus must assume to free the Jews from the Romans. The Second Book of Prophets is a careful reanimation of the warring camps Jesus finds himself in. Elected by the House of David to orchestrate the Roman emancipation of Jews, Jesus is caught amidst an internecine Jewish conflict between the Davidians who elect him and the Tribe of Benjamin who are opposed to him, and ultimately betray him by colluding with the Romans to fell him.

Benyamin’s prefatory note piques interest when he gestures towards the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the West Bank in the 1940s and ’50s, drawing attention to a region dense with ethnic conflict and an ongoing genocide. The strain he cultivates from the discovery of these texts here, and in the Nag Hammadi Library, is how elastic the New Testament can be, a malleable text, on which interpretation can harden and is peddled as religious truth or law. Benyamin asserts that in his retelling of Christ he is not quite Son of God, but a “social reformer and a tenacious fighter.”

Retelling is a tricky postmodern affair. To rewrite anything canonical is a balancing act. How do you invite a new set of readers as you extend a prior text, and, at the same time, retain original readers, who are in on the lore, letting them relish the tricks of your adaptation? Translation, itself a contentious practice, adds another layer to the already philosophically convoluted architecture of texts retold. It is at this dense intersection of Malayalam and English, scripture and remix, that one arrives at The Second Book of Prophets, to find the “secular” twist to the biblical ambitious and, at times, fallible.

The book begins with a heady cast of characters who will pose no trouble to those familiar with the New Testament. For the uninitiated, annotations are scant. Plunging headfirst into a dramatis personae comprising Christian icons, the narrative is still somewhat cloistered by discourse and events that assume readers’ prior knowledge. It seems fitting that Mary, who has not only been read as a minor biblical figure but, canonically, deemed a prostitute, and, hence, often cast outside the fold of Christianity’s respectability politics, delivers the most contextualising and clarifying passages in the book, especially for those readers who may be at the periphery of Christian discourse.

There are junctures in the text that are left for scholars to activate. Food, for instance, creates hierarchies between Davidians and a “low-born” who is so because he is “of water.” These images and references tie in the Bible and India’s caste hierarchies engineered around food and water. This begs one to ask: what is gained when the Bible is retold in Malayalam? What is lost when that retelling is returned to the linguistic legacy of Anglo-Saxon colonialism? Is this translation speaking back to power, ensconced in a religious echo chamber, or, speaking through the mantel, bringing outsiders in, in the truest sense of ‘secular’? These questions will remain ambiguous for some as one sifts through Ministhy S’s prose that jitters between scriptural formality and cosmopolitanism.

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