Deeds Matter, Words Scatter

Story-tellers and mythmakers have minted gold from twins with opposite traits of the psychological spectrum. Of course polar opposites are stereotypical. The way they divide the world into neat good and bad, black and white, categories is formulaic too. Real life is much too complex and chaotic. This could explain why the trick works in reel life for audiences hungering for certainty in potboilers like Sita aur Gita or classics such as Man in the Iron Mask.

But should authors take the liberty of applying such schizoid schemes to epic figures that have a massive, global hold on the public imagination? Take, for instance, one of the amazing’ or adbhut versions of the epic Ramayana. This has a shadow double (Chaya) of Sita going through travails of being kidnapped and jailed by a demon while the real heroine lounges safely in her father’s palace. Why hasn’t it caught on unlike the one in which the heroine triumphs over her suffering as a single, integrated individual?

Imagine the Bhagavad Gita with the good’/valiant protagonist Arjuna dithering in the same chariot alongside his cheerful double the bad’/ villainous twin who is itching for that Mother of All Massacres. What sense would the Lord’s Song make in such circumstances?

For many it would be pure blasphemy even to imagine such an interpolation. Should we respect such sentiments? How sacred’ is an individual’s artistic freedom? How far should we go in the defence of poetic license’ when it picks up a fight with public faith and militant religiosity? Such questions have begun to buzz with the publication of Philip Pullman’s

The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ.

As one of Britain’s better-known atheists, Pullman has already cast the Church as an oppressive tyrant and God as a weak old man in his Dark Materials trilogy (made into a movie with a villainous Nicole Kidman). In this allegorical retelling, Mary has twins, Jesus and Christ. The former becomes a charismatic preacher and the shadowy Christ is encouraged by a mysterious stranger to become an agent for his brother’s teachings. Christ, says the stranger, is the word of God. Jesus must die so he can be reborn and humankind can know eternal truth. So Christ becomes Judas and Jesus dies. The resurrection’ of Christ pretty much seals humanity’s fate. Of course you don’t have to buy the spiel. For what you do matters far more than what you say.






Vithal C Nadkarni