A novel about the Emergency era, stating its horrors as if in a reportage
When a book like K.R. Meera’s The Gospel of Yudas sits on your desk after being devoured, you think of love. The immortal lines of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Virginia Woolf’s innumerable letters, Freddie Mercury’s Love Kills, even bad Bollywood—the reader may get overwhelmed by flashes from one, or all, of these.
In Meera’s novella, love reigns supreme. Like Prema, the protagonist, the reader is tormented by love that permeates each page. All this in a novel about the Emergency era, stating its horrors as if in a reportage! This is where the Malayalam writer bids fair to join the haloed league of Yeats, Marquez and Neruda. Despite the overt political content of their works, love reigns supreme.
Drawn by the terrible beauty of Naxalite ideology, the teenaged Prema convinces herself that deliverance lies in being loved by Yudas. She is almost sure that he was an ex-Naxalite tortured by her policeman father. In pursuing the elusive Yudas, she undertakes what Amitav Ghosh calls filling the gaps in history. Meera’s Prema is a fearless journalist, minus the press card. Her chase for love leads her to the truths, half-truths, ex-truths and falsehoods of one of the most troubled times in modern Indian history.
Meeting ex-Naxalites, the families of those who were tortured and killed, and a now gentle policeman, ‘the Beast’, Prema is able to understand that each syllable of her silent childhood chant, ‘Naxalbari Zindabad’, was drenched in blood. Living with a father whose brutality only changes form over time, Prema is no stranger to tales of violence. Yet, her love for Yudas brings her face to face with the viciousness of a violent political struggle.
Prema falls in love with a man who dredges dead bodies from lakes and rivers for a living. The symbolism is unmistakable. Corpses from the past need to be recovered. The story of the Emergency years can only be complete when all the carcasses, in varying states of decay, resurface. It takes a man like Yudas to be unperturbed by the fish-eaten faces of drowned people, and it takes a Prema to fall in love with him.
At one level, the novella pretends to be about Prema’s chase, her wait. However, it is also about Yudas’s wait. Prema is elemental in Yudas’s deliverance from guilt. Her love is like a poultice for the festering wound on his conscience. Meera’s novella is also an act of catharsis.
Before the redemption, the protagonists have to undergo torments ranging from purely physical to psychosomatic. Is this not what loving entails? Reams have been written about the torment and violence in love. Here, violence is an omnipresent doppelganger of love. Love feasts menacingly not only on Prema’s mind but also her body. In Yudas’s case, love causes death and chains him to a Sisyphean cycle of betrayal and guilt.
A remarkable feature of Meera’s work is how she employs the traditional tropes of romance to tell a sordid tale. Juliet’s infatuation, Cleopatra’s sublimated self-serving passion, Juno’s competitiveness, Heathcliff’s brooding stance: all come together to present the reader with an unsettling gospel on love. The commandment is clear: thou shalt love only when the taste of blood is beknownst to thee.
The cover has it written all over. The image of a drowning girl is an easy metaphor for falling dangerously in love, with a person or an ideology. But as per Zizek, and millions of others, love without falling cannot happen. We love, we pay for it. Rajesh Rajamohan’s translation could very well do with an epigraph from the Slovenian philosopher—‘Love is a permanent emergency state.’