Valson Thampu

Nadirshah must be laughing all the way home! He has become a household name in Kerala, thanks to Christians; much like the mediocre Danish cartoons on Prophet Mohammad becoming world-famous, thanks to Muslim hotheads. What is Nadirshah up to? More importantly, where are we headed?

There are two streams of responses to the two films being directed by Nadirshah: Easho and Keshu is the Lord of this house. The first is that the titles aim at ‘cheap publicity’. Desecrating the sacred quickens public curiosity, driving even the indifferent to the box-office. The second response is that this is a devious Muslim plot to cheapen the Christian faith by dragging Jesus through cinematic slime and sarcasm.

As regards the first, its self-contradiction is evident. If Nadirshah is out on a publicity stunt, why aid him and abet him? Ignore him. As Jesus demonstrated to Pontius Pilate, there are times and situations in which silence is more powerful than a million words or the most adroit sword-rattling. If our objection is that Nadirshah’s publicity stunt is ‘cheap’, we are on even weaker grounds. We cannot decide for Nadirshah, whether it is ‘cheap’ or ‘profound’ publicity that he should seek. That’s up to him: a choice that pertains to his moral disposition and cultural finesse. As Jesus said, if the pearls offered are trampled underfoot, it reveals the zoological pedigree of the person concerned, not the demerit of the pearls.

Here, I crave the indulgence of my readers in taking a slight literary detour to contrast two categories of irony: incongruous irony and inevitable irony. The distinction between them is easy and instructive to grasp, and it has a direct bearing on the issue at hand. Jesus exemplifies incongruous irony. The more he is ridiculed, the more he is glorified. A classic example is in the 26th chapter of St. Matthew. Jesus is mocked as a prophet in the court of Caiaphas, the High Priest. Out in the courtyard of the High Priest, a drama unfolds at the same time in which Jesus’ stature as a Prophet is authenticated, ironically, through Peter’s collapse into cowardice. Peter denies Jesus three times, as Jesus had prophesied. Not only that what man does fails to tarnish Jesus, but that his glory shines forth brighter for being maligned. A crown of thorns is put on his head and hammered down. His head is not sullied by it; instead, the thorns are sanctified. That’s the essence of incongruous irony.

Inevitable irony is just the opposite. The more a person tries to glorify himself, the cheaper he becomes. His efforts to save himself make him sink deeper in the quicksand. Mockery, when applied to the divine, becomes incongruous. That given, we contradict ourselves when, in the first place, we say that Nadirshah’s titles are a publicity stunt and, in the same breath, brawling at the prospective denigration of Jesus. If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then the only sensible stand to take is that nothing that man does can degrade him. It is not an exaggeration to say that his detractors are, at times, more deeply engaged, than his defenders, with Jesus.

Now to the second response: that the film-maker is hatching a plot against Christianity by mocking Jesus. As yet, we know nothing about the substance of the two films. If so, our grievance is limited, strictly, to the titles in which the names ‘Easho’ and ‘Keshu’ figure. Let us take the worst-case-scenario that Nadirshah, despite his disclaimer, intends to caricature and embarrass Jesus. What would be a Christian response to this situation?

To respond Christianly is to respond as Jesus Christ would have responded to the given situation. Such is surely the case, if we say that ‘Jesus is our Lord’. In Jewish thought, as well as in common sense, a name is nothing without the essence of the person who bears it. All the more so, in the case of Jesus, who said: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’. To take the name of a person, neglecting the truth of his personality, is to caricature him. It is to reduce him to a label. Labels are handy, because they can be stuck anywhere as per expediency. As Christians, are we to counter Nadirshah by reducing Jesus to a label or a brand name? The film-maker, we say, seeks to caricature Jesus.

In the novels of Charles Dickens, there is an interesting pattern. I call it the imbalance between action and reaction, of which Oliver’s asking for a little more gruel (in Oliver Twist), is a familiar example. The boy is famished. He asks for a little more gruel. The response it evokes from Bumble, the parish beadle, is wildly excessive. He perceives the boy’s supplication as a revolt against the establishment. He springs into action and overpowers the feeble, famished orphan. Dickens’ point is that there is something fishy in a context in which people over-react to provocations. Those who do so expose their lurking insecurities. Anxieties indicate lack, or littleness, of faith. It is because we do not have faith in Jesus, the Lord of lords, that we fear for him because of Nadirshah. We are oblivious to the atheism implied in casting ourselves as the saviour of the Saviour. It is a curious thing that we save the Saviour so that he may save us! This is the stuff that comedies are made of.

No, dear Sirs! The courage to do battle for the one who said, ‘Put down the sword. He who takes the sword shall fall by it’, is misplaced. It takes far greater courage to live by what Jesus taught in spirit and in truth. Crying wolf about presumptive threats to one’s faith shows nothing but the littleness of our faith as well as historical illiteracy. It advertises that we have little faith in the Faith as well as the author and perfecter of the Faith. And that’s an eminently avoidable self-denigration in the public domain.