K R Meera and Writing
In the Gospel of Yudas, K.R Meera weaves a tale of intense female experience which is a result of her rich journalistic life coupled with her writerly ambitions. K.R Meera is the first woman to be hired by the newspaper Malayala Manorama. K.R Meera’s popular novel Aarachar - Hangwoman is also highly female-centred and it narrates the story of the first woman executioner. A highly socially committed writer, she has developed a craft which appeals to both the high -literature followers and the masses. She believes that writing is a way to repair her own life. She describes her act of writing as an act of revenge against the treatment of women in the patriarchal society. When she writes, her mind is so embedded in the experience of the character. One can see three types of trauma when it comes to K.R Meera’s craft - The trauma that she feels when writing, the trauma embedded in the story and the trauma of the reader who is reading. Her tales doesn’t have any ‘cushioning effect’. She reminds us of Tolstoy who was a pioneer of realistic fiction. The novel is intense and dark. Since she is a felt-writer K.R Meera says that she needed time to get out of the mould of the characters that she has created.K.R Meera talks about her experience of writing hard-hitting realistic stories as ‘not an easy task because I had to experience everything in every cell of mine'.
Themes of Death:
One of the primary themes in the Gospel of Judas is the theme of death. Das the character is busy dredging dead bodies from the river. He does this act in different rivers and different river banks. These acts make him an archetypal figure engaged in a routine which reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus and the story of Naranath Bhranthan in the Malayalam folklore. He is known as the Crocodile (Croc) Yudas for his diving skills. He is an amphibian living in a thatched hut on the river bank and spending too much time in the water. Most of the deaths happening around him are suicides. The dead bodies that are taken out of the river as shapeless and formless due to the nibbling away of flesh by fishes. The way Das is etched bring to our mind the character of Najeeb Muhammad in Benyamin’s classic Aadujeevitham.
The theme of Guilt:
Like Dr Faustus in the 12th scene of Marlowe's play, Yu-das is yearning for redemption. His sin, like that of Lord Jim, is that he had betrayed his Naxalite comrades during the Emergency period raids and the subsequent torture in the infamous Kakkayam camp. Yu-Das lives in his world of guilt and pain, haunted by the memories of his past. The novel begins with the admission of this guilt which like an albatross is hanging on his shoulders.
"A traitor can never sleep. His hunger is eternal; his thirst, insatiable. The burning inside his body won’t be doused even if he immerses himself in water. No matter how hard he tries to drown himself in alcohol, he remains intensely conscious". Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 3).
The theme of Love:
The character of Prema is the mouthpiece of the author. She is an independent woman who makes decisions of her own. She has seen her father as a terror figure who used to engage in domestic violence. The violence became a routine for Prema once he retired from the Police department. He was on duty at the Kakkayam police camp which specialized in different torture forms. The most infamous form of torture was the 'roller'. After retirement, he suffers from Post-traumatic stress disorder. Towards the fag end of his life, he becomes bedridden with Parkinson's disease. He is the one who identifies Yudas as Das. Prema like the housekeeping girl Elisa Esposito played by Sally Hawkins in the movie Shape of Water is curious to know more about the amphibian - Yudas. The novel moves forward as a result of this quest by Prema. She hunts Yu-das wherever he goes. Longing for his love, I looked everywhere for a glimpse of Yudas’s shadow. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (pp. 32-33).She sees him as free-spirit and she wants to escape with him. For Yu-das, tender emotions are all a thing of the past. Yu-das was dead long ago and now he dredges dead bodies for a living. One of the poignant observation about love is 'None of us has ever had anyone else’s love. Life had always unfolded under an emergency of some kind. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (pp. 57-58).
The Political Theme:
Gospel of Yudas is an intensely political novel. K.R Meera uses the backdrop of the Emergency days to bring out a narrative which is intermingled with the Naxalite uprising of Kerala in the 1970s. Through Prema, the author says that the Emergency 'purged the young things’ audacity and grit to love, trust and fight'. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 37).Das was arrested and kept in inhumane conditions of a room in the Kakkayam camp. ‘The most vivid memory of that time will always be a certain room that was darkened, its windows padded with cardboard rags. It stank horribly the moment I walked in. Was it pee, shit, blood or death? People screamed dreadfully all the time. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 45). Prema like a journalist goes to dig the past of Yu-das. She even visits the houses of former Naxalites and quizzes them about the events that happened. K.R Meera skillfully blends the past and the present in the novel. Prema in her quest to find more about Yu-das meets Sangeetha who is the niece of a former Naxalite. Sangeetha in the present world is engaged in a people's protest to prevent private mining companies from occupying their farmlands. The author brings back the memories of the Emergency times when she writes 'Revolutions do not cease. Little people persist with their might wherever they are'. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 118).
The theme of Naming or Labelling (Identity)
Gospel of Yudas is significant for the names of the characters. There is one pertinent question that K R Meera is trying to answer in this novel - How did Das become Yu-das?. Before becoming Yu-das, Das was a student and he was a slave to the ideology of Naxalism but after the torture camp experience in Kakkayam, he became a betrayer - just like Judas in the Bible. Y-das betrayed his colleagues by sharing information about them with the police. His life is his Gospel and Prema is an admirer of Yu-das. The name Prema reminds the reader about love and its balmy effect. What will make the world a better place, is it love or is it violence? The contradiction in the title is quite evident. Gospel is supposed to be a holy text with some moralistic messages. Ironically, this is the Gospel of Yudas, the one betrayed Son of God who had come to save humanity. Will this Gospel turn out to be a panacea to the problems of this world. We may have to wait and watch.
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Image source: https://scroll.in/article/810053/malayalam-writer-kr-meera-writes-explosively-and-her-new-novel-is-no-exception
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