Bridging the language gap: Sarah Joseph's world of words

In her author’s note to “Othappu”, a novel that recently won the Crossword prize, Sarah Joseph talks about her teenage longing to be one with Christ. The way to be with Him was to become a nun. But she did not get the call from God. Instead, she chose to become a writer but never abandoned Christ. “Othappu” is her search for Christ. It is both the quest for a new spirituality built on norms of social, economic and gender justice and a seething critique of organized religion.Politics and poetics converge to produce a fine novel.
Margalitha leaves the convent when she faces a crisis of faith in the order and seeks Christ outside the church. Her quest turns into a search for a Christ unbound, unshackled by the Church and the burden of tradition. It is a woman’s quest for a God who doesn’t insist on a separation of sexuality and spirituality. She is ostracized by her family and the community but finds support from people who are far removed from the powerful institutions of religion. In the end, Margalita understands that she needs to tell the story of the son of Joseph anew. Through her journey, we get a glimpse of the failures of the institutionalized God and alternative ways of reaching Christ.
According to Valson Thampu, a theologian who translated “Othappu”, the book is a case study about any individual in any religion who’s seeking the truth of faith. And that’s the universality of it. Thampu believes that organized Christianity is not ready for the powerful questions Sarah asks. The hope of the individual, according to him, lies with biblical Christianity, not church Christianity.
Othappu is representative of Sarah Joseph’s world of words. Her short stories and novels are often radical readings of stories and situations. They tend to be polemical. Her political activism permeates her writings and she’s proud of it. Satchidanandan, well-known poet and critic, says she brought about a paradigm shift in Malayalam literature.
“There were writers like Balamaniamma, Sugathakumari and Madhavikutty (Kamala Das), but Sarah was the first consciously feminist writer in the language. She’s a great myth-maker and a myth-breaker. In Aalahayude Penmakkal (Daughters of Alaha), she created a new myth whereas in her Ramayana stories she is demythifying or creating or revising existing myths with the idea of women’s freedom and space at the centre,” says Satchidanandan.
This aspect distinguishes Sarah Joseph from contemporary Malayalam writers. Her “Puthuramayanam” (New Ramayanam) is a retelling of Ramayana stories from subaltern perspectives. What did Soorpanakha have to say about the princes of Ayodhya who humiliated and disfigured her? How did the children of Shambuka, the shudra killed by Rama, respond to the bard’s narration of Rama’s journey? Stories like Vanadurga are pregnant with concern about our future, threatened as it is by a consumptive social order.
Sarah is a product of the Kerala of the 1970s and after, when political movements broadened the idea of justice to include issues like gender, caste and environment. Concerns that were subsumed until then by a broad Left agenda of economic emancipation spilled out and led to the emergence of a micro-politics articulated mainly by new social movements.
Civic Chandran, a representative activist-writer of this period, talks about Sarah as a writer who reflects the heat and light of this politics. “She moved out of her room and built connections with Dalit, tribal and environment movements. She transformed these experiences into material for her fiction in a way that only writers with originality are capable of,” says Chandran.
Sarah deserves a readership beyond what Malayalam can offer. Her novels are rooted in a regional and linguistic culture that may be too localized even for a Malayali reader, but her concerns are universal. This finely translated and edited novel takes a remarkable writer beyond the confines of her native tongue.