Book Review: VJ James’ 'Nireeswaran' is a brave attempt at making sense of belief and disbelief

Set in a fictional village of Kerala where an anti-god, an antithesis of the entire idea of god, has attained the status of almighty and become the purveyor of miracles to all and sundry, Nireeswaran puts the two sides of the same coin – belief and non-belief, theism and atheism, faith and a lack of it – against each other in an eternal battle that cannot be won by either.

It is brave of author VJ James to write a story that puts the idea of god, religion, faith and everything entirely opposite of it under the microscope. To much of James’ relief Nireeswaran is not about one god versus another, it is about all gods versus no god at all.

Three rebellious friends set out to eradicate the idea of god and faith at large from their village by installing an idol of Nireeswaran, a non-god – “an Eswaran to face off all the gods”. To “expose the absurdity of a place of worship”, the trio decide to install a Nireeswaran in the place of Eswaran.

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The idol and its identity that was created by the trio – Antony, Bhaskaran, and Sahir – was aimed to question and shatter all notions of faith and even ridicule the “lifeless idols”. However, it ends up becoming all that and more that they had set out to destroy.

Starting from the village invalid gaining the power of speech to a comatose man waking up after 24 years, Nireeswaran’s alleged miracles attain him the status of a new and readily available god in a religiously colourful village. Not that the village was ever communal, but it had its fault lines dividing people on the basis of caste, unverified acts of thievery, and morality or immorality of professions.

Apart from doling out miracles, Nireeswaran brings the village together under the thick canopy of two intertwined trees of mango and peepal - the Athmavu.

“There was no caste discrimination in Nireeswaran’s presence, no distinction between scholars and illiterates either. You could attain serenity by reading the Holy Bible inside the precincts of the Nireeswaran temple or read the Holy Quran and purify your mind. You were free to read the Holy Gita and enjoy an immersive experience. If you wished to do nothing, that was possible too; you could just wander around without being attached to anything at all. Otherwise, you could attain salvation by reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or the voluminous Vairudhyathmaka Bhauthikavadam or Dialectical Materialism. Indeed, they could all be seen as eulogies to Nireeswaran’s ways.”

It becomes unacceptable for the three friends that the very figure of non-belief achieves godly measures of faith among people, which also presents James, a former ISRO scientist, with the opportunity to put the colliding thoughts of belief and non-belief onto the paper in philosophical prose.

He argues in the book through a character, a scientist named Roberto, who is perhaps set in his own image, that not believing in something is also a belief.

“Both belief and disbelief are fundamentally the same! The intensity of belief the devotee has in the existence of god is of the same magnitude as the belief a disbeliever has in the non-existence of god. But the truth is naked, devoid of the garb of either belief or disbelief.”

Even though Roberto “was unaffected by the stubborn belief that everything unfurling around Nireeswaran was a miracle”, he remains open to the possibility that it may occur, a flexibility of thought that is not the strong suit of the three friends.

He argues that had the possibility of nuclear energy burning the world to cinders been announced a hundred years ago, it would have been regarded as a wonder.

At the risk of becoming preachy, James writes, “…those who allow for any possibility are found to be more open-minded than others. The inflexibility that one alone has exclusive insight into the universal mysteries, with a pronounced tendency to look down on the rest as ignoramuses, is not indicative of wisdom but of hubris triggered by ignorance.”

The book raises several questions that have long remained unanswered and open to the reader’s understanding of the subject matter. James questions the meaning and purpose of faith as well as that of radical idealism in an attempt to make sense of such conflicts, rather successfully, by raising arguments in philosophy, science and spirituality in this satirical tale.

Published by Penguin Random House and translated by Ministhy S from the Malayalam, Nireeswaran is an ageless argument between moral and immoral, science and spirituality, and logic and faith. But at the heart of it, the book remains a tale of basic human values that are sometimes lost in the extremities of all the aforementioned ideas. The extremities in the book, however, are subdued, which feels almost like relief from the realities of the world we live in.

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