By the time this appears, India’s 25 million Christians will have seen the dawn of the Resurrection of Christ, which is at the core of their belief and follows the austere darkness of Holy Week when they prepare for his death up to Good Friday.
And what a Holy Week it has been for us as we try to process the news about Notre Dame in flames! Even here, however, there has been silver linings to clouds, not the least being the almost universal grief over the loss of a French iconic landmark that millions of us in India have visited over the years, including your columnist, who has had the good fortune of going not once but twice, both as a tourist and as a Roman Catholic who slipped easily into the ritual of a French Mass.
So the news that it is to be rebuilt is welcome, though received with mixed feelings. Definitely a large part of the appeal of the place was its sheer antiquity, of oak trees used in the building that were already 300 years old when building began in the 12th century, of the air holding memories of the coronation of English kings and Corsican generals, of altars sculpted by masters, and magnificent rose windows in which there is not a scrap of the colour itself.
Till it has been practically lost, one did not realise how much the Cathedral infused modern and even post-modern culture. Writing about Notre Dame, The Guardian examines it through the prism of architecture, books, music, plays, films, television and (hang on to your hat) even video games. That’s how powerful it has been. The same article comfortingly reminds readers that the building itself is more in the nature of a 19th-century fantasy, so overlaid is it by layers added on in the past 900 years, so often vandalised, mutilated, attacked and disfigured. Each time, there has been a restoration, so that the present structure is a mishmash of past, present and even future, and those who visited it loved it for both spirituality and its sturdy straddling of art and culture across the centuries. What’s one more restoration, it seems to suggest, which accounts for the silver lining in the black clouds of loss.
Closer home, Holy Week was marred by the news emerging out of Jharkhand, where four tribal Christians were attacked by neighbours for cutting up a 20-year-old bullock that had died of natural causes. One man died, the others are in hospital and the police have filed an FIR against them for (what else?) slaughtering the bull that had died.
And then the news that Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, still very much an accused in the terror bombing of Malegaon in Maharashtra, in which seven people, including a six-year-old girl, lost their lives and a large number were injured, has been fielded as a BJP candidate from Bhopal. True, she has been acquitted in one other case, while the National Investigation Agency dropped another against her, saying there was not enough evidence, but the last case is still strong.
And it is no secret that the NIA seems to become the creature of the government in power, or that putting up Thakur as a candidate is a defiant statement of the ruling party that it is determined to ensure that she is to be seen as innocent victim and not someone against whom there is plausible evidence of involvement.
There were, however, more silver linings in the form of the courts’ direction against the governments in Union Territories who tried to take away the sacredness of the Good Friday general holiday, turning it into an optional one. Nothing doing, they were told, and the holiday was restored. And in Maharashtra, there was concerted civil movement push back against election officials who tried to make it mandatory for everyone, including Christians, to come in for poll duty training on (you guessed it) Good Friday. This order has now been rescinded.
So it has gone on. Lots of bad news, some good news. But at least for us there is the joy of the Resurrection. For the rest – it’s going to take another one month and two days (from today) before we know what’s in store for the next five years.
