They put him to death by hang­ing him on a tree.
—Acts 10:39.  Good Fri­day is the day when the world re­mem­bers Je­sus’ cru­ci­fix­ion, but it is al­ways fol­lowed by Easter. So, hope tri­umphs, or is ex­pected to. To me, Good Fri­day has al­ways been a re­minder of what hap­pened to Je­sus’ body.

I have seen my friends los­ing their par­ent; even par­ents in one case. I have seen their bod­ies ly­ing in state. I have ut­tered words to the ef­fect that he/​she is in a bet­ter place. A cou­ple of times I have at­tended bhogs of agri­cul­ture labour­ers and farm­ers who had com­mit­ted sui­cide, and I have heard the cleric there telling the con­gre­ga­tion that the de­ceased was in a bet­ter place now; I have seen him be­seech­ing the God to al­lot the poor dead fel­low some space near His feet – Vichrri Aatma Nu Gur-Char­na’n Vich Ni­was Bakhshna. I have seen Com­rade Bant Singh; I have missed see­ing his two arms and two legs, and yet I saw all his limbs in my mind, and I thought – The spir­it’s al­right, but what about his body?

The body is im­por­tant, hence Good Fri­day. Be­fore we trun­dle to­wards Easter, we need to pause at Good Fri­day.

We have the farm sui­cide data be­fore us. We have the mal­nu­tri­tion data be­fore us. We have the stunted growth data be­fore us. We have kids’ wast­ing data. We have the data about anaemic in­fants and ba­bies. We have the data about anaemia among women of re­pro­duc­tive age. We have the data about spousal vi­o­lence – a gen­der-neu­tral eu­phemism for a clearly sex­ist crime: men com­mit­ting vi­o­lence on women. It is all about their bod­ies.

I have ob­served hordes of MN­REGA work­ers hud­dled un­der a tent or a shed where they are called now and then by some ac­tivist friends to make them aware of their rights and to or­gan­ise them to de­mand what right­fully, legally, statu­to­rily and con­sti­tu­tion­ally be­longs to them: the right to work. And while speaker af­ter speaker ex­horts them from be­hind a mi­cro­phone to stand up for their rights, I ob­serve their bod­ies.

It is pos­si­ble that the spirit was high – I hear a lot about ‘Chardi Kala’ in Pun­jab – the fact is that their bod­ies em­body the state of the na­tion. The sunken cheeks, the even more sunken eyes, the bones threat­en­ing to tear through the last lay­ers of flesh, their feet an ev­i­dence of the paths these had trudged, their hands and fin­gers and nails telling a tale of cen­turies that passed them by, gen­er­a­tion af­ter gen­er­a­tion – they were hardly peo­ple. They were bod­ies. For­ever liv­ing on the cross. And no one promis­ing an Easter.

With all this stress on body and spirit, on sha­reer and aatma, on be­com­ing ‘vileen in par­mat­ma’, I find it dif­fi­cult to for­get that the body is im­por­tant. It was the body that laughed and cried. The bod­ies were part of the hu­man be­ings who de­cided to com­mit sui­cide. I have seen those bod­ies. I have seen other bod­ies, bod­ies to which the spirit was still cling­ing de­spite sunken eyes and lost hopes, and I acutely felt that some of these might well hang by some fan some­day, for such were their cir­cum­stances.

I know that on Good Fri­day, I am ex­pected to think only of the spirit in heaven. Some kind of an af­ter­life as a dis­em­bod­ied spirit. Surely, such an af­ter­life won’t have re­li­gious fault­lines. So, there could be any ver­sion of this world with naked baby an­gels strum­ming harp strings. The spir­its of peo­ple with sunken eyes; bones pro­trud­ing through their flesh; feet, hands and fin­gers turned stone over years, decades and cen­turies, and necks a lit­tle too stretched due to hang­ing from ceil­ing fans, and they would now be happy, hop­ping from one white cloud to an­other fluffy lit­tle white cloud.

Will this be our com­mon dis­em­bod­ied fu­ture of the spirit in heaven?

Is that why we are not both­ered enough about their bod­ies here in this ma­te­r­ial world? Is that why we aren’t shriek­ing about call­ing a Sar­bat Khalsa on this is­sue – that our peo­ple are los­ing their bod­ies just as that man did at Gol­go­tha in the holy land some two thou­sand and plus years ago?

Is it the as­sur­ance that our af­ter­life will be com­mon and free of pain, death, sor­row and news of farm sui­cides which has em­bold­ened us not to call for a Sar­bat Khalsa on this is­sue? Chris­tians be­lieve that our bod­ies will be res­ur­rected, trans­fig­ured, per­fected in this new world, but the fact is that, even af­ter fac­tor­ing in that the­ol­ogy, they will still be our bod­ies.

Bod­ies are im­por­tant.

And we have been guilty of per­sis­tent dis­re­gard to our fel­low com­pa­tri­ots’ bod­ies – from the slave auc­tion block to the lynch­ing trees in south­ern Amer­ica, right to the knee upon the neck of George Floyd and the state’s ap­a­thy to my farm­ers and farm work­ers and in­dus­trial work­ers and trib­als and dal­its and mar­gin­alised peo­ple across the length and breadth of this coun­try, shame­lessly call­ing it­self ma­haan, its claims of great­ness reg­u­larly punc­tu­ated by news of what its regime or the regime-backed goons are do­ing to the bod­ies of peo­ple be­long­ing to a par­tic­u­lar re­li­gion or low­ered castes or trib­als.

The body is im­por­tant.

That’s why we ob­serve Good Fri­day. It is about what hap­pened to his body. That is why for a cou­ple of thou­sand years, we have been re­call­ing every year, and are sup­posed to re­mem­ber every mo­ment of our breath­ing time, that his body was mu­ti­lated and put on dis­play. To me, Good Fri­day is a re­minder of how large sec­tions of my peo­ple have been so dis­in­her­ited and dis­em­pow­ered that the state bru­tally and bla­tantly ex­er­cises its power over their bod­ies.

Their bod­ies are the do­min­ion of the state. The state rules over their bod­ies.

Amid de­mands for a larger com­mu­nity gath­er­ing has come an ini­tia­tive of gath­er­ing to­gether the com­mu­ni­ty’s me­dia faces – women and men with pens, mi­cro­phones, cam­eras, face­book and twit­ter ac­counts, and youtube chan­nels. The panth is in dan­ger. Pan­thic qalam (قَلَم) must talk of pan­thic kalaam (کلام).

I know that the state has picked up some bod­ies in re­cent days, and a com­mu­nity is en­raged over what the regime has done and is do­ing. This com­mu­nity has had a re­cent past, mem­o­ries of which haunt vast sec­tions, and the re­sul­tant con­cern has forced some ac­tiv­ity. Amid de­mands for a larger com­mu­nity gath­er­ing has come an ini­tia­tive of gath­er­ing to­gether the com­mu­ni­ty’s me­dia faces – women and men with pens, mi­cro­phones, cam­eras, face­book and twit­ter ac­counts, and youtube chan­nels. The panth is in dan­ger. Pan­thic qalam (قَلَم) must talk of pan­thic kalaam (کلام).

This gath­er­ing is hap­pen­ing on Good Fri­day, a con­flu­ence ei­ther in­tended de­lib­er­ately or a mere serendip­i­tous co­in­ci­dence. But it brings me back to the ar­gu­ment about what has been hap­pen­ing for decades to thou­sands and thou­sands of bod­ies in this land of the Gu­rus, with­out us be­ing moved enough to shriek for con­ven­ing a Sar­bat Khalsa.

I re­mem­ber sit­ting shud­der­ing in my seat in Mal­har The­atre in Lud­hi­ana as I watched Ben-Hur. It was mid-eight­ies, I was­n’t even twenty, and had­n’t been warned about what the ex­pe­ri­ence could en­tail. Friends had talked a lot about a char­iot race scene and I was there to watch that race. But then, I was sucked in. I learnt some­thing that per­haps was not even the point of the movie. It is funny I am re­call­ing it on Good Fri­day.

It was while watch­ing Ben-Hur that I re­alised what I should have known all along: that the story of that Fri­day did not end with Je­sus’ death. Hours passed. The body rose again. God had raised that body. It was the same body. The same body that was there on the cross. How do you think his dis­ci­ples rec­og­nized him? Be­cause he looked the same. His body had been trans­formed and healed, but it was the same body. It still had the wounds from his cru­ci­fix­ion.

The body is so, so im­por­tant.

We need to pay at­ten­tion to bod­ies, bod­ies to which the spirit is still cling­ing. They are peo­ple. We must be in­spired by other bod­ies, dis­mem­bered bod­ies, the bod­ies hang­ing from ceil­ing fans, or con­sum­ing a fu­mi­gant cum oral pes­ti­cide, alu­minium phos­phide, now known to my peo­ple by its house­hold nick­name celphos, the killer of thou­sands of bod­ies.

 

 

 

 

In any post-death world, all these bod­ies will be res­ur­rected, but there will still be di­ver­sity. George Floy­d’s body will be black. Mo­hammed Akhlaq’s body will have the marks of lynch­ing. The 11 Mus­lims and three Hindu em­ploy­ees of the Best Bak­ery will have the burn marks. The farm sui­cide vic­tims’ res­ur­rected bod­ies will find a way to shame us, per­haps with some­what elon­gated necks. The vast sec­tions of our pop­u­lace de­meaned in their spirit and bod­ies be­cause we never worked for an­ni­hi­la­tion of caste will find ways to re­mind us that we failed to call a hun­dred Sar­bat Khal­sas even when we were be­stowed with a Panth with an ex­press ob­jec­tive to en­sure Sar­bat Da Bhala and equal­ity and fra­ter­nity. You can tell those peo­ple of ‘kirt karo’ that we failed on ‘wand chhako’ but our ‘naam japo’ unity pro­pelled us to ex­pressly call emer­gency pan­thic meet­ings when the regime threat­ened some of our well-fed bod­ies.

It is hap­pen­stance that pan­thic women and men hacks and mega­phones are meet­ing on Good Fri­day, though with­out, I am sure, notic­ing the con­flu­ence of the dates and days. They must ex­pand their sphere of con­cern. It can­not re­main lim­ited to ask­ing the regime to lay off its hands upon the bod­ies of those of us who are em­pow­ered and speak out but are be­ing bam­boo­zled into si­lence. It is a wor­thy con­cern, but is nev­er­the­less not wide enough, not big enough, to be wor­thy of a pan­thic con­ven­tion.

The panth must talk big, and of much larger things. The panth is bound by Sar­bat Da Bhala. Any shrewd prag­matic for­mu­la­tion of first ‘apna bha­la’, be­cause we must first sur­vive, and only then ‘Sar­bat Da Bhala,’ will be a clever semi­otic for­mu­la­tion wor­thy of that court in Venice where Shy­lock is sharp­en­ing his knife and a fright­ened An­to­nio’s body waits to lose a pound of flesh.

My peo­ple are los­ing pounds of flesh for cen­turies, for decades, for years, now every day. It has stopped mak­ing news. Lakhs of bod­ies con­verged a few hours ago at Del­hi’s Ramlila Grounds, ask­ing the pow­ers that be to stop cut­ting out pounds of flesh. It made lesser news than the pan­thic con­ven­tion of pens-cam­eras-mi­cro­phones.

The panth needs to stand up with all its might for the still con­joined bod­ies and spir­its of all those upon whom the pow­er­ful are stomp­ing in this casteist, racist, sex­ist, misog­y­nist, fun­da­men­tal­ist, ul­tra­na­tion­al­ist, re­source-skewed world.

The panth needs to stand up with all its might for the still con­joined bod­ies and spir­its of all those upon whom the pow­er­ful are stomp­ing in this casteist, racist, sex­ist, misog­y­nist, fun­da­men­tal­ist, ul­tra­na­tion­al­ist, re­source-skewed world.

This Good Fri­day, we must ask God about his res­ur­rec­tion scheme: “What do you plan to do about the dis­in­her­ited and ripped-apart bod­ies of the world?” Ei­ther give us a bod­ily res­ur­rec­tion or step aside. The promise of a par­adise with white clouds or an aatma headed to be vileen in parm-aatma is no more mak­ing sense to me in my bod­ily ex­is­tence.

We need a God that is of use to us, a panth that cares for the bod­ies of the kir­tis and the rights of all those who speak truth to power. A tem­po­ral seat of the panth can­not and must not re­duce it­self to per­form­ing the func­tions of a press coun­cil, how­so­ever right­eous and wor­thy that ob­jec­tive is.

Have a blessed Good Fri­day. Easter shall in­deed come. And we will stand for the bod­ies of those who are cry­ing for res­ur­rec­tion. Our re­mit will never be short of Sar­bat Da Bhala.