Call Her By Her Name

The gospels often relegate women to the periphery. Jeet Thayil’s new novel brings them to the centre

- Shougat Dasgupta

NAMES OF THE WOMEN

by Jeet Thayil

JONATHAN CAPE

Jeet Thayil’s intriguing, atmospheric fourth novel, Names of the Women, urges the reader to reflect on perspectives that are ignored, neglected, forgotten, or simply go unrecorded because they are thought to be worthless. The women here are on the fringes of the Bible, their presence noted, if at all, in the apocrypha, the non-canonical marginalia to which the likes of Jesus’s sisters, Lydia and Assia, are relegated, while his brothers play sometimes starring roles in the gospels.

The events of the novel are well known, focused on episodes towards the end of Jesus’s life, leading up to the crucifiction, but seen from the point of view of women, some of them familiar even to the lay reader (Mary Magdalene, for instance, the prostitute who was with Jesus to the very end) and many perhaps unfamiliar even to Biblical scholars. That parenthetical aside about Mary Magdalene, a glib popular reference, is upended by Thayil, who presents her in Names of the Women, as Mary of Magdala, misunderstood and misrepresented despite her prominence in the story told by the New Testament—“In time, when these men come to write their accounts of what happened that day.... They will write that the demons that left her were the demons of lust and sin. Hundreds of years later, men who have never met her will call her a fallen woman.... She will be called a sinner, when her only sin is that she is from a prosperous home and she is sad.”