Prophet Nathan approached King David to confront him about his immorality with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah, and he did it without direct accusation. If it were direct at a time when the king had so much power, he would have been instantly done away with; instead, Nathan told a story. When Changampuzha Krishna Pillai (1911-1948) wanted to expose feudal exploitation in Kerala, he wrote a poem. Separated by millennia, culture, and context, both narratives employ the same powerful technique: they make injustice visible through art. Art, be it a poem, a story, a film gives people time and space to process. People feel safer to accept it.
In Nathan's Parable to David (2 Samuel 12:1-7), There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It ate from his table, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him. Hearing this from the prophet, David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, 'As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.' Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”
In Changampuzha's "Vazhakkula" Malaya, a Pulayan (lowest caste member), plants a single plantain plant in front of his humble hut during the rainy season. He tends it like a precious child, watering it, protecting it, watching over its growth with hope and care. The plant becomes an extension of Malaya's dreams. As it grows, sprouting "like hopes in the heart," it represents the modest aspiration of a man who has almost nothing—just enough fruit to feed his family. The children watched every shoot and move of the plantain, waiting patiently for it to bloom and have bananas ready to eat. When the bananas finally ripen—the fruit of months of labor and hope—the feudal landlord comes and takes the entire bunch. All of it. The powerful man who has everything takes the one thing the powerless man had nurtured. Malaya is left with grief, devastation, and the crushing confirmation of his powerlessness in the feudal system.
Both narratives establish a radical disproportion: The injustice isn't just in the act of taking—it's in the grotesque mathematical inequality. The rich man has hundreds; he takes the poor man's one. The landlord has everything; he takes Malaya's only fruit. This disproportion serves a rhetorical purpose: it makes the injustice undeniable. No complex moral calculus is needed. Even a child can understand: this is wrong.
Nathan's lamb grew up with him and his children, ate from his table, drank from his cup, slept in his arms, was like a daughter to him. Malaya's plantain was taken care like a precious child, watered and protected personally, and its growth was growth compared to "hopes in the heart". Neither is just a piece of property. The lamb is family. The plantain is hope made visible. When they're taken, what's stolen isn't merely economic value—it's emotional investment, relational meaning, identity itself.
In both cases, the theft is enabled by structural power imbalance: in Nathan's parable, the rich man has social and economic power. The poor man has no recourse. The system protects wealth, not justice. In Vazhakkula, the feudal landlord has caste privilege, economic dominance, and legal authority. Malaya, as a Pulayan, has no rights, no voice, no protection. The system exists precisely to enable this extraction. Neither theft required force—both were enabled by systemic inequality that makes resistance impossible. This is structural violence, not personal violence.
Nathan doesn't begin with "You sinned, David." He tells a story about someone else. This technique is brilliant because it disarms defensiveness. David responds not as the accused but as a judge. Art creates moral clarity—David knows what's right when he's not implicated. Having condemned the act, he cannot excuse it in himself. His own moral realisation has convicted him.
Changampuzha's poem is directed at an entire society. But the mechanism is similar. It depicts the scene objectively; no overt preaching or accusation. The reader naturally identifies with Malaya. It creates recognition: the landlord-class readers see themselves implicated. Those who benefit from feudalism must confront their role. The poem functions as a collective Nathan moment for Kerala's upper castes and landlord classes. It says, "Look at what the system you benefit from actually does to real human beings. You are the man."
David technically had the "right" as king to take Bathsheba and eliminate Uriah. But divine law supersedes royal prerogative. Legal right doesn't equal moral right. The landlord may have had feudal "rights" to the produce, but moral law (and natural justice) says the fruit belongs to the labourer who nurtured it.
We cannot rationalise away the image of a poor man weeping over his stolen lamb, Malaya's grief as his plantain bunch is taken. Stories bypass our intellectual defences and appeal directly to moral consciousness. They make us feel before we can think our way out of feeling.
Why a Lamb? Why a Plantain? Both could have chosen more dramatic thefts—murder, enslavement, massive robbery. Why these small, almost domestic thefts? Because the small thing reveals the total disregard more clearly than the large thing. If someone steals your house, we understand it as theft. But if someone wealthy steals a poor child's toy, we're horrified because it reveals complete absence of empathy. They have such abundance that they steal not from need but from entitlement. The victim is so powerless they can be robbed of even the smallest comfort. The lamb and the plantain bunch are small enough to be unnecessary to the rich/powerful, yet large enough to devastate the poor/powerless. This disproportion is where the evil becomes visible.
The Effect of Art
David's immediate response was "I have sinned against the LORD." The Psalm that tradition attributes to this moment (Psalm 51) is one of history's most profound expressions of personal contrition.
Vazhakkula became embedded in Kerala's cultural consciousness. It was memorised by schoolchildren, recited at political gatherings, used as evidence for the need for land reform, part of the cultural preparation for Kerala's eventual communist government and agrarian reforms. The poem contributed to collective transformation—Kerala became the first democratically elected communist government in the world (1957) and implemented significant land reforms.
Both Nathan and Changampuzha face a challenge: how do you tell the powerful they're wrong when they control the narrative, the resources, the definitions of what's legal, the apparatus of enforcement? The answer is that you tell a story so morally clear that even the powerful recognise the injustice before they realise they're implicated. Nathan's parable to David and Changampuzha's "Vazhakkula" demonstrate why parable remains one of humanity's most powerful moral instruments. Parables bypass intellectual defences - We understand before we can rationalise. We see ourselves in the characters. Parables reveal what we already know; they don't teach new information; they make visible what we've been avoiding. Parables demand response.
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