Jemimah Rodrigues played a fighting role in India’s victory in the semi-final of the ICC Women World Cup 2025 held in India on 30th October 2025. In a run chase that seemed seemingly impossible the Indian women along with Jemimah crossed the frontier which very often they had failed in the past. While celebrating the victory and receiving the player of the match award came the explosive moment wherein Jemimah deconstructed herself and became deconstruction at several levels for all Indians. Deconstruction is a way of reading text introduced by French thinker Jacques Derrida.

Maybe we say that deconstruction is a betrayal of a text. But the betrayal of the text is revealing. The text is not simply alphabetical. Everything can be viewed as a text. Hence, we can deem Jemimah as a text. On that she manifested great grit yet also shouldered vulnerability with dignity and humility. Here loyalty to India and the team could not be questioned yet her naming of Jesus as her inner strength and power seemed to have become an issue for some fundamentalist of the majority faith. Her confession of Jesus seemed to have produced what we may call castration effect in these hot heads who forgot the victory and lashed on to what they deemed as proper religious positioning in a public arena in India. Maybe we have to uncover the layers of deconstruction effected by Jemimah that become castration or betrayal for some.

Let us return to Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction. Derrida seems to say that a Jew cannot identify with the Jew. A Jewish identification with himself does not exist. A Jew cannot belong to himself. He has to belong to other belongings . A Jew is homeless and he or she is marked by a performance of a betrayal. A Jew has to betray himself or herself. There is an undecideability attached to the very being of a Jew to the extent it makes him or her readable or unreadable to some. This reading or unreading combines dissonance and assonance.

Let us apply the above to Christian Jemimah. It seems that as Christian she cannot properly belong to India. He has to perform a betrayal and deconstruct herself to be accepted as properly belonging to India. India of today has changed. She has to be deJemimah and proberly belong to Indian. Likewise an Indian Christian cannot identify with himself or herself. He/ she has to be born again. An Indian Christian has to become figural. But what is the position of Indians visa vis a Christians? Do we demand of an Indian Christians to be deChristian? Maybe we do want an Indian Christian to betray him or her Christian-ness. We prefer a deconstructed or a castrated Indian Christian. Maybe this demand for castration comes from the logic of being twice born, Dwija . A Christian, therefore, has to be Dwija.

In that case are we not as Indians the betrayers of Christians? This is the irony. A Christian Indian cannot be Christian to belong to India. We seem to be desiring the last Christian. This last Christian cannot be Jemimah. This last Christian belongs to the ideal. It is impossible to inhabit that ideal. Jemimah has to deJemimaize herself. This is why she cannot be calling on the name of Jesus in Public without offending some people. To them to name Jesus is to commit blasphemy. Jesus’ name is unsayable to these people. By saying the unsayable name, Jemimah has blundered. Forget the runs he plundered. She now has to keep quite. Her tongue has to be circumcised.

Christians to have to dechristianize and embrace castrated Christianity to belong to India. One, therefore, has to belong to Christianity without belonging to it. One cannot instantiate Christianity. That ideal is an abomination or crime. Paradoxically, this contamination is productive. It produces the reactive fundamentalist positions that otherwise might not have irrupted. It required the impurity of the unsayability that Jemimah to disrupt the sensible of our country. This disruption makes us political. Thus, Jemimah being a Christian became the key site of such a politics.

It also means being Jemimah is a key site of destruction. It is an experience of deconstruction. It is an experience of an earth quake. Does this means being Jemimah came to mean a wound? The wound that seemed to cut her from Hindu India even when she gave her all to win the match for India. It is the wound that is inflicted on her to cut her from her Indian-ness. This cutting cannot cut her from Indian biology and even culture. But it cuts without cutting for the blind fanatics who made catastrophe out of a great victory. Hence, it appears to be a Jemimah ( or a Christian) is to be marked by the violence of cut, the cut that cuts her from India by a forced forgetting of biology and incarnated Indian culture she lives and breathes.

We are talking of the cut that cuts and separates the Christian sons and daughters of mother India. The cut thus, becomes the difficult way opened by closed mind for the Christian and other minorities to belong to India. It is the cut that wounds that becomes a proper way of being Indian Christian. It is cut that is not transferable and wounds Christians and other minorities of our country. It is only through the cut that Christians like Jemimah are inscribed into India and marked with a scar that cannot be undone. The cut is an archive in Derridean sense. It an event and is singular cannot be repeated.

But in the Freudian sense it comes to haunt us all. The cut inflicted on Jemimah becomes a cut on Mother India. By inflicting the cut on Jemimah, we have inflicted a wound on us all. This means all of us cannot thus become properly Indian. We have failed to instantiate our Indian ideal. We cannot co-inhabit the ideal of being Indians. We have become people who are cut from other Indians. The majority community through its nationalism that cut itself from the rest of India becomes a cut that cracks mother India. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in this crack that wounds us all. This is why we do not have to dejemimize Jemimah. We do not have to dechristianize or minoritize any minorities. Such a position can only cut the limbs and mutilate mother India. Hence, the kind of hardcore narrow nationalism that dejemimized Jemimah is actually de-Indianizing India. It is time that we learn the (de)Jemimah lessons and embrace everything Indian and every Indian.