When I was a child I had a Christmas ritual in Kolkata. My father would get Christmas and New Year cards galore at office. I would arrange them all over the living room. I loved those cards - those images of fields covered in snow and cozy cottages with smoke coming out of their chimneys, Santa Claus and Christmas trees.
It never occurred to me to ask the obvious questions.
Why was I sharing pictures of snowy fields in balmy Kolkata? Why did my father get more Christmas and New Year cards than Diwali? What was I doing singing songs at school about snowmen, red-nosed reindeer and mangers?
RUDOLF
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
As I grew up Kolkata’s excessive Christmas schmaltz would feel somewhat embarrassing. It was all so tinsel, so fake, so cottonwool, as make-believe as Santa Claus. The British might have left the city but colonization had left us dreaming of a white Christmas
In later years it felt even tackier. Kolkata started having a full-fledged Christmas carnival, jingle bells and all with Christmas lighting displays.
CHRISTMAS CAROL SINGER
There are Christmas carol festivals and snaking queues for plum cakes.One of the hoary local clubs is sending out its Christmas lunch menus - sliced ham, roast turkey with blueberry sauce, pork chops with honey mustard sauce, plum pudding and yule log. Digestive pills are not included on the menu.
To be honest here is nothing appetizing about seeing scores of adults pushing and shoving and trampling over each other for a slice of dry turkey meat.
But what I didn’t realize is that while we were trying to have as white a Christmas as possible in our South Kolkata homes, all over India Christmas was turning a more desi shade of brown.
After the publication of the anthology Indian Christmas, one of its editors Madhulika Liddle said growing up Christian in towns in states like Madhya Pradesh without big Christian populations, her family learned to have a DIY Christmas. Their carols came in both Hindi and English and her mother would invariably twist them around a little bit says Liddle.
ML1: “So instead of singing while shepherds watched their flocks by night we would sing while shepherds washed their socks by night.
And the food reflected the India they lived in. Instead of obsessing about turkey and ham, they had chicken curry and mutton pulao and shami kebabs.
This version of Christmas is homegrown and marinaded in Indian traditions. It’s not make-believe like my cotton-wool Christmas with its warm Jim Reeves songs.
JIM REEVES
Old timers might roll their eyes at Kolkata’s Christmas carnival and call it tacky. We might shake our heads and say the old Christmas spirit is missing as they stare aghast at the thousands of revelers on the street.
But those thousands of visitors in Santa hats out to have a good time at the Christmas carnival and eat “Xmas cake” are in their own way keeping an Indian Christmas alive.
CAKEs
It’s a Kolkata Christmas rather than a Calcutta Christmas haunted by the ghosts of Christmases past.
In fact these new boisterous mixed-up Christmases probably reflects the true spirit of Christmas better than the faux snow Christmases I grew up with. It is a Christmas spirit that accommodates all instead of telling those we deem different there is no room at the inn.
As Jerry Pinto, the co-editor of Indian Christmas said
JP1: “Christ child himself is a child in distress. He is under threat of his life. His parents are refugees and they are homeless. The capitalist institutions of the inn and the hotel will not give them refuge. So they take refuge in nature, they go back to the animals, the warm breath of cows and goats and donkeys is what warms the child.”
Thus it makes perfect sense that this year the ongoing Bengal Biennale in Kolkata is exhibiting the works of Madhvi Parekh in Kolkata at St James Church. On paper Parekh, born in a village in Gujarat, well-known for using folk motifs in her work, seems to be an odd fit for a 19th century church in the heart of Kolkata. Behind her Last Supper, rendered in grayscale, the open windows hint at temples and mosques outside.
Her Christ’s face is painted in tones of white, brown and yellow unlike the white figure on a cross that hung above the blackboard of my missionary school. It’s a Jesus that is very much at home in India.
Perhaps that, not mulled wine, is the real spirit of Christmas.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW