The other day I saw an ad for a Black Friday sale in India.
It puzzled me. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in USA which falls on the last Thursday of November. On that day Americans stuff themselves with turkey, cranberry relish and pumpkin pies. Then on the Friday they kick off the Christmas shopping season with huge sales. There are often stampedes at big stores as people queue up from dawn for mega discounts.
The origin of Black Friday comes from 1950s Philadelphia to describe the chaos caused by shoppers. Now it’s been made more respectable to mean businesses moving from red to black as shoppers flood in after Thanksgiving Thursday.
But In India there’s no Thanksgiving Thursday but retailers have somehow discovered Black Friday. When it comes to sales any occasion will do.
On the other hand given that Halloween has pretty much entered the Indian festival calendar with Halloween parties in restaurants and cafes everywhere can Thanksgiving be far behind?
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Thanksgiving was one of my favorite American holidays. Of course, its history was complicated since the native Americans, the original inhabitants of America had little reason to give thanks to the newly arrived settlers who took away their land, gifted them deadly diseases and then herded them into reservations. But I thought we could all do with a festival whose main purpose was to give thanks.
Almost ten years ago a friend and I came up with a hare-brained idea to try and celebrate Thanksgiving in Kolkata. The great challenge was to try and track down a turkey. I finally found a poultry farmer who raised turkeys in his backyard though he said he didn’t eat it. He sells 25-30 in winter.
PL1: Aamra khai na Theek nai. 25-30 bikri hoy
Unfortunately when I went to pick it up I realised it was still very much alive, a big white bird who had been brought to market on the local train and now eyed me curiously. In panic I realised I needed to also find a butcher.
Then we found out there were other hurdles to overcome. Where would we find an oven large enough to fit the turkey? My friend Milena made a bet.
MCM1: in the beginning we had that bet of ok whos going to find the turkey first versus who’s going to find the oven first.
She located an oven but I had no pot big enough to marinate a big bird. For that I ended up using a sturdy black American trash bag. Then carried the turkey-in-a-trash bag in an Uber to the the oven. That was the only time I tried to celebrate Thanksgiving in India.
Later I discovered there were farms near by that actually provided dressed turkeys we could have just stuck in the oven.
TURKEY NOISE
But where was the challenge in that? Our wild-goose chase for an authentic turkey made the end product that much more worthwhile, something worth giving thanks for.
But when holidays like Thanksgiving get imported to India, we just bring the commerce not the feeling behind it. It’s merely an excuse to have Black Friday sales. Festivals, whether it’s Ganesh Puja or Diwali or Dhanteras are all about selling these days anyway. Different parts of India celebrate different festivals. Durga Puja in the East, Onam in the South, Ganesh Puja in West.
Amazon’s Great Indian Festival might be the one festival celebrated everywhere writes Vandanan Vausdevan in her book OTP Please about the online economy.
E-commerce has become our greatest festival and Thanksgiving is just more grist to its mill. The irony is aspiring to an American holiday when American right-wingers are openly turning on everything Indian in America. FBI director Kash Patel and Vivek Ramasway, candidate for governor of Ohio both have US President Donald Trump’s blessing but are trolled by Trump’s own base for being culturally Indian. When Kash Patel put out a Diwali greeting he got a MAGA backlash for promoting what one X user called “this false religion’s Diwali nonsense.” The campaign of Andrew Cuomo who lost the mayoral race in New York released (and deleted) an AI-generated video of his opponent Zohran Mamdani sloppily eating rice with his hands. Mamdani’s eventual election has resulted in a new explosion of xenophobia and racist memes.
Now my clumsy recreation of the spirit of American Thanksgiving in Kolkata feels rather wistful, a reminder of what feels like a different world. In an America, where the MAGA supporters accuse immigrants of just taking, many immigrants must be wondering what to give thanks for these days.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW