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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, like a line of marching soldiers. Some years there were so many we had to hang them on a clotheslines like washing left out to dry. I loved those cards—those images of fields covered in snow and cosy cottages with smoke coming out of their chimneys, Santa Claus with his reindeer, Christmas trees with all their bells and whistles.
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, like a line of marching soldiers. Some years there were so many we had to hang them on a clotheslines like washing left out to dry. I loved those cards—those images of fields covered in snow and cosy cottages with smoke coming out of their chimneys, Santa Claus with his reindeer, Christmas trees with all their bells and whistles.
It never occurred to me to ask the obvious and rather awkward questions.
It never occurred to me to ask the obvious and rather awkward 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 and Bijoya? Why was Christmas with all its accessories, plum cakes, holly and candy canes, even part of my cultural makeup? What was I doing singing songs at school about snowmen, red-nosed reindeer and mangers? One year I even built a model with cardboard, baby Jesus and all, for a beloved teacher at my Jesuit school.
As I grew up, Kolkata’s excessive Christmas schmaltz would feel somewhat embarrassing. It was all so tinsel, so fake, so cotton-wool, as make-believe as Santa Claus. The burra sahibs might have left the city but colonisation 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. Park Street, the centre of nightlife, is festooned with Christmas lighting displays. There are Christmas carol festivals and snaking queues for plum cakes. Luxury hotels are advertising hampers with signature stollen, hazelnut dragees and plum pudding potted in jars. One of the hoary local clubs is sending out its Christmas lunch menus—sliced ham, grilled beckty fish with butter garlic sauce, roast turkey with blueberry sauce, pork chops with honey mustard sauce, plum pudding and yule log. Digestive pills are not included on the menu. As a boy I would look forward to these lunches. As an adult I avoid them—there is nothing appetising about seeing scores of adults pushing and shoving and trampling over each other for a slice of dry turkey meat. And no adult other than Santa Claus should wear Santa hats.There is nothing very attractive about a Santa hat selfie.
And yet I somehow just cannot shake that Christmas feeling.
The cheer in the city feels infectious, sometimes literally so. I remember the throngs of revellers flooding the street to gawk at the lights and take selfies in the middle of the covid pandemic. But much as we might scoff at the need to have plum cakes with candied fruit and the stick-figure mall-workers in oversized Santa suits, the feeling of good cheer is undeniable and in these bleak times, that’s not something to scoff at.
But the other thing I didn’t realise while I memorised my Christmas carols, 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.
Also read: The loss of sound in our noisy lives
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 jugaad Christmas. Their carols came in both Hindi and English and her mother would invariably twist them around a little bit. “So instead of singing while shepherds watched their flocks by night, we would sing while shepherds washed their socks by night," she told me. And the food reflected the India they lived in. She had Christmas cake and gujiyas and shakarparas while for Christmas lunch, instead of obsessing about turkey and ham, they had chicken curry and mutton pulao and shami kebabs. It’s an acknowledgement of the fact that Christmas, and for that matter any festival, is as much about holding on to traditions as it is about re-jigging them to match the worlds we live in.
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. Old timers might roll their eyes at Kolkata’s Christmas carnival and call it tacky. We might baulk at every bakery chain, big or small, coming out with its own line of “rich Xmas cakes" while we, the true blue Christmas-wallas, swear by the old stalwarts like Saldanha or Nahoum. The NRIs who fly into town in winter, determined to re-live the Christmases of their parents in Bengal Club and Calcutta Club, might shake their heads and say the old Christmas spirit is missing as they stare aghast at the thousands of revellers 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. It’s a Kolkata Christmas rather than a Calcutta Christmas haunted by the ghosts of Christmases past. And that is not a bad thing.
In fact, these new boisterous mixed-up Christmases probably reflect 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 in an interview, if you think about it, the “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 and rangoli designs in her work, seems to be an odd fit for a 19th-century church in the heart of Kolkata. Her art blending folk idioms and Christian iconography depicts her take on The Last Supper and the journey of Jesus. 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. Behind her Last Supper, rendered in grayscale, the open windows hint at temples and mosques outside. In the programme notes, curator Siddharth Sivakumar writes “Parekh’s fascination with Jesus transcends religion; for her, he is a muse—a figure of suffering and compassion whose story speaks across cultures."
That, not mulled wine, is the real spirit of Christmas.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr
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