There’s sickness in the family, and I’m spending the season of good cheer in the waiting areas of Delhi’s hospitals. This evening, it was the Dharamshila Narayana Hospital which, as the name suggests, is under no compulsion to do the Christian thing. But the MRI department had ‘Jingle Bells’ playing on loop through the PA system, producing wild waa-waa effects mixed with the long, Zion dub-like pulse of the Magnetron.
In the afternoon, it was the Holy Family Hospital. What an apt destination for Christmas! But my daughter Hiya, who is a patient, pointed out that the ‘No stopping, no waiting’ signs at the portico were inappropriate for the season. If they hadn’t allowed the Magi to stop the barn in Nazareth, would there have been a New Testament? Any story to tell, at all?
Never mind, the halls of the hospital were decked with ― not holly, but very Indian tinsel, and nurses milled about under it, taking group photographs. Avuncular men and sari-clad women had set up stalls, selling cloth bags, home-made candles and uplifting pamphlets ― the sort of things you would find in a village mela.
Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns
Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle (editors)
Speaking Tiger
As Madhulika Liddle says in her introduction to Indian Christmas, the festival has been tropicalised. While mulled wine and punch still feature in some urban homes ― especially in the old presidency and cantonment towns ― her family from Saharanpur does a homely chicken curry for Christmas lunch. In Kerala, it’s more likely to be duck curry with appam, she writes.
Jerry Pinto, her fellow editor, has of late found his voice in the irrational, the mystical and the totally human (much like Christmas), working on matters ranging from psychological issues within his family to the surrealism of Swadesh Deepak, one of my friends who went for an evening walk and never returned. I still look out for him. I shall meet him again, I know, even if it is in the guise of someone else.
But to return to the tropicalisation of Christmas, the most interesting example in this anthology is the contemporary poetry of Arul Cellatturia (translated by Paula Richman), an engineer, a practising Catholic and a poet who’s considered to be of the Sangam tradition. He writes of the moon, which is repeatedly referenced in Sangam poetry, but here, it is compared with Jesus. The accompanying image is very apt: Our Lady of Good Health, whose shrine is at Velankanni, on the outskirts of Chennai. Its most interesting feature is little metal replicas of afflicted limbs and body parts, which the faithful offer. The practice was also common in the Roman Empire, a continent away.
Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim reminds us that Christmas is a mobile feast. You don’t have to stay home to celebrate. In her city, as in others in the east, formality and social distance break down very readily, especially at festival time. At Christmas, “you can land up at anyone’s home and be welcomed in. It does not matter whether someone is the chief minister, a top cop or the terrifying headmistress of your school.”
In many places, including in the metros, Christmas is a community thing, unlike in the West, where it is rooted in the family and the home. Manipur Naga writer Veio Pou writes that community feasts are organised by designated families. And from October, Yuletide music blared from PA systems, powered by car batteries before regular electric connections came to the settlement ― Boney M, Abba, Jim Reeves (but naturally!).
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Those are the very tracks that used to play on Christmas in Bow Barracks, built for World War I servicemen in Calcutta, and inhabited by a fantastically variegated bunch of Anglo-Indians, Kuomintang Chinese and free-floating ethnic Indians ever since. There’s music and dancing in the streets, wining and wassailing of Captain Haddock intensity, and home-grown saxophonistry of an order that John Coltrane would have applauded.
Christmas has probably been celebrated in India almost from the time of Christ. One of His apostles, St Thomas, was here, and apparently died in Chennai in AD 53. As Pinto notes, there was no snow or conifers in the Holy Land, and neither in this region south of the Himalayas. The iconography of the Christmas cards we trade is historically false.
St Thomas’ feast on December 21 is just past. Two millennia after the time of Jesus, we now have a book celebrating the many Christmases of India, which is, visually and culturally, much more like the Holy Land than the Christian-majority countries.