A Colonial Christmas

A box with a coloured bow is magic for any child. A rich, glittering tree, bountiful with family love and unknown gifts, likewise.

Christmas of the western style, with tree, presents, and Santa, comes to India from so far away that it already suggests the non-everyday exotic. It is of the same class as pirates, treasure islands, rolling seas, prairies with wagons and cowboys. These images are so familiar and so totally foreign. You love them already because to love the never-has-been is the essence of the fairy tale.

It must have been in class three that I heard of Christmas, and it was almost certainly through the one volume of pleasure reading in English that I possessed: a Girls’ Annual. This Girls’ Annual had girls like you, but totally different: their short, styled hair signalling tomboyish freedom, their skirts that did not impede movement. Horses to ride, holidays to go on, adventures by the sea, friendships, letter-writing, journals. A risqué life. You learnt autonomy from the Girls’ Annual.

A reader like me knew I was clearly not those girls but still was part of that same world because I was like them, with the same soul that wanted self-fulfilment, and we were all communing over the seas and over the decades. This did not estrange me from my immediate world and my parents, however. They had made this possible, they had given me this book, and they stayed, as it were, alongside me. With my ever-widening eyes I saw afresh our home and family, dogs and servants, lawn and verandah, and my soul moved with all these as well as with those girls in that distant island.

So when Christmas entered on the stage as a part of that storybook world, it was as desirable as all those other girlish desires in the stories. And it was also as legitimate, as sanctioned by home and family, as anything else in my life.

My first celebration of Christmas must have had the full sanction of my mother because I couldn’t have been more than ten, my little brother five. My head full of vague ideas, I collected cardboard, paper, scissors, glue, paints, brushes, ribbon, glitter. With brother as loyal assistant and an occasional man servant for mechanical help, I produced holly leaves with red berries, snowflakes, presents wrapped extravagantly, elves, musical notes, cradle, baby, stars and angels. I set up the room with golden bells and mistletoe. I made a whole tree. I put dozens of presents under it as well as the whole Nativity.

It had no meaning whatsoever to me.

The making of it was utterly pleasurable and meaningful.

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Like every young person who plays with pirates and robbers and activities that are truly fantastical, I felt this was just right—dabbling with the exotic, setting up Christmas.

What happened then? I don’t remember. Maybe my mother provided a Christmas cake or pudding. I never liked any form of raisins and dried fruits in my sweets, so I have erased it from my memory. Maybe she bought me my first record of Christmas carols. But I never had possessions. The gifts I wrapped for others were the cheapest, most trivial things, since I had neither money nor actual freedom to go shopping or searching. Gifts were often my own castaway things, or things I could make with paper and glue, such as books, cards and calendars, or things picked up from somewhere in the house.

I got wiser after the first experience. I maintained a budget. I saved judiciously for a time ahead, not only any gifted money, but also chocolates, pictures, giftable items, dried flowers or grasses, a lot of cotton wool. 

You need a lot of cotton wool to cover all the branches of the tree and also the place underneath for everything to look properly snowy.

Dear reader, here is the crux of the matter: I was not colonised. I had made Christmas my own.

After that first experience, for the next six decades of my life, when someone says “Christmas,” there is in the universe that person’s Christmas and there is equally my own Christmas that is no less. In my world, it rains in July, and it blows hot winds in May, and it is Christmas at the end of December.

Life became complicated. Life became heavy. Politics was everywhere and nothing had ever been innocent.

I lived in Moscow where they had declared that it was actually a New Year tree and a grandfather that had deceptively appeared to be a Christmas tree and a Santa Claus. I travelled in Europe and saw the continuity with the past that was invisible to Europeans themselves: families, intimacy, privacy. I lived in Connecticut and was surprised, then suffocated, by the total sweetness of the repetitive, mass-produced decorations, music, activities.

The saving grace was my Connecticut mother from whom I learnt how underneath all the flim-flam there were simple human values and rules.

Eastern Orthodoxy, Communism, Roman Catholicism, capitalism, commercialism, colonialism, all sifted and found their place in the world. All were clearly products of history and politics. All were equally humane and equally dark. I studied and lived in Chicago, and learnt to merge a fine intellectual postcolonial consciousness with the emotional awareness that I loved carols and festivities. We could all get together and condemn mimicry and colonial constructions, but I could sing more carols than they could.

Then we had our own school and it was a matter of principle to celebrate all festivals of all religions and to do so in a child-centred way. Year after year, therefore, in the heart of provincial and village India, in Varanasi, we decorate Christmas trees and sang carols. Our Christmas celebrations are the best in the eastern atmosphere, not least because we can even sing ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’

Have I colonised Christmas, or it me? 

I wouldn’t know, because love intervenes.

Nita Kumar is honorary director of the NGO NIRMAN and Brown Family Professor Emerita of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College.