Santa Claus – Borderless

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns

Editors: Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

We all know that Christmas Day, the night that Jesus came to earth, bringing with him peace and love for all humanity, is celebrated by Christians all around the world with great enthusiasm and merriment. Interestingly, for a multicultural country like India, Christmas is equally celebrated — not only as a religious festival but also as a cultural one. For a country where less than three percent of the population is Christian, the central celebration is the birth of a child, but it takes on new meaning in different Indian homes. Known in local parlance also as “Burradin”[big day] Indians from all classes and communities look forward to this day when they can at least buy a cake from the local market, shower their children with stars, toys, red Santa caps and other decorative items, and go for a family picnic for lunch, dine at a fancy restaurant or visit the nearby church. This syncretic cult makes this festival unique, and for Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle editing this very interesting anthology comprising of different genres of Indian writing on the topic – essays, images, poems and hymns, both in English and also translated from India’s other languages is indeed unique.

**Mary and Jesus’ a painting by Sister Marie Claire.** **(Picture courtesy: SMMI Provincialate, Bengalaru)**

In his introduction which he titles “Unto All of Us a Child is Born,” Jerry Pinto reminisces how he was surprised when he saw his first live Santa Claus. He was a figure in red that Akbarally’s, Bombay’s first department store, wheeled out around Christmas week. “He was a thin man, not very convincingly padded… seemed to be from my part of the world, someone who would climb up our narrow Mahim stairs and leave something at the door for us at three or four a.m., then take the local back to his regular job as a postman or seller of second-hand comics. The man in the cards and storybooks preferred London and New York. And a lot of snow. … Today, it is almost a cliché to say that Christmas, like every other festival, is hostage to the market.”

The other editor, Madhulika Liddle in her introduction “Christmas in Many Flavours” states, “According to the annals of the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory bakery in Thalassery, Kerala, its founder Mambally Bapu baked the first Christmas cake in India”. It was way back in 1883, at the instance of an East India Company spice planter he set about trying to create a Christmas cake. Liddle wondered what that first Christmas cake tasted like; how close it was to the many thousands of cakes still baked and consumed at Christmas in Kerala? She also writes about the situation in India, where instead of wholesale and mindless importing of Christmas ideas, the people have been discerning enough to amalgamate all our favourite (and familiar) ideas of what a celebration should be and fit them into a fiesta of our own.

Images from ***Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns***: **dressed up as Santa Claus leave for school in Punjab. (Picture courtesy: Ecocabs,Fazilka)**.

There are several other aspects of Christmas celebrations too. The Christmas bazaars are now increasingly fashionable in bigger cities. The choral Christmas concerts and Christmas parties are big community affairs, with dancing, community feasts, Christmas songs, and general bonhomie. Across the Chhota Nagpur area, tribal Christians celebrate with a community picnic lunch, while many coastal villages in Kerala have a tradition of partying on beaches, with the partying spilling over into catamarans going out into the surf. In Kolkata’s predominantly Anglo-Indian enclave of Bow Bazar, Santa Claus traditionally comes to the party in a rickshaw, and in much of northeast India, the entire community may indulge in a pot-luck community feast at Christmas time. Thus Liddle states:

“Missionaries to Indian shores, whether St Thomas or later evangelists from Portugal, France, Britain, or wherever brought us the religion; we adopted the faith, but reserved for ourselves the right to decide how we’d celebrate its festivals.”

Apart from their separate introductions, the editors have collated twenty-seven entries of different kinds, each one more interesting than the other, that showcase the richness and variety of Christmas celebrations across the country. Though Christianity may have come to much of India by way of missionaries from Europe or America, it does not mean that the religion remained a Western construct. Indians adopted Christianity but made it their own. They translated the Bible into different Indian languages, translated their hymns, and composed many of their own. They built churches which they at times decorated in their own much-loved ways. Their feasts comprised of food that was often like the ones consumed during Holi or Diwali.

Thus, Christmas in India turned to a great Indian festival that highlighted the syncretism of our culture. Damodar Mauzo, Nilima Das, Vivek Menezes, Easterine Kire, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Nazes Afroz, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Jane Borges and Mary Sushma Kindo, among others, write about Christmas in Goa, Nagaland, Kerala, Jharkhand, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong and Saharanpur. Arul Cellatturai writes tender poems in the Pillaitamil tradition to the moon about Baby Jesus, and Punjabi singers compose tappe-boliyan about Mary and her infant. There are Mughal miniatures depicting the birth of Jesus, paintings by Jyoti Sahi and Sister Claire inspired by folk art, and pictures of Christmas celebrations in Aizawl, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kochi and these visual demonstrations enrich the text further.

**Seventeenth-century painting depicting Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem. From a Mir’at al-quds of Father Jerome, 2005, Cleveland Museum of Art. (Wikimedia Commons)**

Interestingly, the very first entry of this anthology is an excerpt from the final two sections of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s finest long poems, inspired by the life of Jesus Christ. Tagore wrote the poem “The Child” in 1930, first in English and translated it himself into Bengali the following year, titling it “Sishutirtha.” But many years even before that, every Christmas in Santiniketan, Tagore would give a talk about Christ’s life and message. Speaking on 25 December 1910, he said:

“The Christians call Jesus Man of Sorrow, for he has taken great suffering on himself. And by this he has made human beings great, has shown that the human beings stand above suffering.”

India celebrates Christmas with its own regional flair, its own flavour. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar.

Apart from the solemnity of the Church services, there is a lot of merrymaking that includes the food and drink, the song and dance. The songs often span everything from the stirring ‘Hallulujah Chorus’ to vibrant paeans sung in every language from Punjabi to Tamil, Hindi to Munda, Khariya and Mizo tawng.

Among the more secular aspects of Christmas celebrations are the decorations, and this is where things get even more eclectic. Whereas cities and towns abound in a good deal of mass decorating, with streets and public places being prettied up weeks in advance, rural India has its own norms, its own traditions. Wreaths and decorated conifers are unknown, for instance, in the villages of the Chhota Nagpur region; instead, mango leaves, marigolds and paper streamers may be used, and the tree to be decorated may well be a sal or a mango tree. Nirupama Dutt tells us how since her city had no firs and pines, she got her brother’s colleague to fetch a small kikar tree as kikars grew aplenty in the wild empty plots all over Chandigarh. In many entries we read about how Christmas decorations were rarely purchased but were cleverly constructed at home.

A very integral part of the Christmas celebrations of course is music. In many Goan Catholic neighbourhoods, Jim Reeves continued to haunt the listeners in his smooth baritone: “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you/ I’ll be so blue thinking about you/ Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree/ Won’t mean a thing, dear, if you’re not here with me.” Simultaneously, the words and music of “A Christmas Prayer” by Alfred J D’Souza are as follows: “Play on your flute/ Bhaiyya, Bhaiyya/ Jesus the saviour has come./ Put on your ghungroos/ Sister, Sister/ Dance to the beat of the drums!/ Light up a deepam in your window/ Doorstep, don with rangoli/ Strings of jasmine, scent your household/ Burn the sandalwood and ghee,/ Call your neighbour in, smear vermillion/ Write on his forehead to show/ A sign that we are one/ Through God’s eternal Son/ In friendship and in love ever more!/ Ah! Ah!” But the most popular Christmas song was of course “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way….”

In “Christmas Boots and Carols in Shillong”, Patricia Mukhim tells us how the word ‘Christmas’ triggers a whole host of activities in Meghalaya and other Northeastern states that have a predominantly Christian population. Apart from cleaning and painting the houses, everything looks like fairyland during Christmas, a day for which they have been waiting for an entire year. She particularly mentions the camaraderie that prevails during this time:

“Christmas is a time when invitations are not needed. Friends can land up at each others’ homes any time on Christmas Eve to celebrate. Most friends drop by with a bottle of wine and others pool in the snacks and the party continues until the wee hours of morning. It’s one day in the year when the state laws that noise should end at 10 p.m. is violated with gay abandon. …Shillong [is] a very special place on Planet Earth. Everyone from the chief minister down can strum the guitar and has a voice that could put lesser mortals to shame. And Christmas is also a day when all VIPism and formalities are set aside. 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.”

One very significant common theme in all the multifarious entries is the detail descriptions provided on food, especially the makeshift way Christmas cakes are baked in every home and the Indian way meat and other specialties are being prepared on the special day. There are several entries that give us details about the particular food that was prepared and consumed at the time along with actual recipes about baking cakes. “Christmas Pakwan[1]” by Jaya Bhattcharji Rose, “The Spirit of Christmas Cake” by Priti David, and “Armenian Christmas Food in Calcutta” by Mohona Kanjilal need special mention in this context. Liddle in her introduction wrote:

“Our Christmas cakes are a reflection of how India celebrates Christmas: with its own religious flair, its own flavour. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar.”

Later in her article “Cake Ki Roti at Dua ka Ghar[2],” the house where they lived in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, she wrote how her parents told her that ‘bajre ki tikiyas’, thin patties made of pearl millet flour sweetened with jaggery, used to be a staple at Christmas teatime at Dua ka Ghar[3], though she has no recollection of those. She of course vividly recalls the ‘cake ki roti’. This indigenisation of Christmas is something that’s most vividly seen in the feasting that accompanies Christmas celebrations across the country. While hotels and restaurants in big cities lay out spreads of roast turkey (or chicken, more often), roast potatoes and Christmas puddings, the average Indian Christian household may have a Christmas feast that comprises largely of markedly regional dishes.

In Kerala, for instance, duck curry with appams is likely to be the piece de resistance. In Nagaland, pork curries rich in chillies and bamboo shoots are popular, and a whole roast suckling pig (with spicy chutneys to accompany it) may hold centre stage. A sausage pulao, sorpotel and xacuti would be part of the spread in Goa, and all across a wide swathe of north India, biriyanis, curries, and shami kababs are de rigueur at Christmas.

This beautifully done book, along with several coloured pictures, endorses the idea of religious syncretism that prevails in India. As a coiner of words, Nilima Das came up with the idea that ‘Christianism’ in our churches is after all, a kind of ‘Hinduanity’ (“Made in India and All of That”). This reviewer feels guilty of not being able to mention each of the unique entries separately that this anthology contains, so it is suggested that this is a unique book to enjoy reading, to possess, as well as to gift anyone during the ensuing Christmas season.

[1] Cuisine

[2] Cake bread

[3] Blessed House

Somdatta Mandal, critic, academic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

Click here to access an excerpt of Tagore’s The Child

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I went to Kerala for Christmas, travelling from Bangalore on the night bus. It wasn’t the first time I had taken a night bus in India. The first time was when I went to Madikeri, high in the hills of Coorg. That bus was one with berths that one can lie completely flat on. In fact, you have no choice but to lie flat because there are no seats. It should be more comfortable than sitting upright all night, and I am sure many passengers find it so, but the vibrations of the engine made my body vibrate in sympathy and every bend in the road made me slide around the berth uncontrollably and when the bus climbed a slope all the blood rushed to my head, which was oriented towards the rear of the vehicle. I decided never to use this restful method of travel again.

This is why I chose a more old-fashioned style of bus in order to journey to Kerala. I understand seats. Your head is always up and your feet always down, and if this happens not to be the case then it quickly becomes obvious that some disaster has happened. Head up, feet down, seems to me the natural order of the universe when travelling a great distance. It was a twelve-hour journey. In India that might not be so remarkable, but I come from a small country where twelve hours on a bus is sufficient time to drive right across the land and a fair way out to sea. “Captain, there seems to be a bus overtaking us!” “Have you been at the rum again, bosun?” The immensity of India is something I doubt I will ever get used to. It is big even in terms of bigness.

Not that the bus with seats was completely free of problems. The seats had a lever by the side of them, and if this lever was pulled, the seats reclined. I was expecting something of this nature, but I was completely taken by surprise at the extreme angle they adopted. They reclined to an excessive degree. All was fine for the first fifty kilometres or so, then the young lady in the seat in front of me decided it was bedtime. She reclined the seat so precipitously that it whacked on my knees, and I was given no choice but to stare directly at the top of her head which was almost touching my chin. The only solution was to recline my own seat. I did so and heard a yowl from behind. I had taken my turn to crush some other innocent knees. And so I lay in this absurd position, sandwiched between two sleepers as the hours slowly passed.

The bus was soon filled with snorers and all of them were out of time with each other. I am a jazz aficionado, I love music with complex rhythms, and I also love polyrhythms, but the point of such intricate music is that there is resolution at some point along the melody lines. The contrasting rhythms ought to come together at least sometimes, in order to provide structure, but the snoring was far too avant garde for that. It was atonal and without time signatures. A man in a forest of lumberjack gnomes probably feels the same way I did, as the sawing takes place and the trees topple with a crash. There was no crash for me during that night, thank goodness, but plenty of jolting as the bus ran over potholes in the highway or swerved around unseen obstacles or accelerated to overtake rival night buses also full of snoring passengers.

Well, all this is a nuisance but one that is necessary for travellers to endure. I reached my destination safely and that’s what really counts. It was morning in Kerala and the heat was already intense. Bangalore is at altitude and altitude is a restrainer of temperature. The landscape shimmered and the port city of Kochi pulsated under the sun. No matter! Time to find my hotel and rest for a while in order to catch up on all the sleep I had missed on the night bus, whose motto is ‘sleep like a baby’, which turned out to be accurate, for I slept not at all and felt like wailing for hours. I went to the correct address and found that the hotel had been closed for the past two years. Ah well!

We are always advised to expect the unexpected, and we do this well, but I don’t think we are ever prepared for the types of unexpectedness we encounter. I was ready for the bus to break down, or for me to lose my way in the narrow entangled city streets, or for crows to swoop and peck my head. I wasn’t ready for a hotel to not exist. I soon found another and it was a better establishment with two ceiling fans instead of one, a balcony, even a fridge that was on the verge of working. That fridge later held two bottles of beer and cooled them from hot to lukewarm, and I drank them one evening and regretted it because I have no stomach for beer. Because of that warm beery incident, I missed out on sampling the palm wine that Kerala is so famous for.

The old part of Kochi is picturesque and labyrinthine. I wandered where I would and ended up somewhere, but I’m still not sure where. Christmas lights were strung between the buildings, large glowing stars had been erected on the summits of walls, on roofs, or dangled from gables. One church I passed had a façade in the form of a gigantic angel. This was really quite surreal. We tend to think of angels as radiant beings with a human form, perfect men and women, but if you read the Bible you will soon see that most angels have an appearance that is not human at all. The highest rank of angels, the Ophanim, resemble sets of interlocking gold wheels with each wheel’s rim covered with eyes. They float through the air without needing wings. A church façade based on one of these angels would be an example of experimental architecture. But the church in the shape of a personable angel was endearing.

I walked past another church and saw a fleet of Santa Clauses mounted on bicycles about to set off. Is ‘Clauses’ the plural of ‘Claus’? I have no idea, for it has never occurred to me that there might be more than one of them. This fleet consisted of children in costume and I have no notion of where they were going or what they would do when they arrived. I strolled onwards and they rode past me, guided by two men on a scooter, one steering and the other holding in his arms a loudspeaker and facing backwards, like a Pied Piper who has entered the Electronic Age. One by the one, the Santa Clauses pedalled past, laughing, waving, generally enjoying themselves.

This was Christmas at its most gentle, innocent and benevolent, a far cry from the Christmas ritual I witnessed exactly thirty years ago in Prague, where the tradition involves a saint, an angel and a devil chained together who stalk pedestrians in order to give them lumps of coal that represent the sins of the year. Prague was freezing, Kochi was broiling, and I know which I prefer, but the beer in Prague is certainly better. I reached the waterfront and sat under a tree and wondered if the mass migration of Santa Clauses I had seen was truly a fleet. Maybe it was an armada instead, or a division? Is there a collective noun for Father Christmas? A Splurge of Santas?

Kochi is riddled with waterways, and it feels like an excellent location for a port, which it is. No wonder it was established at that spot. I felt a small connection to the ancient mariners who had sailed here from the West long ago, from Europe and around the tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. One day I will travel from this very place to the islands of Lakshadweep. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, since I was eight or nine years old. I had entered a competition run by the Twinings tea company and I won. A map of the Indian Ocean was given with the names of islands removed and the entrants had to fill in those missing names. I consulted an atlas to do this, as I imagine every other entrant did, but I had an unknown advantage.

My atlas was very old, a green battered thing, and the Lakshadweep islands were marked by that very name. In other atlases the island chain was apparently named as the Laccadives. The administrators were looking for Lakshadweep and that is how I won a year’s supply of tea. It came regularly via the postman in an endless series of little tubs, Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong, Peach Oolong. But in the end, this endless series finally ended, and my tea luck turned out only to feel inexhaustible rather than to be so. I have never won a competition since or even come close. But I have had a fondness for tea and Lakshadweep ever since, so it is imperative that I sail to those islands one day.

During my time in Kochi, I travelled on a boat only once, from Fort Kochi to Vypin Island. A battered rusty ferry crammed with foot passengers, cars and motorcycles. Cost of ticket? The equivalent of three British pennies. This is far cheaper than the cost of any ferry I have ever been on, with the exception of the occasional free ferries that I have encountered around the world, such as the one that takes passengers across the Suez Canal from one side of Port Said to the other, or the ferry that travels back and forth between Mombasa, which is on an island, and the African mainland. Sea travel is something special and I have done too little of it in my life. If I could have sailed back to Bangalore, I would have. As it happens, I went back on another night bus, but this time the person in the seat in front of me only reclined their seat to a reasonable angle. My knees were not crushed, and in return I did not crush the knees of the person behind me. I like and admire reasonable angles. They make geometry sweet.

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles