A Hindu festival called Christmas: Encounters between a non-practising Hindu and Roman Catholicism

Come the first of December, there’s miles and miles of cotton wool snowfall in all the shop-windows of Bombay, aka Mumbai. The only transportation during this time of blizzards, avalanches and snow drifts are the reindeers and snow-sleds driven by old men in post-office red coats with fur collars and trousers and flowing long fleecy-white beards.

Everywhere you see the star of Bethlehem, toy cribs, mangers, the three magi, the shepherds and the holy couple and their baby. All the fancy stores and the malls – where else but in Bombay will you find multi-storeyed malls in the heart of downtown while more than half of the city lives on the pavements and slums – are twitching with tiny electrical lights draped on stunted or monster Christmas trees. The shiny green nylon fir needles weighed down with trinkets and crackers glitter and glint malevolently.

The temperature hits a chillingly cold 33 degrees centigrade during the day on the western littoral of India and occasionally plummets at night all the way to 20 degrees when Bombayites take out their heavy winter woollens: sweaters, jackets, parkas, scarves, monkey-caps, mittens, snow-boots, not to mention thermal underwear.

As the days race past towards the longest day of the year, the tension mounts and the excitement is palpable. The new middle class and the nouveau riche, fat with IT money and new-found prosperity from booming businesses and that very special cornucopia called corruption, will celebrate that secular festival called Christmas by shopping till they have dropped millions in the till every single day in December.

Ah, the wonders of marketing are truly wondrous, for along with cigarettes, GM foods, free-trade and uncontrolled consumerism, the West is converting the native idolaters to Christmas, Santa Claus and the mandatory trillion-dollar business of exchanging gifts.

Currently, India has the third-largest population of Muslims in the world, around 130 million. Along with close to a hundred thousand Parsees (or Zoroastrians), they have been in the country for something like 1,000 years, but the rest of India does not celebrate Muharram or Nowroz, the Parsi new year.

Christians, on the other hand, number a mere 20 million, most of whom were converted barely 300 or 400 years ago. Yet it is their festivals, Christmas, Easter and now Valentine’s Day that the people of India have appropriated as their very own.

Christianity comes to India

Christianity came to India, according to one theory, with the landing of the apostle, Thomas, the Doubter, on the shores of Kerala at the southern tip of the subcontinent. It is his followers who are known as Syrian Christians. There was, however, a second coming. That was in the year 1498 when Vasco da Gama turned up, oddly enough, once again in Kerala and presented some monumentally tawdry knick-knacks to the king, the Zamorin of Calicut.

The Zamorin should have turned him round 180 degrees to face the Indian Ocean and kicked him on his butt all the way back to Portugal, but he failed to do so. Instead he welcomed the foreigners and Roman Catholicism got a foothold in India.

The spice trade was the obvious reason for Vasco da Gama’s visit but it was always coupled with saving the heathens. Once the Portuguese were established in Goa, Jesuits and later other orders began their mission of converting the unwary local population to Christ.

The third wave of Christian missionaries came with the British. They were mostly Protestants and though they had the full support of the Crown, their conversion-rates were not a patch on that of those of the Roman Catholics from Goa.

For a while it looked as if the Portuguese, who were a mercantile power long before the English, would take possession of the western coastline of the peninsula before making inroads into the interior. They rapidly took Goa, Diu, Daman and Bom Bahia, the Good Bay or Mumbai as it is known today, and then ran out of steam because of lack of funds, support from home and visionary leadership.

By the time the British settled down, the only territories left with the Portuguese were Goa, Daman and Diu. But whereas the pursuit of colonisation and greed were severely checked, the conquest of souls was vastly successful. Much of Goa became Roman Catholic and parlayed the coloniser’s tongue, Portuguese, into a position of power and privilege in government and society. But for sheer prescience, there was nobody who read the future as clearly as the Catholic clergy who went on a spree to open English-medium schools all over the country.

I become a Hindu-Catholic

I was given to changing schools with the same alacrity that the Sheikhs of Araby were supposed to change their lady-partners. My father worked in the Railways and one day, the wife of one of his Catholic friends, a Mrs Drego, took charge of me and marched me to Don Bosco High School at King’s Circle, a suburb of Bombay a couple of miles from my home.

She was not a very tall woman but she had an impressive presence. She wore a saree made from a new-fangled fabric that I had never seen before. It was shiny and slithery and every now and then it sizzled with charges of electrical static. The saree was blinding white with a broad, bottle-green border. But what I kept staring at surreptitiously was that it had stitched-on pleats. Instead of draping it as my mother would, Mrs Drego must have got into it feet first and worn it like a skirt.

We stood in a queue in front of the principal’s office for hours, maybe four, perhaps five. I was wise beyond my years and knew that this was a futile exercise. We had already been told several times that all divisions of all classes from class 1 to 11 were way beyond full, but Mrs Drego had my hand firmly in hers and she was not about to let go of me.

Father Giacomello, the principal, took a break at one, had lunch and came back. We were still there though I was convinced that I was ready for the last rites that the Catholics called extreme unction. At 3 pm, we were ushered in. Father Giacomello looked exhausted and he quickly set matters to rest. “If there had been any room, Mrs Drego, I would have admitted the boy. Please go home.” I sprang up from my seat instantly but was firmly shoved back.

“I don’t want a room, Father,” Mrs Drego smiled brightly. “All I want for this clever little boy is a little space. Just two inches is all I am asking for.” Now it was true that I was so thin (already five-eight but barely 96 pounds and still shooting up), sometimes you saw me but most of the time you didn’t, but two inches? What was Mrs Drego talking about? I was being reduced to Tom Thumb. I had never been so humiliated.

But by now the “clever little boy” was so ravenous and fed up, he was willing to say goodbye to all education and become a shoe-shine boy but only after eating Mrs Drego uncooked and whole right then and there. “Mrs Drego, you understand English? The classes are absolutely full. Listen to me, go home. Try some other school.”

“Two inches, Father, only two inches.”

The overweight priest who had no neck shook his head in despair and said goodbye to us. Within a month Mrs Drego had got her two inches and I was installed in class 6, division A.

School started every morning with the Lord’s Prayer. I was in Don Bosco for six years. Enough time for even a stone or a clod of earth to learn the fine short prayer but there was something inexplicably perverse and contrary in me. Every single day I mimed and semi-lip-synched the half-familiar words but not once did I recite the prayer. If it was a rebellion of some kind, then it was an extremely childish one. I had no idea what I was rebelling against or what cause I was fighting for. I am ashamed to say that I still don’t know all the words.

Above the blackboard in each classroom, Christ was nailed all over again to a cross. The patron of the school was the founder of the Salesian order, Don Bosco. But for some odd reason, his portrait did not adorn the walls. Instead, we looked at a highly air-brushed Dominic Savio, the boy-saint who had doubtless performed some miracle and then ascended to heaven to meet his maker. Dominic was dressed in a jacket and a bow-tie and his eyes were glued to the sky or rather, the ceiling, because like all the super-rich, God has a spiffy loft apartment on the terrace.

I was going through a rough patch in my school years and excessively given to bouts of superstition. I grovelled in front of the boy-saint and had appallingly abject and servile one-way conversations with him. I had developed a private code for the purpose. If I looked at him in a certain way and prayed desperately, he was supposed to come through for me in my exams. He was far more sensible than I was and gave my frantic entreaties a wide berth.

The faithful in the Catholic school system had Bible Class while those that fell outside the pale got Moral Science. This turgid, mind-numbingly unimaginative and soul-destroying subject was compulsory and came in a question-and-answer format. “Who made man? God made man.” And so on and so on. The great contribution of Catholic schools to teaching in India is what we called mugging. The idea is that it is a crime to allow young minds, not to mention older ones, to think for themselves.

This is, needless to say, a corollary of the “forbidden fruit” doctrine. Look what happened when our first parents made their own choices: they got kicked out of Eden. The prime example of this school of thinking was the Moral Science class. Ethical complexity, ambiguity and dilemmas were taboo, a total no-no. If you had any sense, you learnt everything by heart and you never argued because that might confuse the poor priest and cause him to have a nervous breakdown.

One of the intriguing by-products about being in Don Bosco High School was that I was often taken for a Roman Catholic. Talk about being ambivalent. In my early years there, most if not all my friends were Goan Catholics, most of them from the poorer areas of Parel and Lalbaug. I don’t remember whether my speech patterns had become akin to theirs. But I seemed to have drifted away as I moved into the higher grades and my new companions were mostly non-Catholic. It is difficult to say whether this was because I had become conscious of the differences between our cultures and upbringing.

My family was poor, but I came from reformist stock and to that extent from a liberal, westernised background that put a premium on education. The school may have had two rather well-fed Italian priests at the helm but the ones who, I suspect, had a profound influence on the way I looked at Catholics and their clergy, were both Irishmen. Father McFerran was the father-prefect. He was not an imposing figure but he had to merely walk down the corridor for all the students, teachers and parents to cower. I was certainly petrified of him and made sure that I turned invisible when he was around.

To this day it is a mystery to me why he allowed a boy of whose existence he was unaware, to go on a school trip to Kashmir and then paid half my expenses since my parents could not afford to send me.

I would visit him in Madras when he was transferred there and one stayed with him for nearly a fortnight. At this point I am perhaps expected to speak of the abuse I suffered at his hands since it is now the fashion to think of the priesthood as a blighted vocation much given to child molestation and homosexuality. But Father McFerran was an honourable man and beyond reproach. The same with that wonderful pied piper, the great story-teller, Father Dean, who died of blood cancer when he was barely 35. As with most lay people, the good priests still far outnumber the bad ones.

I should have graduated from school in a blaze of glory but things did not pan out quite that way. I barely managed to get a first division and joined a prestigious Jesuit-run institution called St Xavier’s College. It was all downhill from there. I failed in every subject in the mid-terminals and skipped the finals altogether because of a serious illness. Oddly enough, what saved me was the Moral Science paper. (Yes indeed, the Jesuits too were trying to raise the heathens, if not to Christian salvation, to a higher consciousness.)

In the mid-term Moral Science paper there were 10 questions which required short answers and one for which you were supposed to write an essay. After staring at the blank answer-sheet for an hour, I tried to tackle the essay on strikes. In what was surely a nadir of inarticulateness, I attempted to unravel the ethical ambiguities and dilemmas of strikes.

The bell rang halfway through my answer but at the end of the year, when I was advised a change of climate for health reasons and was about to join one of India’s oldest colleges in a campus town called Pune, my failure was condoned because of that fumbling, uncertain essay.

Exit the Portuguese

My official Christian education had come to an end. The year was 1961. I was returning to Bombay on December 19 (thanks to our British masters, we got Christmas vacations in those days) but the train was shunted off to a siding for hours and hours. The liberation of Goa had begun and the delay was due to heavy troop and ordnance movement.

Liberation for whom? There were as many Catholics as Hindus who fought for Goa to become a part of the mother country. But the majority of Goans were bemused and many in positions of power were deeply upset and dismayed. Some critics in the subcontinent saw this as a betrayal and a lack of patriotism.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, I too must have felt unhappy about the slow pace of assimilation amongst the Goan population. Superior and supercilious, it would take me years to realise how unfair I was. Regime change, even if one is returning to the fold and to self-rule, is always traumatic. But when the privileged few lose their privileges, then it is bound to breed resentment even amongst idealists.

Four hundred years is a long time. Konkani may have been the local language but the medium of instruction in schools for hundreds of years was Portuguese. Goan life was deeply permeated with Portuguese culture, cuisine, religion, the spirit of the fado and the carnival. Besides, there was prohibition in the rest of India. Little wonder then that there was some trepidation in the Goan mind about joining the motherland.

The Roman Catholic side of my writing

I have half-facetiously called this article “A Hindu Festival called Christmas”. But the other half is not half as risible. The ironies of conversion in India are bemusing, bewildering and fascinating but also tragic. They tell us how deep the roots of the Indian caste system are. You are never a simple Roman Catholic in India. You can only be a Hindu Roman Catholic. Which means you never forget your caste.

Brahmin Catholics generally choose their brides from amongst former Brahmin families and that too from the specific Brahmin sub-caste they belong to. Many Goans had settled down in Portugal and some had made it big in government, but even in Lisbon there was no escaping the stranglehold of the caste system. You had better know your place in the pecking order.

The sad fact is that even the clergy is not immune to these prejudices. To write the second section of my novel God’s Little Soldier, I lived in a Catholic monastery in America for months. They had recruited the first Indian monk in their order and had found him to be a worthy addition to the group. He was an exceptionally quiet, thoughtful person with a meditative turn of mind. But on the couple of occasions when he spoke to me about some of his brethren from the Catholic community in Bombay, he made disparaging comments about lower-caste Christians and how caste always showed.

My first job in advertising was for a company called MCM. It was the fastest-growing agency in India in the late 1960s and early 70s. Its fall too was spectacular and it was dead and buried by 1975. But while it was around, it was one hell of a place to work in. I was in the copy-writing section and one Sunday Sylvie, the Catholic secretary of the department, asked all of us over for lunch at her home.

All I recall of the food was that it was Goan, delicious and plentiful and we fell on it as if we had got there directly from the famine in Bihar. What stayed with me, though, was that Sylvie lived in a chawl, a huge complex of tenement buildings with common toilet facilities on each floor. Chawls were not new to me but this was the first time I was visiting a set-up where the ground floor plus the first four storeys were occupied by Hindus and the top fifth one by Catholics. Those chawls, with their parallel Hindu and Catholic worlds, would become the location and third protagonist in my novel Ravan and Eddie.

Some debts one can never repay. I don’t wish to either. On the contrary, may their numbers increase. As you can see, the Roman Catholics have been good to me.

Hallelujah, praise be to God, at the midnight hour of the 24th of December, we will witness the coming of the Hindu god of love and forgiveness, none other than the child Jesus, the latest addition to the over-crowded pantheon of Hindu gods. Which makes him, according to the latest census taken in Swarg, as the Hindu heaven is called, in the year of our Lord, November 2050, god number thirty-three million and one.

This is an excerpt from Asides Tirades Meditations: Selected Essays by Kiran Nagarkar (Bloomsbury).