This December, some young friends from Finland came to Goato escape the biting cold during Christmas and to spend time on the warm Zalorbeach in Carmona. They had hardly hit the pillow when carol singers singing‘Silent night, holy night’, ‘It’s gonna be a blue Christmas’ and ‘Jinglebells…’ below the window sill began serenading them. “We thought we hadexchanged the chill of a cold Christmas for a week of sunny beachside warmthbut the carols followed us,” they said laughing.
The irony of it all stayed with me as we drove theirchildren one late evening to see the Christmas lighting and the cribs aroundthe villages. The imagery of Christmas visuals that we create to commemoratethe birth of Jesus is so alien to the pulse of our everyday lives that onewonders how to cope with it all. The birth of Christianity is indeed Asiaticand there is enough proof to conclude that before Asia was re-christened by thesecond coming of the religion into India, the faith had already visited theregion in the early years of the century. One theory even purported that Christwas born in Kashmir.
The sledge, cold and frosted, bearing colourful gifts in thetradition of a very north European Christmas decorates the shops and otherretail outlets. Do we still consider Christmas as an all colonial festival? Dowe still live in the landscapes of colonial time or do we deliberately continueto make these reprints in order to nurse the post-colonial hangover? Goanpainters Angelo da Fonseca and Angela Trinidade tried to capture the veryIndian ethos of colours, emotion and celebration by allowing our Gods to becomeAsian in colour, conceptualisation and gestures. But their works are stillmarginalised, and showcased by only a few in their homes.
The Christmas imagery is a very sectional celebration. Inmany ways, Catholics seem to see themselves as more European than Indian.
We do it to our children with nursery rhymes and otherteaching tools, too. We deprive them from learning about their own landscape.Every time nursery children recite ‘Baba Baba Black Sheep’, ‘Wee WillieWinkie’, ‘Peter, Peter’ or ‘Little Miss Muffet’, I cringe within knowing thatwe have failed our children. Some of these rhymes are rejected in the verycountries that created them for their racist or sexist content. But we stillhappily let our children parrot them. Iam not willing to believe that poets and songwriters or folk artists have notput forth material specific to Indian children that is worthy of being used ineducation. The fault lies in the fact that no concerted effort has been made tocompile and disseminate these to the institutions that nurture children.
It is not even the failure of a particular state but aglaring national disaster that enough thought has not been given to thecreation of or even compilation of regional songs for their content andmeaning. Children learn sounds easily if they are recited and put to music.They do not need to know the meaning of the songs but the teachers can have acompanion reader which can translate the songs or rhymes. That way, we can atleast make them connect with their own ethos and environment rather thanblindly aping the west. Such an exercise would have far-reaching impact on theposterity than the politically-charged acts of changing city or street names todemonstrate a narrow and hollow sense of nationhood.
Savia Viegas is an art historian writer and artist. Herrecent novel ‘Let me tell you about Quinta’ has been published by Penguin India
