An Indian Christmas

When she was born in Udaipur in the 1980s, Karishma’s mother convinced the extended family that, to avoid discrimination, her daughter should be given a Hindu first name. “I can’t even count the number of times she told us while travelling on trains to not mention our surname if anyone asked us for our names,” Karishma says.

In Bombay, a decade earlier in my Jesuit school, Karishma’s last name, D’Souza, rolled easily off our tongues and was not one that anyone felt the need to hide. None of the Catholic girls had Hindu first names. In my privileged south Mumbai bubble, back then at least, we didn’t run each other’s identities through a scanner that spat out every cultural or religious difference.

As Christmas 2021 approaches, the invites for quiet year-end celebrations have started coming in. Once again, as Bharatiya Janata Party legislators in Karnataka, the state in which I reside, conjure up fears of Christian missionaries “brainwashing” rural Hindus and as churches and pastors across India are attacked, in my Bengaluru neighbourhood, my child readies to sing Down in Bethlehem and Silent Night at the park.

“I want the Rondo Alla Christmas group to come separately for practise,” texts my 11-year-old’s choir director, a kind-hearted doctor whose house visits during the pandemic made so many seniors—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—in the neighbourhood feel safe.

The othering of Indian Christians is a familiar, deep-rooted story. Just like spiralling Islamophobia, the recent increase in violent attacks against the second-largest minority only exposes our long and hateful history of caricaturing the community. Among those Hindus who raise the bogey of ‘forced conversions’ are generations of middle/upper class and upper caste Indians who have studied in and continue to send their children to Jesuit-run educational institutions.

As some Christians have pointed out, if hundreds of Christian institutions were indeed involved in conversion, wouldn’t the rise in population reflect in the numbers? Yet Christians comprised 2.3% of our population in the 2011 census—the latest available—down from 2.6% four decades ago.

“…the police asked me why I believe in Jesus; asked for my bank account details and properties I own; why I gave my son a Christian name; where I buy my Bibles from; and how many people I have converted,” Somu Avaradhi, a pastor in Karnataka’s Hubballi who was attacked by Hindu fundamentalists in October and then, bizarrely—but not uncommonly—arrested, told Article 14 recently.

Decades before the Karnataka government began building its case to push through an anti-conversion law—Bangalore’s Archbishop Peter Machado has termed it “undesirable and discriminatory”—in 1956, the Niyogi Committee report had already spotted a Christian “conspiracy” in the demand for Jharkhand. The report said conversion—a right outlined in Article 25 of our Constitution—could “undermine” a person’s “loyalty” to his country and state.

When I visited Kandhamal, Odisha in 2018, 10 years after the anti-Christian riots, the horrors of a decade ago still lived as ghosts in the faces of people and the burnt skeletons of churches.

More than 600 villages were ransacked, 5,600 houses were looted and burnt, 54,000 people were left homeless, according to the civil-society led National People’s Tribunal headed by Justice (Retd.) AP Shah. At least 38 were killed and 295 churches and other places of worship destroyed. The year I visited, a Christian mission ranked India 11th in a list of 50 most unsafe countries for Christians.

“They have never felt the grace of asking for forgiveness,” one man told me then.

A year after I visited, it was the 20th anniversary of another unforgettable hate crime in Odisha. Twenty years after the gruesome burning of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons in their jeep, a close associate of the Bajrang Dal murderer Dara Singh was arrested. It prompted Brut India to produce this video, a reminder to millennial Indians of our violent relationship with Christians.

The paternal side of Karishma’s family lived an anglicised life in Hyderabad and couldn’t understand why her mother wanted a Hindu name. “My paternal great grandmother’s name was Ruby and it’s what her daughter—my grandma—wanted to call me,” Karishma says.

Karishma’s mother was only responding to her Indian reality. When Karishma’s maternal grandmother moved from Goa to Udaipur after marriage in the 1960s, she wore dresses. “Her Hindu neighbours pointed at her legs and laughed saying ‘dekho apni taang dikha rahi hain’. After one week they told her she needed to wear saris and so they taught her to tie one,” says Karishma.

In Udaipur, her grandparents were compelled to assimilate. They ate meat—only chicken—once a year on Christmas. They gave their four children Hindu names.

By the time Karishma’s mother got married, she and her siblings spoke Marwari, not Konkani. She didn’t know how to cook meat. As Karishma says, “They had to erase their culture just to fit in.”

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.