It is almost four full decades since the highly unlikely figure of Bob Geldof (a scruffy punk rocker from Ireland who fronted the Boomtown Rats) spearheaded Band Aid, an unprecedented “supergroup” of world-famous pop musicians who recorded the fastest-selling song in UK chart history, and hit number one in at least a dozen other countries. Do They Know It’s Christmas? came out at the end of 1984, after a full year of an extraordinary “biblical famine” in Ethiopia, and asked some searing questions of everyone who was immersed the usual hyper-commercial “traditional” revelry: “Here's to you/ Raise a glass for everyone/ Spare a thought this yuletide for the deprived/ If the table was turned would you survive/ Do they know it's Christmas time at all?”
Let us recall that the song was roundly panned for both its style and substance. No less than the leading music publication NME dismissed the “turkey” with just one line: “Millions of Dead Stars write and perform rotten record for the right reasons.” Many others were rightly irate about the extreme condescension dripping from every aspect of the project, especially Bono’s appalling lyric: “Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” Nonetheless, the record and its associated concerts wound up despatching over $150 million to charity, and it also had an additional salutary effect because Geldof and his mates returned focus to what is supposed to be the main event anyway: the birth of an innocent refugee, whose family is in perilous flight from certain death. We tend to forget all this, so it’s worth asking anew: do we know what’s Christmas time at all?
I really appreciated how Jerry Pinto seeks to probe this very question in his foreword to Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns (Speaking Tiger), a fine new anthology in which Verem-based artist Nishant Saldanha, the 2022 Jnanpith Award winner Damodar Mauzo and I are also included to represent Goa: “The central celebration is the birth of a child. There is no culture that does not celebrate this event, because all of us who belong to the human race can see our collective future in the pudgy little face. We marvel at this conjuring act, the miniature miracle, at its tiny fingernails and bud-like nose… let us forgive our species its parochialism, and let us agree a human birth is indeed special. The world seems a generous, beautiful place in that moment, full of promise and hype.”
Here’s the twist, however: “stop a moment – there is a different reason why that birth in Bethlehem moves us so much, year after year. Here is a child in perilous circumstances. His parents are exiles. They are homeless. They are refugees.” Desperately seeking refuge, “they knock on door after door and they are turned away. Later, the boy grown to wisdom will say: ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren that you do unto me.’ (Beware, you nations that turn the refugee away and build walls to protect the wealth that has been built on expropriation. If you trumpet your Christian beliefs and thump your Bible as you do so often when elections come around, turning the refugee from your door is tantamount to turning away the Holy Family in its hour of need.”
As a child, Pinto remembers asking his father about the “shepherds who watched their flocks by night. He got an answer based on our collective Indian experience: “My father said, ‘They must have been nomadic shepherds’. I knew of nomads in our own parts, homeless tribes living on the streets, and I understood: the Good News, the Godspell, was first announced to the poor. The savants saw it in the sky as a star. The angels themselves came down to announce the news to the shepherds. But the rulers of the time were terrified. The star foretold a grim destiny for them and so we have the story of the slaughter of innocents, all children under two to be done to death to make sure that one threat will be neutralized. I recognized the horror again when I heard the story of Krishna’s death – his mother imprisoned and every baby she birthed snatched from her and dashed to the ground. Little Jesus survived. Warned by an angel, Joseph took the family to safety in Egypt.”
It is not just the Pintos, of course, because Indians naturally picture the “Holy Land” in their own surroundings, as you can see from the 1961 painting by Angelo da Fonseca accompanying this column. The Jesuit scholar Délio de Mendonça puts it very well in his new book on the great artist from Santo Estêvão, and favourite pupil of the Tagores in Shantiniketan, “Fonseca’s sacred and secular repertoire calls our attention to the urgent need to carefully protect the cultural and spiritual heritage that we tend to overlook. His art sprang from his desire for an inclusive society, an ideal for which he incessantly struggled, and though rejected, he was able to pass it on.”
That is actually the common strand of all the various reminders from Pinto to Bob Geldof’s conglomeration of prima donnas, and also the reality of 2022. How can we celebrate the Nativity without acknowledging that the innocent refugees right now amongst us in Goa? Some of them – just like “the holy family” – are in flight for their lives, after devastating warfare gripped Ukraine and Afghanistan. Many more are simply seeking to breathe, eat and love freely, without the intolerance and discrimination that has taken pernicious hold in so many other parts of India. It is impossible to ignore, and we cannot turn away. Turns out they did put it pretty well in Band Aid so many years ago: “It's Christmas time, there's no need to be afraid/ At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade/ And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy/ Throw your arms around the world at Christmas time.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)