The sound of Royal salutes would echo over Loll Diggy; gunshots fired at intervals from the grand battery on a Christmas morning. Tokens of churning chatters would rule the Governor General’s Court House before elaborate servings would keep repleting the dinner table with delicately-cooked turkey, ham-saddles imported from England overland, prawn and fowl curries, pilaf, roasted beef, and ‘profuse pyramids of certolan and quails.’
Sparkling red wine and Madeira (Portuguese wine) would topple over the tall, brimming glasses, calling for one more round of, preferably, Champagne. The hoorays and live band strumming would sway over the Christmas revelry; an effulgence of festive air falling upon the elite Christmas Balls. Arrays of cakes and confectionery would bring flavours and textures of the West, not until the 200-pound sumptuous cake masterfully hogged the centre stage.
Even at the old Viceregal Lodge, celebrating Christmas with an elephant was not unheard of. And in the households, Calcutta-style barley sugar was mixed with flour to bake plum cakes and spiced beef to delegate the spree, cured and pickled in saltpetre. Such elaborate were the Christmas celebrations in the 1800s and 1900s, during the British colonial rule, in the capital of India, Kolkata, a monochrome city that managed to perpetuate the Yuletide traditions of the Europeans, even today.
The extravagance of those Western fetes might have fled the scene with the East India Company’s Capital shift to Delhi in 1911, but Santa hasn’t left the grottos of Old Chowringhee and Park Street. He is omnipresent at the midnight mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral and nonetheless around rows of food stalls, jingle bells, Santa hats, and street musicians.
Especially the Anglo-Indian communities in Kolkata, the generational offspring of European and Indian parents, celebrate Christmas in its most authentic expression in Bow Barracks, where Kolkata’s last Anglo-Indian colony is.
Squeezed between the red-bricked heritage lanes of rhythmic grid-style houses, the families from Bow Barracks lay out homemade ginger wine, kulkuls and rose cookies on roadsides, to foster that curated camaraderie of Christmas, slowly spilling over from framed households to the ushered cityscape.
“My entire family gets together — aunts, uncles, and cousins — for a beautiful day of celebration. It’s an essential family tradition. We throw a house party with plenty of food, including roast chicken and grilled meat. But plum cakes and homemade fruit cakes are a must every year,” says Maurice Robert Demonti, who works as a Floor Manager at Sugar Plum Cakery. He has Italian roots, from his great-great-grandfather’s side.
Signature Anglo-Indian dishes such as yellow rice, ball curry, and various roasts are served alongside spicy mince pies with rum-soaked apples and raisins. “The atmosphere is electric. We drink Champagne together, with loud music playing and everyone dancing around. This is the pure Anglo-Indian spirit.” Maurice adds.
Meatballs simmering in a coconut milk gravy with specks of ginger, garlic, and Indian spices—that’s the traditional Anglo-Indian way of preparing Ball Curry, often paired with flavoured coconut rice infused with cloves, cardamom, and caramelised onions. Not to forget vinegar — Anglo-Indian dishes are incomplete without splashes of vinegar.
Not only Ball Curry and Yellow Rice, but the Christmas table of most Anglo-Indians in Kolkata also features dry preparations of stir-fried vegetables cooked with dollops of mustard seeds, onions, and ginger-garlic paste, more often as accompaniments. But the main dishes would almost always lean on Homemade Salt Pork and Savoury Duck Roast, more like the vice-regal gala of British colonial times, when the typical Christmas dishes were boar’s head or roasted turkey, plum pudding, and imported wine.
Around Christmas, the queue at the decades-old Kalman Cold Storage at Mirza Ghalib Street gets longer for raw ham, salted beef, and meatloaf. And for the best Christmas cake in town, Firpos Restaurant still leads the row, even with a history of a featured cabaret back in the 1970s. The cabaret effect may have dwindled as Indian culture has become increasingly submerged, but slices of dark plum cake are still fragrant with spices and rum.
“Every morning, starting from the middle of November, I wake up at 4 am. I have my coffee, and I immediately start putting up lights. I have over 2000 lights to string up all over my house, inside and out.” Maurice says, “The goal is to capture the overwhelming spirit of Kolkata at Christmas. The famous Park Street is decorated with thousands of lights, and I wanted to bring that same magic home.”
