Brunnel Arathoon with her children, decorating her Armenian Christmas cakes.
By Shamik Bag
Though born and brought up in Kolkata, it is only recently that Brunnel Arathoon, 36, started examining her Armenian roots. All these years, Arathoon says, she had only the one identity, of a Catholic; her paternal origins in the Eurasian country remained a footnote in family dinner-table conversations and a conundrum in social circles.
“I had absolutely no idea of my Armenian identity and the history surrounding it. After I got to know of my father’s side originating from Armenia before shifting to Kolkata, I started looking up the map of the country. It is nice to know where one goes back to,” says Arathoon.
For the first time, she has baked the traditional Armenian Christmas cakes— spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon and stuffed with walnuts, and, unlike most other Christmas cakes, without fruit. They are a marker of her Armenian roots, a country from where large numbers came to settle down in Kolkata and do business, as far back as the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Though the British are popularly believed to have been the first Europeans in Kolkata in 1690—Job Charnock, an employee and administrator of the British East India Company, is regarded as the founder of the city now called Kolkata— the discovery of an Armenian tombstone in the city dating back to 11 July 1630 has pushed back Kolkata’s European links by at least another 60 years. The site of the tombstone of Rezabeebeh, “wife of the late charitable Sookias”, is the Armenian Holy Church of Nazareth near Burrabazar, built in 1707 and widely regarded as the oldest surviving church in Kolkata. It stands as a monument to the city’s earliest encounter with Christianity, even as the number of Armenians has dwindled to an official estimate of less than a hundred. Arathoon, however, contends there are many like her: uncounted Armenians grappling with issues of identity, since only Armenians who are baptized are counted.
Having bagged orders for 56 cakes within a few days of promoting her effort on Facebook, Arathoon hopes the world will now come to know of her Armenian background. “Christmas in Kolkata is as good a time (as any ) to spread the word,” says Arathoon.
We meet one evening at a café attached to a book store in the Park Street area. It’s a week before Christmas, and Park Street is a merry swirl of revellers in red and white Christmas caps, caught ethereally within a dazzle of blue and white lights. On 16 December, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee inaugurated the state government-organized Kolkata Christmas Festival in this area’s Allen Park. This nearly three-week-long festival, which has been organized since 2011, sees street-corner pop-rock concerts, dancing, choir performances, parades, Christmas merchandise, roadside stalls selling Anglo-Indian beef roasts and pork vindaloo, and a heady maze of festive illumination running across Park Street and the St Paul’s Cathedral-Victoria Memorial area. At around 14-15 degrees Celsius, this year’s winter temperature is just adding to the cheer.
On 25 December, Park Street turns into a pedestrian-only zone, with thousands of people in their Christmas finery taking it over. This year, Banerjee spoke about visiting churches at midnight on Christmas Eve even when she was not chief minister. Her comparison of Christmas celebrations to Durga Puja almost echoed the campus saying in Kolkata that describes 25 December as a day dedicated to “Jishu (Jesus) Pujo”—a day when many non-Christian Bengali homes will bake or buy cakes, party at clubs, visit the zoo, St Paul’s Cathedral or Park Street, perfectly at ease in their red Xmas caps.
Youngsters can often be seen in red Santa Claus clothes, complete with faux white beards, while the Santa illuminations put up by the Trinamool Congress-run state government glow in blue and white—red is not a colour it favours. Bengali gospel songs played over public address systems and Santa cutouts in dhotis complete the appropriation of the occasion by even those who are not Christians.