Vanka’s Christmas

Vanka is a nine-year-old orphan apprenticed to a shoemaker in Moscow. On Christmas Eve, while his master and mistress are away, Vanka writes a letter to his grandfather who is a watchman in a village. It is a heartbreaking letter which describes the beatings, hunger, sleepless nights, humiliation, and forced labour that the little boy has to endure day after day. He recalls how his grandfather used to shower affection on him and also how the old man once got him a Christmas tree. The letter is posted. The address on the envelope reads: “To Grandfather in the village.”

Vanka is a character in a short story of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). The great writer ended the story without any moral preaching, but letting the child’s faith collide silently with a cruel social reality. The country was celebrating Christmas with joy and festivity, while Vanka was weeping over the cruelty and injustice he had to endure. What did Christmas mean to those who celebrated it when Vankas suffered pathetic misery?

Let me generalise that question: what does religion mean to those who fight for it today?

Vanka is a symbol of the vulnerability of the weaker sections of any society. He is also a symbol of the emptiness of ritual without compassion. Christmas is a celebration of divine love; yet in Vanka’s world there is not even basic human mercy, let alone joy and goodwill. Vanka’s trust or hope in the system is misplaced too. The postal system won’t deliver his letter to his grandfather simply because the address is incomplete and nobody in the department is going to take the trouble of finding out the writer and doing something about his condition. Christmas is merely an idea, Chekhov suggests to us, not a lived ethic.

Religion has become just that today: an idea (worse, a political idea) that has nothing to do with morality or spirituality. On the contrary, more evil is perpetrated today in the name of religion than anything else.

In the past few days in India, Christmas celebrations have been disrupted by the Hindu right wing. Churches were vandalised, carols objected to, and the festival was portrayed as “foreign.” Even children were not spared. 

My state of Kerala was relatively free of the kind of sectarianism that dominates the politics elsewhere in the country. But this Christmas brought that disgusting Northern politics here too. A children’s Christmas carol was attacked by an RSS man in Palakkad. I had always hoped that Kerala would stay above the depravity that has become the hallmark of North Indian politics. Now I know that depravity spreads much faster than the spirit of Christmas. Vanka is the reality; religion is always a myth, an illusion.

Vanka’s voice is soft. The religion around him is vociferous.

Religion in today’s India is violently vociferous. Confident and punitive.

Chekhov wrote Vanka’s story over a century ago. If the story were rewritten today, Vanka’s letter would still not reach its destination. Instead it will in all likelihood become a political weapon with the right wing questioning the very right of Vanka to exist in the country that belongs to a particular community which claims that the country is theirs only.

The real question raised by Vanka is not whether Christmas is our festival or theirs; rather it is: Do we understand what festivals are for?