In India, Christmas does not arrive as a guest. It has been here long enough to know the house.
Long before fir trees, tinsel, and mall Santas entered the subcontinent, the story of Christ had already put down roots along India’s western coast. According to a tradition recorded as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries—notably in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History and later Syriac church chronicles—St Thomas the Apostle is believed to have reached the Malabar Coast around 52 AD, travelling along Roman-era maritime trade routes linking the Mediterranean to South India.
The communities associated with his mission—later called the Saint Thomas Christians (Nasranis)—are among the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, predating Christianity in much of northern Europe. Historian Stephen Neill, in A History of Christianity in India, notes that these communities existed “independently of Western Christendom for over a millennium,” developing their own liturgy, social structures, and customs.
This history complicates the popular assumption that Christmas in India is a colonial inheritance. When Portuguese missionaries arrived in the early 16th century, followed by the Dutch and British, they encountered Christians who were already observing the birth of Christ, already using Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) in worship, and already integrated into local caste, trade, and kinship networks.
As sociologist Susan Visvanathan has observed, “Indian Christianity did not begin as a minority faith; it became one.” That distinction explains why Christmas here never felt entirely imported. It evolved locally, absorbing climate, cuisine, language, and custom, rather than being imposed wholesale.
Even the idea of Christmas as a fixed date is relatively late. The celebration of Christ's birth on December 25 was formalised only in the 4th century, following the conversion of Emperor Constantine and decisions influenced by the Roman Church. Earlier Christian communities across West Asia, Africa, and India observed Christ's birth through varied calendars and theological emphases.
Indian Christians followed Eastern Christian traditions, tied closely to the Church of the East, with liturgical links to Persia and Mesopotamia. The use of Syriac—closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus—connected Indian worship to some of Christianity’s earliest linguistic roots (recorded in the Acts of Thomas and later East Syriac texts).
For centuries, Christmas in India unfolded without snow metaphors or winter iconography. It was celebrated amid coconut palms and monsoon cycles, shaped by fasting calendars, midnight liturgies, and communal feasts. Faith did not resist geography; it adapted to it.
That adaptability carried into Indian visual culture. When Jesuit missionaries presented Christian paintings at the Mughal court in the late 16th century—documented in Jesuit letters from Akbar’s court (1580s-1590s)—the emperor encouraged interfaith dialogue rather than conversion by force. Mughal artists began rendering biblical scenes using miniature techniques: symmetrical composition, intricate borders, and Indo-Persian aesthetics.
Art historian Ebba Koch notes that these works did not attempt theological accuracy so much as cultural translation. Christ was absorbed into a visual world already fluent in sacred storytelling.
In the 20th century, Indian modernists extended this process. Jamini Roy, rejecting Western academic realism, painted Christian subjects using the flattened perspectives of Bengali folk art. Angelo da Fonseca, working in Goa and Pune, portrayed Mary in a sari and Christ with brown skin—works that challenged European iconography and were, at times, criticised by church authorities.
“These images,” writes scholar Giorgio Vasari da Fonseca, “were not acts of rebellion, but of recognition-that Christianity in India did not need foreign faces to remain sacred.”
Nowhere is this recognition more widely shared than in the kitchen. And no dish captures Indian Christmas more succinctly than plum cake.
Originally derived from European fruitcakes—carried by colonial trade and migration—the Indian plum cake transformed through climate and taste. Dried fruits were soaked for weeks or months in rum or brandy; sugar was caramelised to near bitterness; spices deepened with time. By the late 19th century, bakeries in Kerala, Kolkata, and Bombay had developed versions that bore little resemblance to their British ancestors.
Food historian K.T. Achaya notes that plum cake’s endurance lies in its portability and patience—it travels well, improves with age, and belongs equally to home kitchens and commercial bakeries. Today, it is one of the few Christmas foods consumed across religious lines.
As writer Vir Sanghvi once remarked, “Plum cake may be the only thing Indians eat at Christmas regardless of faith.” In that sense, the cake mirrors the festival itself—local, shared, and quietly universal.
Beyond plum cake, Christmas food varies by region. Along the Konkan and Malabar coasts, coconut, rice, toddy fermentation, and meat dominate festive tables—documented extensively in colonial gazetteers and community cookbooks.
In Kerala, Christmas morning often begins with appam and stew, followed by lunches of duck roast, beef fry, pork vindaloo, and vegetable thoran. In Mangaluru, kuswar sweets precede pork bafat and sannas. In Goa, Portuguese techniques meet Indian ingredients in sorpotel, vindaloo, bebinca, and dodol—many requiring days of preparation.
Move east and north, and flavours shift again. In Meghalaya, pork with black sesame reflects indigenous Khasi foodways. In Kolkata, Anglo-Indian bakery traditions-documented since the 18th century, merge with Bengali winter produce.
What unites these tables is not a menu but a method: slow cooking, shared labour, and circulation. Christmas food in India is meant to move—from house to house, town to town, memory to memory.
By the late 19th century, Christmas had entered Indian public life-appearing in newspapers, railway calendars, clubs, and school holidays. Yet it never collapsed into uniformity. It remained plural.
That plurality explains its endurance. Christmas in India survived not by insisting on purity, but by allowing itself to be shaped by region, language and taste.
Nearly two thousand years after St Thomas is said to have stepped onto the Malabar Coast, Christmas here remains what it has always been: ancient, adaptive, and alive—told through prayer and painting, through plum cake wrapped for travel, through a faith that learned early how to speak in many languages at once.
