A Very Indian Christmas: The Greatest Indian Holiday Stories of All Time

Few countries celebrate religious and cultural festivals with greater passion, imagination, and joy than India. And among the many festivals of this gloriously diverse, multicultural nation is Christmas. The Christian communities of India celebrate the birth of Christ with food, music, lights, prayer, family gatherings, charity, and other age-old traditions. This anthology captures the distinctive magic of Christmas in India and in the Indian diaspora with a splendid collection of essays, stories, poems, and hymns―both in English and translated from India's other languages. It includes works by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie and Aravind Adiga, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Khushwant Singh, Jerry Pinto, Damodar Mauzo, Vivek Menezes, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, and others writing about Christmas in Goa, Kerala, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, as well as in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SALMAN RUSHDIE (1947- ) was born in Bombay. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the 1981 Booker Prize. After his fourth book, Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, he became the subject of assassination attempts and a fatwa calling for his death, issued by Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini.

JHUMPA LAHIRI (1967- ) was born in London to immigrants from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was three years old. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861-1941) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, the first to be awarded to an Asian. He was an eminent Bengali poet, critic, essayist, composer, and author of short fiction.

ARAVIND ADIGA (1974- ) won the 2008 Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger. He was born in 1974 and has written three other novels--Amnesty, Selection Day, and Last Man in Tower--as well as a story collection, Between the Assassinations.

KHUSHWANT SINGH (1915-2014) wrote many novels including Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, and The Company of Women, as well as nonfiction works like A History of the Sikhs.

JERRY PINTO (1966- ) is a Mumbai-based novelist, short story writer, translator, and journalist. He won the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2016 for his fiction. He is a Roman Catholic of Goan origin.