The old man and a fleeting year

Fort Kochi’s custom of burning the papaanji on New Year's Eve is one of its kind

Popular custom: The 'papaanji' that was designed by the artists of the Biennale in 2012 in Fort Kochi. Photo: special arrangement

At the dot of midnight on December 31, when one year wraps up and another begins, the night sky will light up with celebratory fireworks. Concomitantly another equally joyous custom, of burning an effigy of an old man, lovingly called papaanji, will hold revellers enthralled in Fort Kochi. This public burning, signifying the end of the passing year, is a custom whose origins are ambiguous. Most historians and practitioners of the custom say that its genesis lies in the area’s hybrid - Portuguese, Dutch and English - past. With questions over its lineage and evolution obscure the custom remains one of Fort Kochi’s most interesting curiosity much like the indigenous character kappiri muthappan , the hat-donning, cigar-chewing friendly spirit.

“The papaanji is European in manifestation and secular in character,” says Anwin Joseph Biveria, whose family has a papaanji bonfire almost every year.

The activity around this custom gathers steam in the last week of December, soon after Christmas, when one finds young children collecting money to put up effigies at street corners. Soon, tacky Santa Claus prototypes appear sitting or standing amidst ferns and balloons. Local clubs or children’s groups put up posters around the figures welcoming the New Year. At night, dolly bulbs light up the area around the

papaanji and the tempo builds up daily as the year closes to an end.

At midnight on December 31 the effigy is consigned to flames marking the end of a year and consuming with it all that was evil and bad that year. “It’s a joyous occasion as the ills are burnt and one begins on a new note,” says Bonnie Thomas, who as part of Kochi Muziris Biennale team suggested this custom be turned into a public affair and organised a burning of the

papaanji on the Fort Kochi beach in 2012.

Bonnie says, “ Papaanji means grandfather in Portuguese. In my reading it has evolved from the history of Cochin, mainly the 163 years of Portuguese rule. Generally, people mistake it for Santa Claus but the papaanji is not so. It is a European concept confined only to Cochin.”

Bonnie lists out the relation of effigy to the communities that were present in Cochin of yore. He says that the Konkanis have a custom of hanging an effigy on the Banyan tree, called

Bodhan , for a week and burning it after which they have a customary bath with turmeric paste called

manjal kuli .

The Jews of Cochin too are associated with a ritual involving an effigy. A dummy of a Minister of Nebuchadnezzar who was known to have massacred Jews was built and pelted with stones. The figure of Santa Claus exists in the collective memory and unlike other dummies he is a loved figure. “The concept of the effigy evolved from a mix of all this,” says Bonnie.

From all this Bonnie delineates papaanji as an old European man, suited and booted with a hat. Many see the New Year as a new born baby, born on January 1, who turns old in a year’s time and goes away at the end of the year, carrying with him the burdens of the passing year. Another baby or year is born the next day, and so along with celebrations the truth of life is carried forward in this symbolic burning of the ‘papa’, the chain of death and birth, of passage of time, of old and new, of time and tide.

Acclaimed playwright from Fort Kochi Nelson Fernandes remembers being part of the papaanji festivities as a young boy. “ Papaanji is a Portuguese word meaning an old man. The belief is that there is an old man in all of us who is worldly and so we burn the old man with his vices. That is the theology of Saint Paul,” he says. For him this custom is a combination of social and religious tenets.

K.J. Sohan, former Mayor and one of the founders of the Cochin Carnival that showcases typicality of the area along with the contemporary, says that the papaanji myth grew bigger after the formation of the Carnival in 1984. “Earlier, locals clubs had papaanji festivities all over the area. It merged together with the carnival and the legend too grew with this formalisation.” To him the papaanji , an old man, is a metaphor of the passing year and he says that Fort Kochi’s colonial legacy is from where the custom is born.

Writer N. S. Madhavan speaks of it as a strange custom where a Santa Claus look alike is burnt, “but nowhere in the world is Santa Claus burnt,” he reasons, adding that carolling in Fort Cochin is called by some as papanjikali .

George Thundiparambil, a writer from the area and one of the organisers of the Carnival, says that the papaanji is referred to as Xmas papa. He says that burning of Santa Claus, as pointed out by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, took place in 1951 outside a church in France against the ‘paganisation’ of Christmas. He wonders if the custom began in Cochin around that time. Ninety-year-old Francis Xavier Gomez says it is a very old custom. He remembers the papaanji festivities, “in town” (current day Princess Street Junction) as a young boy. At his age, he says with a twinkle in his eye, “The papaanji is an old man; may be I am the papaanji . There are so many myths about the custom.”