Carols in mother tongue finds chorus in Christmas

There is no Christmas without carols, and in Hyderabad, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ is not complete without carolling and that too in multiple languages.

Christmas carols, widely believed to be sung only in English, the language they were written in, have taken several special regional flavours, including in Telugu, Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam and Tamil, to name a few.

However, one carol, a favourite for many cutting across religions— Jingle Bells—appears to have held its own in English. This is best summed up by 85-yearold Kenneth Samuel Dutt, who has been into music from age 10, and continues with his passion of playing the grand piano, and is a regular during carolling in the city churches.

He said “Jingle Bells is universal. It is joyful and makes people tap their toes and break out into happy dances, and it is best in English.

Everyone enjoys it.”

It is not just the translated carol classics like ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’, ‘Joy to the World’, ‘Hark the Herald the Angel Sing’, that are sung with joy and reverence but also several other compositions in regional languages.

Carols in regional languages make the Christmas season more homely for many, with many churches offering services in different languages. “I am from Mangalore but settled here. When the Mangalorean community gathers during the season, we sing carols in Konkani. During carolling, we make sure to visit our elderly. When we sing carols in our mother-tongue, it gives the feel of a real Christmas,” says Capt. Alwyn Menezes, a resident of RK Puram in Secunderabad.

According to Marshal Franklin David “my whole family, children of my siblings and their children keenly listen to carols and sing them in Kannada. Although we also listen to the English originals, we associate more with those rendered in our own language.”