This book provides a rare insight into the Chinese community in India

Kolkata is currently the hub of international cuisine like Korean, Burmese, Spanish, Thai and it is available just at the click of an app. Despite the availability of this variety, the city’s love for Chinese cuisine has not waned. Be it the roadside stalls or the Chinese cuisine served at fine-dining restaurants, it is lapped up by foodies. Interestingly, however in spite of this love for Chinese food, the Chinese community in the city, responsible for creating the internationally famous Kolkata Chinese flavour, has remained largely insulated.

The erstwhile Kim Wah restaurant, one of the first and most popular, Chinese eateries of South Kolkata, was my next-door neighbor in Garcha Road. The family that owned the restaurant lived in the four-storey building that housed the restaurant. Thanks to their proximity, we had some exposure to Chinese culture.

My mornings would start with Buddhist chants that they played on their music system and the Lion Dance during the Chinese New Year was something we looked forward to as kids. While going to school I always hoped the dancers would arrive in the truck only after I had returned. We knew the entire family, attended their weddings and ceremonies, and their eldest son played cricket with the boys of the para.

Even though we had this interaction with a Chinese family, I realized recently that I know very little about the Chinese community in India. Ananda Mohan Kar’s book Chinese Indians: Representation in Literature, Films and Media has been a complete eye opener for me. The kind of research the author has done to give us a detailed idea of the history and the traumatic past of the Chinese in India is phenomenal.

Jailed and interned during Sino-Indian War

Like the trauma of Partition was shoved under the carpet, the misery of the Chinese people has never been talked about. Partition became a talking point in the mainstream only when Urvashi Butalia brought back the voices and their trauma in her seminal work The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.  

Ananda Mohan Kar’s work also brings to the fore the pain that was inflicted on the community during the Sino-Indian War of 1962. Though the main purpose of the book is to analyse the representation of the community in Indian creative works and in the Indian media, but in the process, it brings out many interesting, unknown, and lesser-known facts.  At the time of the 1962 war, the Chinese living in India were suspected to be spies, by the Indian government, and as well as by the Indian public. Many of them had their citizenship revoked. Some were sent to an internment camp in Deoli, located in Rajasthan. Many were even deported to China. In India, the Chinese faced public anger, and their businesses were shut down in some places. There were instances that Chinese-owned business establishments were attacked by mobs. Since then, many Chinese descendants had to live in India as stateless subjects for many years.

The internment at the camp in Deoli, and deportation to China, separated many families. When the internment was over, some of them found it difficult to return to their homes because they couldn’t raise the money for travel. Some were put in the jails as well.

The camp was set up in 1962. The last group of internees was released in December 1967, five years after the war.

Just like the way innocent people suffered at the time of India’s partition, similarly, many ordinary Chinese in India suffered for no fault of theirs.

The death knell for the community

This was perhaps the beginning of the end for the thriving Chinese community in India. After the war ended, most Chinese migrated to different countries like Canada, Hong Kong, USA, and UK etc. So now only a few thousand were left in India, predominantly in Kolkata. Interestingly, people who had been interned had lived in India for generations, embraced the identity of Chinese Indians and many had not even set foot in China till they were deported.

Even today Kolkata is the only city in South Asia that has a China town, in fact as the author points out, there are two China towns. He writes: “The older one is in Central Kolkata and the relatively newer one (that too is over a century old) is located in Tangra, the eastern periphery of the city. Some Bengalis refer to the old Chinese neighbourhood as Chinapada and the relatively new one as Chinatown.”

Tangra is the hub of eateries that serve Indian Chinese cuisine and even a few years back it was famous for its tanneries and they produced excellent leather goods. In the first quarter of the 20^th century some Hakka Chinese shoemakers moved to Tangra to manufacture leather for shoemaking.

In the 1970s Tangra used to make a very significant contribution to the Indian leather industry.

But since the 1980s the leather business started declining because they lost a huge market after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were also unable to innovate and keep up with the modern demands, political turmoil also affected business. The West Bengal Government closed the tanneries in Tangra in 2000, pollution being the main reason given and they were asked to move to the Calcutta Leather Complex in Bantala. But moving wasn’t feasible for many since they had already invested in their units in Tangra. Many tannery owners shut down their business and moved abroad. The beautification initiative to promote the Chinatowns as tourist spots, and thus reviving the local economy, didn’t work out either. So, the trend of leaving India gained momentum with the passage of time.

In 1952, according to unofficial estimate, there were 20,000 Chinese in Kolkata. In 2005 it came down to around10,000 and in 2018 it is less than 1,500.

How the Chinese became Indians

Diplomatic relations between India and China began to improve in 1976 but the government of India took many more years to finally allow the naturalization of the ethnic Chinese living in India.

The Chinese however never waited for this formal acknowledgement of the government of their status in India to forge their distinct identity in the country.

The first Chinese settlement in India was established in Bengal in 1781 at Achipur, a place located 9 km west of Budge Budge, by a man named Tong Atchew, who was looking for new business opportunities in a new place.

Realizing the potential of Calcutta as a developing port city under the British, he wrote to Warren Hastings, the then Governor General of Bengal for land to set up a farm and bring in skilled labourer from China. He was granted his wish and returned with 110 Chinese workers and set up India’s first Chinese colony on the river Hoogly.

But Atchew’s life took a downturn when a hooligan, an opium trader started wooing his labourers to Calcutta and he even developed a fancy for his adopted daughter. The British Government tried to stop this labour drain but to no avail. Atchew incurred heavy financial losses, his health took a beating, and he died.

The temple Atchew built is still there in Achipur and on Chinese New Year many people from the community go there to pray.

There are many legends associated with Atchew. One is that he had introduced the first hand-pulled rickshaw in Achipur, to carry goods.

The evolving Chinese identity

As Ananda elaborates, after Atchew, most of the immigrants came to India from Southern China. Interestingly, their preference for occupations is also connected to the place of origin. For instance, the Cantonese who came from modern-day Guangzhou were able carpenters, the Hakkas who came from tiny farms in Moi-Yen were shoe makers, tannery, restaurant and salon owners and those who came from Hubei were dentists.

The detailed analysis of the media reports shows how the new generation is losing interest in family occupations and are looking for other career options in India and abroad. One important side of the book is the study of social media platforms – Facebook, blog, YouTube etc. – used by the community members. It shows how the Chinese are getting attracted towards Indian culture, festivals, and of course, Indian food. But at the same time, they are trying to protect their Chinese cultural identity by celebrating the Chinese festivals, and by protecting the Chinese temples in Kolkata.

Tell-all documentary and books

The experience during and after the Sino-Indian war perhaps made the community wary of any kind of interaction with the media and researchers. Therefore, researchers also didn’t take much interest in the community. As a result, the community gained the image of being ‘insular’ and ‘closed’.

When Mumbai-based filmmaker Rafeeq Elias made the documentary The Legend of Fat Mama in 2005, international attention for the first time turned to the suffering of the Chinese in India after the Sino-Indian War in 1962.

Thereafter, Indian print media, both English and Bengali, repeatedly published about the community. The researchers and academics too found renewed interest in their rich history in India. The media recognized their contribution to Kolkata’s economy and projected them to be skilled, professional and hardworking. The media also sympathetically highlighted their bitter experience as a consequence of the war between the country of origin and the country of residence.

Before this, films and books that had Chinese characters consistently created a negative image of the community in India by showing them in opium and gambling dens and showed Chinatowns as places of criminal activities.

Kar has written in details about a number of Bengali fictions that are written on the community or has Chinese characters, and he has mentioned films as well like Neel Akasher Nichey, Howrah Bridge, Chinatown and Fire that have prominent Chinese characters. He has taken up the Hindi book Chini Pheriwala by Mahadevi Verma where she shows the beautiful relationship between a woman and a Chinese hawker and how they develop a brother-sister bond.

Sahitya Akademi award-winner Assamese writer Rita Chowdhury’s book Makam published in 2010 is based on extensive research and poignantly touches upon the struggles of the Chinese settlers in India after 1962. Kar writes in his book, “The novelist’s intention is to bring into light a forgotten chapter of Indian history that did not get much public attention for years. Makam is probably the only book that captures the history, acculturation, political marginalization and the social life of the Chinese settlers of North East India.”

Makam is significant for another aspect. This work also documents the harassment of the Chinese people, who were deported to China during the Sino-Indian war, on the suspicion to be Indian spies.

One important feature of the Kar’s book is a chapter on the writings by the Chinese Indian community members.

It was not until 2006 that the first insider’s account of the horrors faced by the Chinese was written in English. Kwai-Yun Li’s book The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories gives rare insight of the life of Chinese in India, especially in Kolkata, where she was born and raised.

A Lost Tribe by Ming Tung Hsieh is another such book where the author apart from writing about the harrowing conditions of the camp also points out that not a single Chinese was charged, tried or convicted for espionage or acting against the nation.

In Doing Time With Nehru: The Story of an Indian Chinese Family, Yin Marsh writes about how they were a happy family living in Darjeeling, owning a Chinese restaurant and a beauty parlour. Yin was 13, her brother was 8. Both were taken to Deoli with their father and very old grandmother and their properties were confiscated by the government. 

The Boy from Kalimpong too touches that time period, but very briefly.

 In 2015, Rajnath Singh, the then home minister of Government of India, expressed regret for the sufferings of Chinese diaspora at the time of the Sino-Indian War in 1962. This gesture was welcomed by the Chinese Indian community.

The Chinese in Calcutta

Ananda Mohan Kar’s book gives a detailed and extremely poignant account of the Chinese community in India. How they worship Ma Kali, how many of them speak the local language fluently, how they perceive Bengalis as compassionate, inclusive and artistic people and how the fear of Deoli still looms large and came back to haunt them when the Chinese incursion happened in Galwan in June 2020. When the COVID 19 pandemic had spread from China, some of these Chinese faced harassment in public places. Despite the difficulties they have faced, there is no denying the fact that the Chinese are an integral part of Kolkata and will always remain so.

As for Kim Wah restaurant, the famous Chinese restaurant next to my house, it has closed down long back. But some members of the family still live there. The Lion Dancers still come on Chinese New Year wearing their elaborate glitzy costumes. Their numbers have increased; from a single truck 40 years back, there are at least 3-4 trucks coming at various times of the day.

As the Chinese New Year celebrations begin this year the wait at my balcony begins too. Hope the truck comes when I am at home.