India’s disappearing Chinese community

When Janice Lee went on holiday to China, she found that she couldn’t wait for it to end. “I couldn’t speak the language, I didn’t like the food and I felt very lost,” she recalled.

Not being able to fit into a foreign culture may not sound that strange – except that Lee is of Chinese origin herself. When she told me, “I felt at ease only when I finally got back”, she was referring to her home in Kolkata. Lee is a fifth-generation Indian Chinese of Hakka origin, and works at Pou Chong Foods, a business started by her grandfather in 1958 to supply Chinese sauces and noodles to other Chinese residents.

India’s first Chinese immigrant, Tong Ah Chew (Atchew, according to British records), arrived in Kolkata with loads of tea in 1778 and set up a sugar mill near the city. As an eastern port, Kolkata was the closest entry into India from China and East Asia, so this became India’s only Chinese community. The city’s Chinese population swelled to more than 20,000 in the early 20th Century when many fled China to escape its civil war and conflict with Japan to find work in the tanning and leather industries. Here, they intermarried and integrated with locals, learning to speak Bengali and Hindi fluently.

Lee explained that it was Ah Chew’s association with sugar – “chini” in many Indian languages including Bengali – that gave rise to the still-prevalent Indian word for Chinese people, best captured in the popular diplomatic slogan of the 1950s, “Hindi Chini bhai bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers). Kolkata’s original Chinatown is still called Cheenapara.

Today, there are barely 2,000 people of Chinese origin left in Kolkata. But their culture is visible everywhere in the Tiretta (also called Tiretti) Bazar and Tangra neighbourhoods: in the street food vendors, the Taoist temples and community clubs, as well as the annual lion dances to welcome the Lunar New Year.

While cities like San Francisco and London are known for their Chinatowns, Kolkata’s has remained under the radar. And while India still doesn’t have any other Chinatowns, Kolkata counts not one, but two: the original one at Tiretta Bazar that has existed since the 1800s; and the settlement created later at Tangra in the early 1900s.

Kolkata blogger Rangan Datta, who has been documenting local heritage for many years now, explained that a large chunk of the population was forced to move to a marshy area that used to be outside the main town when pollution-causing tanneries were shifted out of Tiretta Bazar in central Kolkata.

“The Chinese first settled in an area between the Bengali town and European town, where other foreigners like the Armenians and Greeks, as well as non-Bengalis such as the Marwaris and Parsis lived. All of them came to Kolkata then for trade or business,” he said.

Surely enough, Bow Barracks (where the Anglo-Indian community lived), the Armenian Church and the Parsi fire temple all exist in close proximity within this multicultural neighbourhood. Even then, not everyone from the community lived in Tiretta Bazar, said chef Peter Tseng, a third-generation Kolkata Chinese, who grew up outside the area and remembers visiting his cousins living there.

Kolkata resident Swati Mishra, who led the Community Art Project at Tiretta Bazar, aimed at garnering local participation to rejuvenate their public spaces, said, “Unlike typical Chinatowns, Tiretta Bazar is not a gated or enclosed community. The Chinese have been living in close proximity with other communities since the beginning, and some of them speak better Bengali than me.” But Tangra, which was created later, does have the ornamental gateway typical of Chinatowns worldwide.

One of the ways in which the Chinese community managed to bridge the gap with locals was through food. The first Chinese restaurants in India were set up in Kolkata by the local Hakkanese community, and over time, this Sino-Indian – or “Chindian” – cuisine made its way to the rest of the country. To this day, it remains their greatest gift to India, a constant favourite across the country and one of the mainstays of eating out in India, found everywhere from street carts to plush restaurants.

BBC