Chinese community in India

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Chinese community in India
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Total population
4,000 Chinese Indians (2014)[1]
5-7,000 Chinese expatriates (2015)[2]
Regions with significant populations
Chinese Indians: Kolkata, Mumbai
Chinese expatriates: Mumbai, Gurgaon, Bangalore[2]
Languages
Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, varieties of Chinese (especially Hakka), English
Religion
Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism

Chinese people in India are two communities with separate origins and settlement. One is of immigrants from China and Indian-born people of Chinese ancestry and the other is of expatriate Chinese living in India for terms of usually 2–3 years.[2]

The immigrant community started in the late 18th century with arrivals working at the ports in Calcutta and Madras, and has gone on to contribute to the social and economic life of Kolkata through manufacturing and trade of leather products and running Chinese restaurants.[3] The community numbers about 4,000 with around 2,000 living in Kolkata and 400 families in Mumbai, where there are Chinatowns.[1][4][5]

There are an estimated 5-7,000 Chinese expatriates living in India as of 2015, having doubled in number in recent years. Most work on 2-3 year term contracts for the growing number of Chinese brands and companies doing business in India.[2]

History

Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian at the ruins of Ashoka palace

The first record of travel from China is provided in the travelogue of Faxian (Fa-Hien) who visited Tampralipta, in what is now Tamluk in the 5th century AD. Records of immigration for the next sixteen centuries are not reliable although many words in Bengali can be attributed to Chinese influences.[3] For example, chini, the Bengali word for "sugar" comes from the word for China, and words like Chinamati for porcelain china hint at Chinese influences.[6]

The first recorded Chinese settler in India is Tong Achew,a trader who landed near Budge Budge in late 18th century. Achew set up a sugar cane plantation along with a sugar factory. Achew brought in a band of Chinese workers to work in his plantation and factory. This was the first Chinese settlement in India. Achew died shortly after and the Chinese settlers moved to Kolkata. The place came to be named as Achipur, after Tong Achew. Achew's grave and a Chinese temple is still seen in Achipur.[7]

Portuguese India

Chinese children who were kidnapped by the Portuguese from China were sold as slaves in Portuguese India.[8][9][10][11] The Portuguese were alleged to have eaten some of the Chinese children.[12][13][14] In Portuguese India, the Indian Muslim Kunjali Marakkars fought against the Portuguese and raided their shipping. One of the Kunjali Marrakars (Kunjali IV) rescued a Chinese boy, called Chinali, who had been enslaved on a Portuguese ship. The Kunjali was very fond of him, and he became one of his most feared lieutenants, a fanatical Muslim and enemy of the Portuguese, terrorizing them in battle.[15][16] The Portuguese were terrorized by the Kunjali and his Chinese right-hand man, eventually, after the Portuguese allied with Calicut's Samorin, under Andre Furtado de Mendoça they attacked the Kunjali and Chinali's forces, and they were handed over to the Portuguese by the Samorin after he reneged on a promise to let them go.[17] Diogo do Couto, a Portuguese historian, questioned the Kunjali and Chinali when they were captured.[18] He was present when the Kunjali surrendered to the Portuguese, and was described: "One of these was Chinale, a Chinese, who had been a servant at Malacca, and said to have been the captive of a Portuguese, taken as a boy from a fusta, and afterwards brought to Kunhali, who conceived such an affection for him that he trusted him with everything. He was the greatest exponent of the Moorish superstition and enemy of the Christians in all Malabar, and for those taken captive at sea and brought thither he invented the most exquisite kinds of torture when he martyred them."[19][20][21] However, de Couto's claim that he tortured Christians was questioned, since no other source reported this, and has been described as lacking credibility.[22][23]

British India

Entrance of Nam Soon Church, Kolkata

Kolkata, then known as Calcutta, was the capital of British India from 1772 to 1911. It was also geographically the easiest accessible metropolitan area from China by land. The first person of Chinese origin to arrive in Calcutta was Yang Tai Chow who arrived in 1778. He worked in a sugar mill with the eventual goal of saving enough to start a tea trade.[24] Many of the earliest immigrants worked on the Khidderpore docks. A police report in 1788 mentions a sizable Chinese population settled in the vicinity of Bow Bazaar Street.[3]

During the time of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of British India, a businessman by the name of Tong Achi established a sugar mill, along with a sugar plantation at Achipur, 33 km from Calcutta, on the bank of the Hooghly River near Budge Budge.[25] A temple and the grave of Tong Achi still remain and are visited by many Chinese who come from the city during the Chinese New Year.[25]

One of the earliest records of immigration from China can be found in a short treatise from 1820. This records hints that the first wave of immigration was of Hakkas but does not elaborate on the professions of these immigrants. According to a later police census, there were 362 in Calcutta in 1837. A common meeting place was the Temple of Guan Yu, the god of war, located in the Chinese quarter near Dharmatolla.[3] A certain C. Alabaster mentions in 1849 that Cantonese carpenters congregated in the Bow Bazar Street area.[3] As late as 2006, Bow Bazar is still noted for carpentry, but few of the workers or owners are now Chinese.

Some Chinese convicts deported from the Straits Settlements were sent to be jailed in Madras in India, the "Madras district gazetteers, Volume 1" reported an incident where the Chinese convicts escaped and killed the police sent to apprehend them: "Much of the building work was done by Chinese convicts sent to the Madras jails from the Straits Settlements (where there was no sufficient prison accommodation) and more than once these people escaped from the temporary buildings' in which they were confined at Lovedale. In 186^ seven of them got away and it was several days before they were apprehended by the Tahsildar, aided by Badagas sent out in all directions to search. On 28 July in the following year twelve others broke out during a very stormy night and parties of armed police were sent out to scour the hills for them. They were at last arrested in Malabar a fortnight later. Some police weapons were found in their possession, and one of the parties of police had disappeared—an ominous coincidence. Search was made all over the country for the party, and at length, on 15 September, their four bodies were found lying in the jungle at Walaghát, half way down the Sispára ghát path, neatly laid out in a row with their severed heads carefully placed on their shoulders. It turned out that the wily Chinamen, on being overtaken, had at first pretended to surrender and had then suddenly attacked the police and killed them with their own weapons."[26][27][28] Other Chinese convicts in Madras who were released from jail then settled in the Nilgiri mountains near Naduvattam and married Tamil Paraiyan women, having mixed Chinese-Tamil children with them. They were documented by Edgar Thurston.[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] Paraiyan is also anglicized as "pariah".

Edgar Thurston described the colony of the Chinese men with their Tamil pariah wives and children: "Halting in the course of a recent anthropological expedition on the western side of the Nilgiri plateau, in the midst of the Government Cinchona plantations, I came across a small settlement of Chinese, who have squatted for some years on the slopes of the hills between Naduvatam and Gudalur, and developed, as the result of ' marriage ' with Tamil pariah women, into a colony, earning an honest livelihood by growing vegetables, cultivating coffee on a small scale, and adding to their income from these sources by the economic products of the cow. An ambassador was sent to this miniature Chinese Court with a suggestion that the men should, in return for monies, present themselves before me with a view to their measurements being recorded. The reply which came back was in its way racially characteristic as between Hindus and Chinese. In the case of the former, permission to make use of their bodies for the purposes of research depends essentially on a pecuniary transaction, on a scale varying from two to eight annas. The Chinese, on the other hand, though poor, sent a courteous message to the effect that they did not require payment in money, but would be perfectly happy if I would give them, as a memento, copies of their photographs."[39][40] Thurston further describe a specific family: "The father was a typical Chinaman, whose only grievance was that, in the process of conversion to Christianity, he had been obliged to 'cut him tail off.' The mother was a typical Tamil Pariah of dusky hue. The colour of the children was more closely allied to the yellowish tint of the father than to the dark tint of the mother; and the semimongol parentage was betrayed in the slant eyes, flat nose, and (in one case) conspicuously prominent cheek-bones."[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] Thurston's description of the Chinese-Tamil families were cited by others, one mentioned "an instance mating between a Chinese male with a Tamil Pariah female"[50][51][52][53][54] A 1959 book described attempts made to find out what happened to the colony of mixed Chinese and Tamils.[55]

According to Alabaster there were lard manufacturers and shoemakers in addition to carpenters. Running tanneries and working with leather was traditionally not considered a respectable profession among upper-caste Hindus, and work was relegated to lower caste muchis and chamars. There was a high demand, however, for high quality leather goods in colonial India, one that the Chinese were able to fulfill. Alabaster also mentions licensed opium dens run by native Chinese and a Cheena Bazaar where contraband was readily available. Opium, however, was not illegal until after India's Independence from Great Britain in 1947. Immigration continued unabated through the turn of the century and during World War I partly due to political upheavals in China such as the First and Second Opium Wars, First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion. Around the time of the First World War, the first Chinese-owned tanneries sprang up.[3]

In Assam, local Indian women married several waves of Chinese migrants during British colonial times, to the point where it became hard to physically differentiate Chinese in Assam from locals during the time of their internment during the 1962 war, and the majority of these Chinese in Assam were married to Indian women.[56]

Sino-Indian War

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Chinese in India faced anti-national sentiment during Sino Indian war of 1962.[57] After its defeat in the war, India passed the Defence of India Act in December 1962,[58] permitting the "apprehension and detention in custody of any person [suspected] of being of hostile origin." The broad language of the act allowed for the arrest of any person simply for having a Chinese surname, a drop of Chinese blood, or a Chinese spouse.[59] Under the draconian law, 10,000 people of Chinese origin were estimated to have been detained at the desert prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. All of them were accused of being spies, but not a single charge has ever been proven.[58] In 1964, many internees were forcibly and arbitrarily deported, resulting in the breakup of many families.[58] The rest were released starting in 1965. The last internees were released from Deoli in mid-1967, after four and half years of captivity.[58]

The Chinese population in Calcutta decreased by half, from 20,000 to 10,000. Those who remained were seen as enemies, and most could not hold any job except in the restaurant, tanning, and shoemaking businesses.[57] Moreover, their movements were restricted. They were required to report to designated police stations once a month, and until the mid-1990s, they had to apply for special permits to travel more than a few kilometres from their homes.[58]

The situation was alleviated when India and China resumed diplomatic relations in 1976. However, it was not until 1998 that ethnic Chinese were allowed naturalized Indian citizenship.[57] In 2005, the first road sign in Chinese characters was put up in Chinatown, Tangra.[24]

Communities

Chinese New Year 2014 Celebration in Kolkata

Chinese Indians

Chinese Indians today are located in ethnic neighborhoods in Kolkata and Mumbai. The largest population is in Chinatown, Kolkata where about 2,000 live and another 400 Chinese Indian families in Mumbai.[1] Hakka Chinese of Kolkata tend to be endogamous but at the same time have integrated into Kolkata society by learning the Bengali language.

This community of Chinese works as tannery-owners, sauce manufacturers, shoeshop owners, restaurateurs, beauty parlours owners. The new generation have gone in large numbers to dentistry.[24] Many of the shoe shops lining Bentick Street, near Dharmatolla, are owned and operated by Chinese. The restaurants have given rise to fusions of Chinese (especially Hakka) and Indian culinary traditions in the widely available form of Indian Chinese cuisine. There is one Chinese newspaper published in Kolkata, The Overseas Chinese Commerce in India but figures from 2005 show that sales have dwindled from 500 to 300 copies sold.[60]

At one time, 90% of the students of the Grace Ling Liang English School were ethnic Chinese. In 2003 they comprised only about 15% of the 1500 students.[61] Many of the Chinese of Kolkata are Christians due to the influence of missionary schools they studied in.

The Chinese New Year remains widely observed as well as Hungry Ghost Festival and Moon Festival.[24][62] The Chinese of Kolkata celebrate Chinese New Year with lion and dragon dance. It is celebrated in the end of January or early February.[63]

Expatriates

Expatriate Chinese in India are concentrated in the cities of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.[2] The Mumbai neighborhood of Powai is described by the Economic Times as an "upcoming hub" for Chinese expats, who according to the newspaper "form close communities within themselves."[2] Better integration of Chinese expats in their host communities is hampered by short time frames of stays, often durations only last for 2–3 years as part of a work contract.[2] Also many in order to comply with visa regulations must routinely exit and leave India.[2]

Notable people

See also

Notes

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  6. Suniti Chatterji. The Origin and Development of Bengali Language, University of Calcutta Press, 1926.
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External links