18:26
Tieng Anh Vui
STREET food in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, does not usually include barbecued-pork dumplings. Yet the delicacy is on offer in Tiretti bazaar, a forlorn part of old Chinatown. One stallholder, Yu-chai, tells how his parents, who were farmers, fled Guangdong province at the time of Japan’s invasion of China. An elderly lady nearby, Nam Yok Chang, says she has sold sticky rice, pork and shrimp wrapped in bamboo leaves for as long as she can remember.
Soon after dawn each day a dozen people of Chinese descent—dentists, a carpenter, restaurant-owners—settle on plastic chairs to eat and gossip. Their number is dwindling, they say, and the congee on sale in the stalls is not what it used to be. More and more stalls are run by Bengalis. Younger Chinese meanwhile have emigrated, to Canada, Australia and America. Parents have followed.
Georgie Ling, a chef, says that when his father arrived in Calcutta in the early 20th century, Chinese “lived like kings”. Chinese migrants had begun coming to India in the late 1700s, setting up the first sugar refineries. Then the British, who pressed exports of Indian opium on China in order to pay for purchases of tea and to plug a huge outflow of silver to China, brought back carpenters and tea-plantation workers to Assam in India’s north-east. Most Chinese were Cantonese-speakers from Guangdong in the south. A century ago, they numbered about 100,000 in India. Calcutta’s Chinatown won fame for its red lanterns, exotic food and drug dens.
Things began to go downhill after independence in 1947. In 1962, during a vicious border war between India and China, Chinese Indians suffered the indignity of internment in miserable camps in Rajasthan. Then city tanneries, many run by Chinese, were moved out of Calcutta. And West Bengal’s economy, misrun by Marxists and others for decades, only decayed.
By one estimate, barely 4,000 people of Chinese descent now remain in India, about half of them in Kolkata’s Chinatown. “Everyone wants to leave”, says Mr Ling. True, other Chinese expats are coming into India on the back of growing bilateral trade, worth $66 billion in 2013, while about 175,000 Chinese tourists visited India last year (the number almost certainly includes small traders). But India’s own Chinese population is close to vanishing.
A plan exists to salvage the remaining Chinese buildings in Kolkata, partly in the hope of persuading the last Chinese to stay. Step over a dead dog to head down Chinatown’s side streets beyond the market, and a few gems appear: a temple with a neat courtyard and an intricately carved and lacquered representation of a heavenly dragon-boat; a mah-jong club; and a former opium den turned funeral parlour. There is also the redbrick structure of India’s most famous Chinese restaurant, the Nanking, opened in 1924. China’s then prime minister, Zhou Enlai, reportedly ate there in the 1950s; today, vapours rise from a pile of rubbish by its entrance.
A conservation group, Intach, wants to clean up the area, inspired by the revival of Singapore’s Chinatown. Others, too, are keen. Chinese festivals and hygienic eateries could bring tourists and prosperity. There is a proposal for a new Chinatown costing 2.5 billion rupees ($41m). But success almost certainly depends on a broader urban recovery. Kolkata is more ramshackle than most big Indian cities, and strapped for cash.
There are small success stories. The owners of one family-run factory, making sauces, say that Indian consumers have a strong liking for food from the East. Business was good enough for the family to return from Canada last year in order to expand. Recipes are saltier and spicier to suit the Indian palate, and “Bengali Chinese” has emerged as a distinct cuisine. If the Chinese minority is to carry on, it will be with an Indian touch.
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