India’s Ethnic Chinese Feel Marginalized, Migrate
2 hours, 45 minutes ago
By Kamil Zaheer
CALCUTTA, India (Reuters) - William Yeh’s family has lived in India for generations. Still, the 33-year-old restaurant manager, a member of a small ethnic Chinese community in Calcutta, says he does not feel Indian.
“My parents were born in India, so was I. Yet I often feel like a second-class citizen,” Yeh told Reuters.
“I speak Bengali and have worked with Indians but some people still make me feel like a foreigner,” he said. “The police asked extra questions when I applied for a passport. One reason was because I am Chinese.”
That rankles for someone who belongs to a community that has been part of Calcutta’s history for more than 200 years. The first Chinese settler arrived in the city in 1780 during British colonial rule and started a sugar mill.
Disillusioned about being marginalized from mainstream Indian society, Yeh plans to move to the West like hundreds of other Chinese who have left Calcutta and migrated to countries such as Canada, Austria and Sweden.
As a result of the exodus over the past 12 years, the number of ethnic Chinese in Calcutta has plunged to about 4,500 people from more than 19,000 in 1990.
“When we go to villages, people stare. In cities, some make fun of us because we are different,” said Paul Chung, a former assistant school principal.
CHINESE CHARACTERS
Calcutta is home to more than 90 percent of India’s dwindling Chinese community, which made a name for itself at the start of the 19th century as carpenters on ships at the city port.
Today, while some Chinese run restaurants and tanneries in the city of some 15 million people, others are carpenters or run shoe stores, laundries and beauty clinics.
Most live in Tangra, Calcutta’s rundown Chinatown, where restaurants with names written in Chinese characters sit next to old tanneries.
The tanneries, which once released untreated effluents into open drains flowing past the eateries, have been closed since the Supreme Court asked them earlier this year to move to a new industrial area with proper treatment plants.
“Though Tangra is still quite dirty. It was far worse 25 years ago when the tanneries were functioning. It really used to stink and one had to be very brave to eat there,” said Calcutta businessman Ravi Kumar.
DETENTION CAMPS
The first Chinese settler, Yong Atchew, arrived about 220 years ago and started a Chinese settlement in Calcutta when he brought more than 100 laborers from China to work at his mill. Many early settlers were also men who had jumped ship.
After 1949, Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in China sent a wave of Chinese emigres fleeing communism into Calcutta.
Things became difficult for the Chinese when India and China fought a brief border war in 1962, leading to anti-Chinese sentiment in India.
Hundreds of people were sent to detention camps in the western state of Rajasthan, more than 685 miles away.
Monica Liu, now a partner in a successful chain of Chinese restaurants, was 12 when she was sent to a camp. “Along with my family, I was sent to a camp in Rajasthan, a hot desert state. I kept asking why? We weren’t criminals.”
“Later, I realized we were sent away because we were Chinese,” Liu, 52, said as customers poured into her restaurant.
“Even when we were allowed out for a picnic, police followed us. Though things are better now, the suspicion is still there.”
A LOSS TO THE CITY
Chung, also president of the Indian-Chinese Association, says the Chinese must take some blame for their relative isolation.
“The Chinese are conservative and don’t mix freely, fearing trouble,” said Chung, who has no plans to migrate to the West and waited three decades before getting a passport.
“They tell me they are harassed, but when I ask them to file a complaint in writing, they don’t want to.”
Calcutta Deputy Police Commissioner Sivaji Ghosh said he had not received any complaints of harassment of ethnic Chinese people but did not rule it out at the lower level.
“Indians of Chinese origin should not put up with unwarranted suspicion. They should file a complaint,” Ghosh said.
Many in Calcutta lament the Chinese exodus. “The Chinese are an intrinsic part of cosmopolitan Calcutta,” said Joy Goswami, a famous Bengali poet.
“Their departure will be a loss to the city.”