A studio portrait of Ah Leen (left, standing), her husband, brother, mother and two sons. Ah Leen was born in Sui Thang village of Canton in China. She moved to India in 1935 when she was 2.5-year-old. Photo courtesy of Wu family Archives.
Jennifer Liang: My two brothers and I were born in Kolkata (state in east India) and moved to Bangalore (southern Indian city) early on. The emotional connect with the city where most of our family lived was always very strong. Though the questions of our Indian-Chinese identity were always there, being physically away from the larger community provided us the space to chart our own life and career path.Being away also helped me look at things a bit more objectively, especially the crises which the young people from the community regularly faced with regard to their identity, education, life choices etc. Based on these concerns, I chose to do my master’s thesis on the stress that Indian-Chinese youth experience in Kolkata. Later, while doing a short pre-doctoral course, I spent a year and a half researching and recording our oral histories which led to the organisation and establishment of the Indian Chinese Association in Kolkata.
Jennifer Liang: For Lawrence and myself, this is of course a very personal journey. This is our way of leaving behind a legacy and memory of a community that was vibrant, and contributed to the cultural history of India in its own special way.Vidura Jang Bahadur is a photographer who, after returning from an almost four year stay in China, started meeting and photographing Chinese families in India. He has travelled all over the country, and has possibly met more members of the community than any other person. He was, thus, a natural partner in this project.
Jacob Shen interacts with students at the Benjamin Garden School, run by his family. Shen’s father, Shen Fu Min, was the first headmaster of the Chinese Chungwah School set up for the children of the Chinese trading community settled in the eastern Indian hill town of Kalimpong. Photo Courtesy of Vidura Jang Bahadur.
Koel Chatterjee is a graphic designer and illustrator who has a similar interest as Jenny’s in food histories.
Lawrence Liang: Official histories are often the product of official memories, and when you are working with an extremely tiny community in the context of a large nation state, it becomes difficult to turn to the usual sites of history namely archives and repositories. In fact, archival history in this context acts as a deterrent rather than an enabler of community narratives.Aga Shahid Ali in a poem speaks of how history comes in the way of memory, and one of the challenges of a project of this kind is to reconstruct the story of a community primarily through its individual and shared memories. This is easier said than done as it requires a methodology that is attentive to oral histories, experiential narratives, all of which become a challenge when it comes to a community that has been a little reticent to speak about itself.Given the current political climate between India and China, are there any issues the members of the community face that hinder the peace of their daily existence?
Lawrence Liang: In general, India has been an extremely hospitable home for the Indian-Chinese community, for whom in fact there is no other home apart from here. However, the older generation has memories of the 1962 war, during the course of which many families were interned in a camp in Deoli, Rajasthan (state in north India). There is, therefore, understandably some amount of anxiety about how a conflict would impact those of us living in India.
Liu Yong Ven (seated in the foreground) or “Shaida Chini” as he is popularly known in literary circles of the eastern Indian city of Jamshedpur, was a well known Urdu poet. Photo courtesy of Vidura Jang Bahadur.
Jennifer Liang: We envisage this project as being one that is driven primarily by content provided by the members of the community itself. What we have compiled is merely the preliminary material and we hope that it will inspire people to contribute their own stories, images and memories to make this a rich and thriving archive of the community.
Desi Chinese Project team in the northeastern state of Nagaland in July, 2019. Photo courtesy of Desi Chinese Project.