POPULATION-INDIA: Bad Business, Distrust Driving Out Calcutta’s Chinese

By Sujoy Dhar Reprint | | Print |

Sujoy Dhar

CALCUTTA, Dec 19 2000 (IPS) - Every evening, 63-year-old Chen Pin Chang eagerly waits for the diners to enter his small one-room dwelling in a dilapidated building in this eastern Indian metropolis.

Not many know about the place located in a dingy alley, but a small group of informed clients regularly visit their home to savour the Chinese delicacies served by Chen and his wife.

The Chens cannot afford the exorbitant rental they would have to pay to open a restaurant outside their home in this overcrowded city and have to put up with the daily invasion of their privacy to support themselves.

Things would have been worse, were it not for the money they get every month from a daughter and son who live in far away Taiwan.

The Chen’s story is similar to that of nearly every Chinese family that has been living in this eastern Indian port city for several generations.

Arriving here a century ago, the Chinese community easily mingled with the people in what was even then, one of India’s biggest and most cosmopolitan cities. The Chinese dominated trades like leather, shoe-making, food, dentistry and the beauty business in the city.

But things have changed in the past three decades and Calcutta’s once-prosperous Chinese have been leaving the city for greener pastures in Canada, Australia, Taiwan and even the Gulf, since the 1980s.

Part of the reason was the stiff business competition they got from newly rising local entrepreneurs. The Chinese also had to cope with local distrust after the border war between India and China in the year 1962.

Nearly 350,000 Chinese lived in Calcutta before the 1962 conflict. Now there are less than 5,000, according to community members. For several years after the war, the Chinese found themselves treated with suspicion by the government, which severely restricted their movement.

While Chen, who came to the city from China some 50 years ago, has preferred to stay back, his brother and sister have migrated to Canada. Two of his children left for Taiwan, leaving only a brother behind who helps his parents run the Chinese restaurant while he waits for a chance to settle abroad.

The Chinese community feels that it has no future in Calcutta. Donald Hou, the owner of ‘Canton Restaurant’, who also owns a shoe shop on Bentinck Street in the city’s business hub, has seen his business slump.

“Chinese shoes have lost their price edge to the bargain buys offered by new big shoe companies which use cheap material like PVC sole instead of leather and have better marketing power. These cheaper brands start at a price that is impossible for us to offer,” he says.

“We cannot after all compromise on quality,” he insists. In the past few years, Donald has seen other shops shut down in quick succession on Bentinck Street — still famed for its Chinese shoe shops. From 250 Chinese-owned shoe shops in the 1970s, the street now has just 45.

“Lim Brothers, New Fo, Athin and Ahfun wound up recently and perhaps more will follow suit owing to trade union problems and price challenge from the big companies,” says Donald.

Their business was also hit hard by the militant trade unionism that has grown under the quarter century-old Communist Party rule in West Bengal state of which Calcutta is the capital.

“To cater to our customers we used to employ cobblers who in the seventies began agitating for higher wages. But in the nineties came the big blow when the leftist union forced us to reinstate three casual laborers whom we had sacked for absence without notice,” says Lim, the president of the Calcutta Shoe Traders Association who has shut down his own shop ‘Lim Brothers’.

For the more prosperous Chinese too, the city no longer holds much attraction. Many of the members of a family that owns two of the most popular Chinese restaurants in the city — ‘Jimmy Kitchen’ and ‘Jimmy’s Restaurant’, too have settled in the West.

Richard Chen, who looks after Jimmy’s Restaurant, is also waiting to go abroad. Michael Lim, the owner of ‘Canton Tannery’ is the only member of his family to have stayed behind.

There was a time when almost every beauty salon in Calcutta had Chinese women hairdressers. Every customer, specially rich women, expected to be served by a Chinese beautician.

But not anymore. The Chinese beauticians have all left for Canada, Australia and the Gulf. Famous salons like ‘Eve’, ‘A.N. John’ and ‘Cecelia’ along Calcutta’s ‘Park Street’, no longer have Chinese women hairdressers.

Says popular Indian television actress Rupa Ganguly who lives in Calcutta; “Today, we have only one Chinese hairdresser in the Bengali film industry and the disciplined way she does her work is admirable.”

The Chinese community now mainly lives in a locality named ‘Tangra’ on the north-eastern fringe of Calcutta. Despite being thousand of miles away from China, Tangra residents have preserved their identity.

Marriages outside the community are rare. Tangra has its own Chinese school and a temple dedicated to ancient Chinese heroes. The community also has its own Chinese daily, ‘The Chinese Journal of India’.

The Chinese community still thinks of India as its motherland. “We love India and many of us don’t want to leave Calcutta. But often we are forced to migrate as we have problems that cannot be told to the media,” says Henry Lim, manager of ‘Donald’s’ restaurant.

“Even in Canada our boys and girls have formed an Indian Chinese Association. We don’t want any government help but only don’t want to be pressurised to leave. For us India is the motherland and not China,” he says.

Though the first Chinese came here almost 100 years ago, India’s colonial British rulers had set up a triangular trade between Calcutta, Canton and London in the early 1800s. Calcutta sent opium and later cotton to China, while Canton reciprocated with tea and silk.

Driven by famine in central China, the ‘Hakka’ community was among the first to arrive in Calcutta. The second round of migration followed the Communist revolution in China half a century ago.

The Cantonese Chinese settled along Chitpore road and near ‘Chhatawala Gully’ in north Calcutta, along a labyrinth of streets, setting up noodle kitchens and even opium dens.

It was here that ‘Nanking’, Calcutta’s most elegant Chinese restaurant, opened its doors. The Chinese community has now all but abandoned Chitpore Road, which was once the real Chinatown of Calcutta.

A few Chinese families have stayed on and it is still possible to get piping hot jasmine tea and ‘dimsum’ in the neighborhood.