The Chinese at Kolkata

Mud-map of Kolkata’s Chinatown, with a few guildhalls marked

In March 2024 I had a superficial look around Tiretta Bazaar (aka Tiretti or Terita), Kolkata’s one-time Chinatown. There have been Chinese in the city since the 1700s, but it was from the mid-nineteenth century onwards that large numbers, impoverished by famine, foreign invasion and civil war at home, emigrated here to look for better lives. They found work as carpenters and tanners and, as in other overseas Chinese communities, formed self-help associations, each with their own meeting houses.

Lap cheong sausage-maker and Chinese beauty parlour for ladies only

Today, though there are still a handful of these guildhalls around Tiretta Bazaar, Kolkata’s once-substantial Chinese population of “ten thousand” residents has shrunk to a few hundred. I talked to loungers at the Sea Ip Guildhall (四邑會館), but nobody could read or speak Chinese, only Hindi, and we communicated through an English-speaker from Sikkim. They seemed to have an anecdotal, sketchy view of the community’s history and religious objects: a print of Cai Shen, god of wealth, was said to be that of Genghis Khan; another of the Peach Maiden with children and cranes – symbolic wishes for progeny and longevity – is now claimed to be a transvestite.

Sea Ip Guildhall entrance, plus interior shrine upstairs

See Ip originally catered to four clan houses from the southern Chinese towns of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui and Enping, later adding Heshan too; they also had members from Hainan Island off the south China coast. The British had brought them in as cheap labour during WWI and they later felt unable to return home, or perhaps China wouldn’t allow them back in. But in Kolkata they often felt unwanted; when China’s Nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek visited in 1942 the police arrested locals who turned out to greet him.

Four other guildhalls: Toong On, Yixing, Chooney Thong and Sea Voi

Feelings of persecution only increased after India’s independence from Britain in 1947. As China-India border disputes flared during the 1960s Chinese were rounded up a shifted to internment camps in Rajasthan. When they returned to Kolkata their land and property had been occupied by squatters who refused to move on (even now the guildhall’s land between its buildings and the street is full of illegal stalls which police refuse to prosecute). Tiretta was gradually abandoned by Chinese families and today, aside from the surviving guildhalls and a few shops (including a Chinese supermarket) there’s little sign it was once there.