Students: Lukas Pauer, Adam David Wilson
Location: Group work in Kolkata
Date: November, 2008
Type: Research project, student work, Invisible Chinese

Background
Settled by emigrants from China starting in the late 1700s, the Chinatown of Kolkata is the only one of its kind in an Indian city. Mainly in the area of Tangra, the squalid, winding back lanes of Kolkata Chinatown - with abandoned sheds of closed tanneries, famous authentic Chinese eateries, open drains and the smell of dried leather hanging heavy in the air - remains an enclave that celebrates its ethnic origin.

Themes
Once settled in a booming area of markets in the city center, the Chinese community has since moved to the periphery of Kolkata in Tangra after the dilapidating relations between China and India in the 1960s. Hanging on to the only sources of livelihood for non-ethnic Indians – in the leather industry and tannery business – the community also clung to their Chinese traditions despite increasing detachment in time and place from China.

Project
What is the destiny for a ‘ethnic’ enclave/neighborhood in a formerly-colonial city? The role of a minority community, not only its confined space of the ‘quarter,’ but its effect on the urbanscape as whole, has transformative leverage that is beyond the spatial. What, specifically then, is the physical and social manifestation of the relationship of a contemporary diasporic Chinese community to its Indian host city? The ‘old’, ‘historic’ Chinatown near Tiretta Bazaar area - where few Chinese actually live today - seem to represent a romantic image of Kolkata’s diverse ethnic heritage, an image that is highlighted in time for the warming relationship between economic trade partners and neighbors China and India. The ‘new’, ‘actual’ Chinatown in Tangra - where most ethnic Chinese live and work - seem to be a physical reality of an ethnic enclave battling for cultural and economic survival. The (forced) conversion of tanneries to restaurants here and the exodus of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs for more friendly host countries in the recent decades bode an uncertain future. What, if any, could be the role of both the old and new Chinatown in the increasing importance of Kolkata as the eastern gateway to China and Southeast Asia? And how does the role of ‘heritage’, that of an image of the ‘old’ Chinatown, re-narrate the history of an ethnically diverse contemporary Kolkata for India? Could this romantic re-narration simultaneously bring real change to the Chinese of Kolkata? Can these Indian-Chinese - the majority of Chinese who live in India are in Kolkata after all - redefine Kolkata’s Chinatown for a new role in the renewed relations between the growing economic giants of China and India?