Despite dwindling numbers, Chinese community in Indian city ushers in Lunar New Year with pomp and gaiety

The dwindling Chinese community in Kolkata, in India's eastern state of West Bengal, celebrated the Lunar New Year in a traditional way with a lot of festivities and much pomp and grandeur.

The community organized an array of events, including lion and dragon dances, fireworks, a food festival, and the lighting of Chinese lanterns, with the celebrations taking off on Jan 21 in the two Chinatowns of Tangra and Tiretta Bazaar in central Kolkata. The festivities offered a taste of the community's history, heritage, rituals, lifestyles, while showcasing the city's ethnic diversity.

The Spring Festival, the biggest traditional Chinese festival, has been celebrated by the local Chinese every year since they began to settle in Kolkata in the late 18th century. The celebration starts a couple of days before the Chinese New Year kicks in, and continues for two weeks.

A couple of days before the festival, people in the community cleaned their houses, decorated doors with red posters of poetic verses and red lanterns to welcome the new year and to ward off evil and invite good fortune, happiness and longevity, said Christopher Chang, a fourth-generation Indian-Chinese resident of Kolkata.

A midnight walk and lion dance was organized at Tangra on the night of Jan 21. Like every year, the dance, a quintessential part of the festival, enthralled everyone, as it featured large faces of "Chinese lions" made of silk, cotton, paper, and plastic. They danced to the beats of cymbals and drums, as they wound their way through the Chinese localities, with crackers burst at regular intervals.

The Indian-Chinese community in Kolkata is a small diaspora and very close knit. During the Chinese New Year, lion and dragon dance groups visit door-to-door, offer prayers and wish families good luck and good health, said Janice Lee, a fourth-generation Indian-Chinese born and brought up in Kolkata.

Twenty or thirty years ago there were many more lion dance groups. On Chinese New Year's Day, a dance group used to come after every 10 minutes and perform the dance, recalled Thomas Chen, a third-generation Indian-Chinese living in Tiretta Bazaar .

"This time I have seen merely one lion dance group performing," said Chen, who is joint secretary of the Indian-Chinese Association for Culture, Welfare and Development.

Family gatherings for meals are important part of the private celebrations. They make special Chinese cookies called 'Maafaa'. A feast is prepared and placed on a round table where the entire family sits together and has special foods. Noodles are a must as they signify and symbolize good health and longevity, said Fang Chung, from a third-generation Chinese immigrant family in Kolkata.

On the two Sundays after the New Year, many Chinese in Kolkata visit the tomb of Yong Atchew, located on the banks of the Hooghly river, on Kolkata's southern fringe. They make the trip as part of a pilgrimage to remember the first Chinese immigrants to India in modern times. The community gathers at a temple near the tomb, a bright red horseshoe shaped structure, to light candles and pray.

Records show that a small number of Chinese migrants arrived in what was then known as Calcutta, in the latter half of the 18th century on ships that arrived from Canton, historians Zhing Xian and Tansen Sen noted in their paper "The Chinese in South Asia."

The most well-known "first" settler was a tea trader named Yang Dazhao, nicknamed Atchew, who received a land grant from the then British governor-general Warren Hastings in 1778 near Budge Budge, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly river. Atchew set up a sugar mill on the plot in the area, since called Achipur, and began to bring laborers from China.

But in recent times, the Chinese population in Kolkata has been shrinking, with the younger generation moving abroad in search of better future and livelihoods, rued Chen.

Ahead of the Chinese New Year, a special event, "Know Your Cheenapara", was organized at Tiretta Bazaar on Jan 15 where several history and heritage enthusiasts were present. A research presentation on the Chinese community, dragon dance shows, a curated heritage walk and a lantern-making workshop marked the event.

Another special event was organized by the Chinese consulate in Kolkata, featuring a heritage walk, a lion dance show and a lavish dinner in a city hotel.

Kolkata is one of the few cities in the world to boast two Chinatowns — Tiretta Bazar (Old Chinatown) and Tangra (New Chinatown) — where at one time more than 20,000 ethnic Chinese-Indians used to reside.

The Chinatowns swelled with Hakka Chinese, migrants from the provinces of Guangdong, Shandong and Hubei. The number rose rapidly after the Japanese invasion of China in 1931 and the subsequent Sino-Japanese war, according to historians.

Walking along the streets of the Chinatowns, one can find plenty of old Chinese signboards, hundred-year-old Chinese restaurants, soy sauce factories, carpentry workshops, shoemakers, dry cleaners, Chinese temples and schools.

Now, less than 2,000 of the Chinese-Indians still live here, Chen said, expressing worry that in a few decades, there is "a high chance" that the community would vanish from the city.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China daily.

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