India’s only Chinatown in Kolkata, fading away Premium

Kolkata's Chinatown faces decline, with its Chinese community dwindling from 50,000 in the 1960s to just 2,000 today.

Paul Wen (71) struggles to walk even with a cane in his right hand. His eyes have lost most of his vision due to diabetes. He stops at a tea shop to take a breather and talk to people passing by. On a chilly winter morning, as a cool breeze flows through Kolkata in January, Wen says that even if with difficulty, he takes the walk every day, because he has no one left in this world to share his life with.

Being out and about on the roads of Teretti Bazaar, also known as old Chinatown in north Kolkata, is his only social life. Wen’s father had immigrated from China during the Second World War, and Wen was born in Kolkata. With no living family or many friends to count on, he lives off the food that the community members make for him.

“In my heyday, I was the Chinese cuisine chef at the Great Eastern Hotel (a luxury hotel chain) in Dalhousie. Even during the upcoming Chinese New Year in mid-February, I have no family to look forward to,” Wen adds, as he sits at a tea shop wearing his torn orange cap, a worn-down black T-shirt, and tattered beige trousers.

An equally fragile 73-year-old man passes by, struggling to take every step as he walks back to the Sea Ip (1882), a Chinese Buddhist temple, which he now calls home. He also has no family left, much like Paul. 

Just about 5 kilometers from Terreti Bazaar lies another Chinese settlement in Kolkata, called Tangra or the new Chinatown, in the Eastern end of the city. The number of Chinese-origin people that straddles these has dwindled to between 1,500 and 2,000. In the 1960s the number was at an all-time high of over 50,000, say community members. 

In the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal, 484 people (252 men and 232 women) of Chinese origin were deleted, found an analysis by the Sabar Institute, a non-profit that uses data for social justice. Of those deleted, 389 have been categorised as untraceable or absent. Untraceable or absent voters are those who have not collected SIR enumeration forms.