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The Chinese connection
Many places in the world outside China have a Chinatown, including cities such as San Francisco, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, where the emphasis is on colour and food. However, not many people in Pakistan are aware that there is one city in the subcontinent — Calcutta — which has a Chinatown, too.
That the Chinese are highly enterprising can be seen in full measure in Mumbai-based filmmaker and writer Rafeeq Ellias’ 23-minute documentary The Legend of Fat Mama. This highly absorbing short film, shown seven times last month by the BBC World, tells the viewers that the first Chinese came to Calcutta 200 years ago. Their numbers grew as they prospered and as one of the Chinese men in the documentary maintains, they “made positive contribution to the economy as also to the cultural fabric of (what was until recently) Calcutta.”
As for the somewhat intriguing title of the film, the promo claims “The Legend of Fat Mama is the sad-happy story of the Chinese community in Calcutta, a nostalgic journey in search of a woman who once made the most delicious noodles in the city’s Chinatown.”
There are references to the Fat Mama in the movie, but there is much more than the legend in the documentary. You find it laced with nostalgia and some unpleasant memories, all linked with the unfortunate events that took place in the wake of the Indo-Chinese war of 1962. Some Chinese men, women and children living for generations in Chinatown and Tengra — a smaller locality of Chinese, often referred to as Second Chinatown — were picked up and taken to inhospitable camps in Rajasthan, where they lived for four years. The food supplies at least in the initial period was sparse. The luckier Chinese remained in Calcutta but they were not allowed to leave the city. The wounds may have healed but the scars remain. One old man recalls bitterly: “Every year we had to apply for a permit to stay in India.”
“Thank God, the relations between China and India have improved considerably in recent years, which is why we now lead a carefree life,” says another elderly resident of Chinatown.
But now there are much fewer Chinese left, a good number of Bengalis and Biharis have moved into Chinatown. The film-maker shows viewers some poignant scenes in this context. He takes them to a printing press where once they published a daily newspaper in the Chinese language.
An unemployed staff member is religiously there to feed the fish that have seen better days. However, there is one dedicated Chinese who calligraphs a “newspaper” and distributes photocopies among the older residents of Chinatown and Tengra. The newer generation would not be familiar with the Chinese script, which is reminiscent of Indian Muslims in North India and Hyderabad, who do speak Urdu but are unfamiliar with the script.
From 1962 there have been waves of Chinese immigrants from India landing in North America. The second half of The Legend of Fat Mama shows the prosperous members of the community settled in Toronto. They are into different professions, one of them who strikes you practises holistic Chinese medicine.
Incidentally most members of the Chinese community in Karachi have migrated from Pakistan also. The ones who have stayed behind are in food business and are doing so well that they don’t need to go anywhere.
But, as they say, exceptions prove the law. In Devon, a locality in Chicago, which has a large number of eateries, run by the immigrants from the subcontinent, there is a Chinese restaurant which offers halal food. It’s managed by the children of the man who owned Cafe Canton in Karachi. The cuisine is subcontinental Chinese in flavour rather than pure Chinese. This may sound as a digression because Rafeeq Ellias only portrays the Chinese community living or hailing from Calcutta.
The documentary takes you inside the houses of some Indian-Chinese who drift down memory lane as they recall Calcutta and their happier days in India. One of them drifts down melody lane as he bursts into a Hindi film song Tum se achcha kaun hai. The scene is both hilarious and poignant.
But back in Calcutta they still have the dragon dance on the Chinese new year and they have eateries too, even if they are fewer, serving breakfasts. Rafeeq Ellias makes it a point to have Chinese breakfast every time he is in the city. In an exchange of emails, the film’s writer, director and cinematographer wrote: “I’ve been visiting Calcutta and its Chinatown for breakfast (and to shoot stills) for over 30 years, ever since I met my girlfriend now wife. My passion for food, travel and people overlapped nicely, I guess plus my love life.”
He adds “I see parallells everywhere. There are Gujarati Hindus in Wembley in the UK or Sikhs in Southall, or Pakistanis and Bangladeshis coping with their multiple identities. The story is, therefore, specific and universal, a story we can see echoes of in the subcontinent and around the world. It is not a festival film, not a gloom and doom film. It is a mainstream film and I intended it to be that. So, I am hugely delighted that the BBC World, the very first and only channel approached, decided to premiere it in 200 countries around the globe to inaugurate its China Week.”
The documentary has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Film Festival in Edinburgh in May and will be screened in a section called The Songs of Exile. Here’s hoping that Rafeeq Ellias enters the movie in the Kara Film Festival, too.
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