ONEHere Be Dragons
A fact that confounds me now, when I think back on it, is that for most of my life China was for me a vast, uniform blankness. The huge space that hovered above India on maps might just as well have been marked: ‘Here be dragons’.
As it happens, I was born in West Bengal, an Indian state that almost touches China, and grew up in a city, Calcutta (now Kolkata), that has a small but significant Chinese community. Yet, I had no interest whatsoever in Chinese history, geography or culture. Nor, despite the fact that I have always loved to travel, did it ever occur to me to visit, say, Yunnan, even though the capital of the province, Kunming, is not much farther from Calcutta than New Delhi, as the crow flies. Somehow Kunming seemed to belong to another world, one that was cut off from mine not just by a towering range of mountains but also by a Himalaya of the mind.
It was not till 2004, when I started writing my novel Sea of Poppies, that I thought of visiting China for the first time. The novel’s central characters are a couple called Deeti and Kalua who set off on a journey to Mauritius, in 1838, as indentured workers. This being the basic arc of the narrative, I knew that the research for the book would take me to Mauritius—and so it did—but it also led me in another, completely unexpected direction. As I got deeper into the research, I realized that the story’s background was formed not just by India and Mauritius but also by the stretch of water that separates (and also joins) the two countries: the Indian Ocean.
To write about the sea is not like writing about land. The horizons are larger and the settings lack the fixity that enables novelists to convey ‘a sense of place’. If a ship happens to be the principal location, as the schooner Ibis is in Sea of Poppies, then you become very aware of currents, and winds, and flows of traffic. And the more I explored the background, the clearer it became that the flow of seaborne traffic in the period I was writing about, the first half of the nineteenth century, was not primarily between India and the West, as I had imagined, but between India and China—or, rather, one particular place in China, a city called ‘Canton’.
I had come across this name often in the past without being quite sure of exactly where the city was. Now, as I began to steep myself in nineteenth-century nautical writing, I became increasingly curious: what was so special about Canton that the very thought of setting sail for it could induce raptures in nineteenth-century sailors and travellers?
Had I been at all informed about China and Chinese history, I would have known that ‘Canton’ was a word Europeans once used, rather loosely, to refer to the province of Guangdong in general, and to the city of Guangzhou in particular.1 But at that time my knowledge of China and its geography was so sketchy that I had only a dim idea of where Guangzhou was.
Thinking back, it seems to me that my blankness in relation to China was not the result of a lack of curiosity, or opportunity, or anything circumstantial. I am convinced that it was the product of an inner barrier that has been implanted in the minds of not just Indians but also Americans, Europeans and many other people across the world, through certain patterns of global history. And as the years go by and China’s shadow lengthens upon the world, these barriers are clearly hardening, especially in India and the United States.
There is, I think, something important to be learnt by taking a closer look at this condition—not only because of its bearing on China, but also because of what it tells us about the ways in which the world is perceived and understood.
* * *
On the Indian side, the memory that dominates, indeed overwhelms, all others in relation to China is that of the Sino-Indian war of 1962, in which India suffered a resounding defeat.2
I was six years old then but my memories of that time are still vivid. I remember my mother tearfully picking out gold bangles to contribute to the war effort; I remember my father collecting blankets and woollens to send to the front; I remember my parents and their friends arguing endlessly about the causes of the war and who was to blame for the debacle.
There is still no consensus on these issues. A 2021 study by the former head of the Historical Division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Avtar Singh Bhasin, suggests that misunderstandings and blunders on the part of the country’s then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, played a significant role in precipitating the war. ‘It was Nehru taking liberty with the western border that had invited trouble,’ writes Bhasin. ‘India became a victim of its wrong presumptions.’3 Nehru was in many ways an admirable man and a visionary statesman, yet he seems to have been peculiarly inept in his handling of this crisis.
The whole truth will probably never be known anyway because some of the most important historical materials have yet to see the light of day. What is certain, however, is that the 1962 war was to some extent a consequence of the cultural and political shadows cast by the Himalaya—misreadings, misjudgements and faulty understandings played no small part in triggering the conflict.4
The issues that catalysed the 1962 war are by no means settled. The conflict has continued over decades and is still ongoing, with clashes between Chinese and Indian troops occurring regularly along the border. Nor is there an end in sight to these clashes: China is today an increasingly assertive and bellicose neighbour and India has no option but to stand its ground as best it can.5
There can be no doubt that this ongoing confrontation has added many layers of fear, resentment and hostility to Indian attitudes towards China. The extreme rancour against China that is now increasingly evident in the United States has existed in India for most of my life.
But extreme tensions exist also between India and Pakistan: they have fought several wars, and in both countries there are large numbers of people who are bitterly hostile towards each other. Yet, there is no lack of interest and curiosity on either side of the border. Quite the contrary: India and Pakistan have an obsessive interest in each other’s politics, culture, history, current events, sport and so on.
This is by no means an unusual circumstance: conflict often tends to cause a deepening of cultural and imaginative engagements. In the United States, for example, there was a surge of enrolments in Arabic language classes after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The flow of books, articles and films on Iraq and Afghanistan has increased steadily ever since.
Nothing like that happened in India after 1962. Instead of a spike in interest, there was a spasmodic recoiling, accompanied by an upsurge of shame, suspicion and fear. After the war, which lasted only a few weeks, India’s small, scattered communities of Chinese-origin migrants became scapegoats for the disaster.
The roots of India’s Chinese communities go back to the late eighteenth century, when the first Hakka migrants settled near Calcutta.6 Over time the community thrived; it ran several schools, temples and newspapers, and many of its members became successful professionals and entrepreneurs.7 Many Chinese Indians never visited China and had no connections with that country; a substantial number were anti-Communists. But still, the 1962 war was no sooner over than the Indian government passed a law allowing for the ‘apprehension and detention in custody of any person [suspected] of being of hostile origin’.
Thousands of ethnic Chinese were forced to leave India; many became stateless refugees. Thousands more were interned within India, remaining in internment camps for years, without trial. When they were released, most returned to find that their homes and businesses had been seized or sold off. For years afterwards they had to report monthly to police stations. The atmosphere of suspicion extended even to the few Indian scholars who studied China.
In the years after the war, Calcutta’s ethnic-Chinese population halved in number, falling from 20,000 to 10,000. Many of those who remained were forced to relocate from the old Chinatown, in the city centre, to Tangra, a swampy marshland on the urban periphery. It is a testament of the community’s resilience and enterprise that this neighbourhood has become a vibrant new Chinatown, dotted with factories, workshops, temples and restaurants.
The scapegoating of the Chinese Indian community after 1962 is, without a doubt, a very ugly chapter in the history of independent India. But India too has paid a price for it, Calcutta most of all. The 1960s and 1970s were exactly the time when diasporic Chinese communities were bringing about an economic transformation in many parts of Southeast Asia by funnelling in foreign capital, and by creating new businesses and industries. Had the Sino-Indian community not been devastated by the 1962 war it might have helped revitalize Calcutta too.
I was forcibly reminded of this in 2010 when my wife and I spent a few days in Coloane, at the southernmost tip of the Macau peninsula. Our tranquil, sun-bathed hotel stood above a sandy beach, commanding a spectacular view of the sea; its kitchens produced some of the finest Macanese fare in that famously epicurean city. One morning I discovered, to my surprise, that the hotel’s proprietor, a woman in her mid-fifties, had grown up in Calcutta: she spoke fluent English, Bengali and Cantonese (but not Mandarin). Her family had owned restaurants in Calcutta, she told me, and they had always wanted to run a hotel as well. But after 1962 they had been compelled to leave. It had taken many years of struggle before they finally managed to realize their dream—except that their hotel was in Macau, not Calcutta.
* * *
What part, then, did the 1962 war play in shaping my view of China? That it played some part, I do not doubt—but the most notable thing about my perspective on China, really, was that it scarcely existed. And this was, I think, the result of a certain way of perceiving not just China but also the world in general: it is an outlook in which the West looms so large that it obscures everything else.
The presence of the West is inescapable across the Indian subcontinent, no matter whether it concerns language, clothing, sport, material objects or art. In fact it has long been a default assumption, among Indians as well as many Westerners, that the transformation of social, cultural and material life that occurred in the region over the period of colonization was largely due to a process called ‘Westernization’.8 Underlying this, in turn, is the assumption that modernity was an exclusively Western creation that was transmitted to India, and the rest of the world, through contact, like ‘a virus that spreads from one place to another’.9
Another part of the world that has had a long and visible presence in the Indian subcontinent is the Middle East. Across the region, Middle Eastern influences are apparent everywhere—in art, architecture, food, clothing and language. The vocabularies of the major subcontinental languages all draw massively on Persian and Arabic. Even as a teenager I was aware that I used dozens of words of Arabic and Persian origin while speaking Bengali, Hindi or English. But I would not have been able to name a single word of Chinese origin in any of those languages; indeed, the very idea that I might be using words of Chinese derivation in my everyday life would have seemed bizarre. The same was true also of everyday objects and practices: it would not have occurred to me that anything in my material or cultural world might point in the direction of China rather than to the Middle East or Europe.
It was not until I visited China for the first time, in September 2005, that I discovered how profoundly mistaken I was.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Amitav Ghosh