SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR
A new book delves into a two-century history of Indians in Shanghai, Satarupa Bhattacharjya reports.
Abook on the history of Indians in Shanghai, which was launched in the city on Aug 18, is seeking to provide an insight into this less well-known aspect of Sino-Indian relations.
The anthology of essays in English and Chinese, written mostly by scholars with knowledge of the two countries, touches on both the highs and lows of that past association.
While much of the writing in Stray Birds on the Huangpu: A History of Indians in Shanghai is dedicated to Sikh policemen, and Parsi, Sindhi and Muslim traders from India — communities with presence in the Chinese metropolis in the 19th and 20th centuries — others relate to India’s freedom struggle and the China visits of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Despite the euphemistic title that includes the city’s arterial river, the book’s co-editors Indian author Mishi Saran and Chinese historian Zhang Ke steer their introduction toward a larger Asian resurgence brought about by India’s independence from Britain in 1947 and the founding of New China two years later.
“It would be safe to say that most Indians here at that time had some direct experience of the creation of a new China. Taken all together, what we have in Shanghai are strands of two ancient civilizations that were accidental witnesses to the birth of each other’s modernity,” they write.
Stray Birds reproduces images by the late Paris photographer Sam Tata that include one of Communist troops entering Shanghai in 1949 after the Kuomintang defeat in the civil war.
“This book is a historical inquiry into which, collectively speaking, decades of research have gone,” Saran, a former resident of Shanghai who has previously written about Chinese monk Xuanzang, says over the phone from Hong Kong.
Zhang, an associate professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who has studied the “changing image of Indians among Chinese intellectuals”, says the book is an attempt to break away from the earlier view in China, whereby many saw Indians merely as subjects of colonial rule until India attained freedom.
“Here we talk about the Indian identity, the regional identity (in India),” he says.
The city, where the first congress of the Communist Party of China was held in 1921, was among major Chinese ports that the British forced access upon after the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) lost in the First Opium War (184042). Shanghai also witnessed a bloody battle in 1937 during the Japanese invasion.
Some Chinese historians have earlier described Shanghai as a “sub-colony” where the British and other Western powers set up concessions as they did in dozens of other Chinese cities.
Chinese museum records say the British East India Company processed opium in India and smuggled it into China when the trade was barred (it was legal for a while in the Qing era). But Western merchants aside, it is believed that some Parsi and other traders from British India were involved in the business that fueled the addiction of millions in China (including in the 18th century).
The book contains many references to the trade. The traders had moved from opium to real estate and returned to cotton by the early 20th century. The Parsi community, which has produced many entrepreneurs in diverse businesses, had private ships that could sail to China and Southeast Asia.
Sikh policemen, who came from an agrarian region in India, were the most visible Indians in Shanghai at the time of the Western concessions, Zhang writes in an essay in the book. Employed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, the settlement’s relevant governing body, they frequently appear in images and memories of that period.
The monthly salary of the council’s policemen ranged from 16 yuan ($2.33) to 22 yuan, with higher-ups getting 25 yuan. “This was only slightly higher than the average salary of a Chinese worker.” The policemen worked eight hours a day at one of the three jobs — patrolling, guarding prisons or controlling traffic. Nationalistic feelings among the Sikhs also began to rise, he adds.
By 1949 there were fewer than 200 Indians living in Shanghai and none in the police. The Sikhs gradually left the city (all foreigners had to exit China) and the Sikh temples were shut.
Malaysian-born scholar Tan Chung, who taught in India, shares an anecdote in the book about the Sikh turban becoming an “unmistakable symbol of India”: At a reception for doctors sent to China by the Indian National Congress party during the Japanese invasion, Mao Zedong was amused to see students of a Chinese art school impersonating Sikhs in a skit.
Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate, traveled to Shanghai by sea in 1924. Another scholar, Yuting Lee, writes that Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore were the two Indians the Chinese were most familiar with. And in Tagore’s case, even more than his personal connections with China — built over three visits — was his hope for the “rebirth of the East”.
But Lee adds that Tagore faced criticism from some Chinese intellectuals for his ideals considered “ineffectual” in the Chinese context back then.
On India’s freedom movement, Indian historian Nirmola Sharma writes that the Indian diaspora held meetings in Shanghai from 1942 onward, with fundraising as a key objective.
Stray Birds has been published by Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing Co.