So near and yet so far
A book on the history of Indians in Shanghai, which was published 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 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,” they write. “Taken all together, what we have in Shanghai are strands of two ancient civilisations that were accidental witnesses to the birth of each other’s modernity.”
Zhang, an associate professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, 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.
The city, in which 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 (1840-42).
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 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 at today’s rate) to 22 yuan, with higherups 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.
By 1949 there were fewer than 200 Indians living in Shanghai and none in the police. The Sikhs gradually left the city and the Sikh temples were shut.
Tagore travelled 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”.