Discovering China’s Malayalis

IT TOOK Joe Thomas Karackattu, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, two years and a 20,000-km-long journey to uncover the forgotten history of the Chinese of Kozhikode. But Guli’s Children, a 43-minute documentary and labour of love for the scholar, shows it was well worth the effort.

Begun amid the fishing docks and mosques of Kozhikode, his search leads him to a remarkable discovery in small-town China. When he was a boy, the Chinese were an unexplained but ubiquitous presence—from Chinese silk and fishing nets to a Silk Street in Kozhikode, Karackattu tells us. “China could have been next door or thousands of miles away, but it was embedded into the daily life and vocabulary,” he says.

He traces the journey of the Chinese traders of the 12th to 15th centuries, who made Kozhikode an unlikely home. Most famously, the naval explorer and admiral Zheng He visited India as he traversed the oceans. Because of the nature of the monsoon winds, the Chinese traders—who like Zheng He were mostly Muslims—made Kozhikode their home for a few months every year.

As Karackattu finds, today there are still many locals with curiously Chinese facial features.

His journey in seeking out the descendants of the Kozhikode Chinese leads him to China, where he tracks down the 14th generation descendant of a Kozhikode trader named Ma Li Ke. Ma Xunkai shows him a meticulously preserved family tree that traces his family all the way to the city known in China as Guli.

“I left their home with a deeper connect,” Karackattu says. “We were just two Malayalis holding different passports.”

Guli’s Children will be screened at CD Deshmukh Auditorium, India International Centre, New Delhi on July 4 at 6.30 pm.