Neighbourhood, City, Diaspora: Identity and belonging for Calcutta’s Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Geography at the Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London Jayani Jeanne Bonnerjee 2010 ABSTRACT This thesis is located in the wider debates in postcolonial cultural geography on the city and diaspora. It engages with everyday lived spaces of Calcutta’s Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities through a focus on ideas of home, identity, belonging, cosmopolitanism and nostalgia. Drawing on overlapping narratives of these two communities in the city and in diaspora in London and Toronto, the thesis explores the idea of Calcutta as a ‘diaspora city’ and also the notion of a ‘Calcutta diaspora’. It explores the material and imaginative entanglements of migration and places narratives of identity and belonging for its Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities in the context of the city. Both Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities have been an integral part of Calcutta’s colonial and postcolonial histories, and although many members of both communities have migrated elsewhere in recent times, the city remains an important locus of emotional register. It is in this context that the thesis studies everyday lived spaces at different scales: in the neighbourhood, in the city and in diaspora. While the actual spaces are located/ rooted in real neighbourhoods and cities inhabited by the communities, the imagination of these spaces both in the city and in diaspora also intersect to create a more complex relationship between minority communities and cities. Methodologically, the thesis has adopted a multi-sited, qualitative approach to follow the lives of the communities across cities. Whilst a large part of the material has been drawn from in-depth interviews, the thesis also uses material drawn through ethnographic research and participant observation at community events, maps of the neighbourhood and city drawn by interviewees and secondary material such as community publications and websites, films, pamphlets and newspaper reports. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 LIST OF FIGURES 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 1 INTRODUCTION 8 Calcutta as a ‘diaspora city’ 9 Chinese Calcutta 10 Anglo-Indian Calcutta 15 2 ACROSS CITY AND DIASPORA: CONCEPTUAL FRAMES 20 ‘Unmoorings’ and ‘groundings’ 21 Postcolonial cities as sites of encounter 26 Everyday spaces in the city 28 Cosmopolitanism 33 Home and belonging 38 Memory and nostalgia 40 3 RESEARCHING OVERLAPPING LIVES: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 46 Straddling boundaries: doing qualitative research on communities 47 Performing identity: ethnographic encounters 55 ‘Community’ archives, ‘diasporic’ archives 58 Reading the city, mapping memories 60 Emotions, ethics and responsibility 62 4 LIVING TOGETHER IN THE CITY: ACTUAL AND IMAGINED COSMOPOLITANISMS 65 Cosmopolitan encounters in ordinary spaces of the city 67 Overlapping lives 69 Sense of para 70 Everyday/mundane cosmopolitanisms 72 A narrative of loss 83 Calcutta to Kolkata: politics of cosmopolitanism in the city 89 Bow Barracks: a cosmopolitan para 89 Envisaging Chinatown: culture, politics and community 94 Conclusions 97 3 5 NARRATIVES OF BELONGING TO THE CITY 99 Belonging and the city 100 Belonging/not belonging 102 Between nation and the city 104 1947 108 1962 113 Calcutta as desh: home, memory, identity 117 Tracing belonging 118 Longing and belonging 133 Conclusions 137 6 A CALCUTTA DIASPORA? IDENTITY AND MEMORY IN THE EVERYDAY LANDSCAPES OF THE CITY 139 Moving memories 141 Home in the city 146 Dwelling (in) the city 147 Calcutta memorabilia 158 Feeding nostalgia 166 Indian Hakka restaurants in Toronto 171 Re-membering the city 173 Dias-para 174 Calcutta connections 188 Cosmopolitan city/multicultural city 197 The Seventh World Anglo-Indian Reunion 198 Being Calcutta Chinese in Toronto 203 Re-encountering memories 205 Conclusions 209 7 CONCLUSIONS 213 APPENDIX A List of interviewees 220 APPENDIX B Interview schedule, Information sheet 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY 228 4 LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 Map of Calcutta 14 4.1 Chinese market in Tangra 76 4.2 Morning market in Cheenapara 77 5.1 Chinese Consulate in Calcutta, c.1955 113 5.2 At Shin Hua School, Calcutta, c.1955 116 6.1 (Map) Memories of home 148 6.2 (Map) Daily routes 149 6.3 Celebrating Christmas in Calcutta 150 6.4 At home in Calcutta 150 6.5 (Map) Idyllic memories 151 6.6. (Map) Places of attachment 154 6.7 Brass artefacts in Anglo-Indian home, Toronto 160 6.8 Fragments of memory 161 6.9 Memories of Bandel 165 6.10 (Map) Memories of food 167 6.11 (Map) Food in the neighbourhood 168 6.12 (Map) Everyday places in the neighbourhood 1 176 6.13 (Map) Everyday places in the neighbourhood 2 177 6.14 (Map) Iconic places in the neighbourhood 178 6.15 (Map) Personal memories of the neighbourhood 179 6.16 (Map) Everyday places in the neighbourhood 3 183 6.17 (Map) Community places 184 6.18 (Map) Inside Tangra 185 6.19 (Map) Beyond Tangra 185 6.20 (Map) Memorable places of sociability 1 189 6.21 (Map) Memorable places of sociability 2 190 6.22 (Map) Memorable places in Calcutta 191 6.23 India and Canada: At the 7th World Anglo-Indian Reunion, Toronto199 6.24 Exhibiting memorable Calcutta places 200 6.25 Books and display on Calcutta 201 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has benefited from a number of people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. First of all, I would like to thank members of Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities in Calcutta, London and Toronto without whose help this research would not have been possible. For reasons of maintaining anonymity I cannot name all who spent hours talking to me. They have opened up a very different Calcutta for me and I feel touched and privileged for the warmth and hospitality they have shown me. I can only hope that I have been able to do some justice in representing their words in this thesis. Officers of community associations in Calcutta, London and Toronto also extended significant help. In Toronto, I would like to thank Chen Chou Hua and Peggy Chen for sharing their personal collection of photographs on Chinese Calcutta. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Alison Blunt, for the generosity and kindness with which she has guided me through this thesis. She has been a great inspiration and her sound advice has been invaluable in this intellectual journey. I feel privileged to have conducted this research as part of her project, ‘Diaspora Cities’ funded by The Leverhulme Trust. I would also like to thank Shompa Lahiri, my second supervisor, for her constructive feedback and suggestions. Working with Alison Blunt, Shompa Lahiri and Noah Hysler-Rubin on the Diaspora Cities project has been a wonderful and enjoyable learning process and helped me shape the ideas presented in this thesis. Research on a transnational scale would not have been possible without adequate funding. I am grateful to Queen Mary, University of London for funding the first year of my PhD and The Leverhulme Trust for funding the next two years of study as well as my fieldwork in Calcutta, London and Toronto. My travel to Calcutta for fieldwork was funded by the Central Research Fund, University of London. I feel fortunate that at the beginning of this research I was able to meet a core group of people with interests in the Chinese community. I thank Tansen Sen for making me a part of the discussion group on Chinese Indians. His efforts at bringing together the very few people working on this community through a workshop and a conference in Calcutta turned out to be timely for this research. I have benefited greatly from these discussions. I would like to thank Zhang Xing and Kwai Li for sharing their ideas with me. Many thanks are also due to Rafeeq Ellias for sharing his wonderful book of photographs- Kolkata Chinatown. His documentary, The Legend of Fat Mama inspired me to work on the Chinese community. It was wonderful to share fieldwork time in Toronto and Calcutta with Robyn Andrews. I have enjoyed talking to her about her research on the Calcutta Anglo- Indian community and learnt a great deal. The ‘Researching Anglo-India’ conference organised by her at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta in December 2007 was a great opportunity for me to meet other researchers working on the community. I have had valuable feedback on my paper presented at this conference. I have also presented papers at conferences in Britain, India and the United States and got helpful comments. For helping me with initial contacts within the Anglo-Indian community and particularly Bow Barracks, Calcutta I thank Shireen Hyrapiet and her family. In Toronto, I am grateful to Sanjukta Mukherjee for solving my accommodation worries and to Jessica Chu for her wonderful friendship and her very generous gift of a digital voice recorder. 6 Many thanks are due to Fiona McConnell for reading through my chapters on cosmopolitanism and belonging and for her extremely helpful feedback. I also thank Samantak Das in Calcutta for solving my transcribing woes. Ed Oliver at the Department of Geography, Queen Mary kindly put together the map of Calcutta at a very short notice. Several transnational friendships gave me much support throughout this research. I thank Ana Jelnikar, Dipali Ghosh, Kamalika Mukherjee, Madhumati Manda, Maude Lapierre, Nandita Nanchal, Shahana Das, Shelley Grant, Subhadra Roy and Tampha Oinam for being there. Finally, but certainly not the least, I thank my family in Calcutta and London for their support. To my father for encouraging my early interest in cities. To my brothers for reminding me in very brotherly ways that there is life outside the PhD.