Kolkata's Chinatown: Old Chinese businesses flounder; young Chinese are emigrating to West

Lin P Yuan passes the days on a diet of memories, nearly three centuries after his forefathers from China made their way to India. Lin, 62, once owned a leading tannery in Tangra, popularly called Chinatown. In the late 1990s, he downed shutters after a Supreme Court order to prevent pollution. Lin today rents his machinery. It barely manages to make ends meet. His wife does her bit selling dim sum in the local market.

Lin’s despondence symbolises the tale of woes of the once-humming Chinese business community in Kolkata. Their virtual monopoly in businesses like tannery, shoe-making and beauty parlours has crumbled in the face of intense competition and unfavourable policies.

Kolkata may boast of India’s only Chinatown, but the numbers are fast dwindling. A 25,000-strong population has shrunk to 1,500.

Most Chinese families, especially the youth, are migrating to Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Switzerland, and even China. The Chinese say the discriminating attitude of the administration is abetting this trend. “If the Indo-China war was the first trigger for Chinese exodus, the Supreme Court was the second. The West Bengal government had no support or sympathy to us. The message is loud and clear: this is not the land where we belong,” says Lin.

Downtown Bentinck Street, which once had scores of Chinese shoe stores, has 5-6 left. To know why, one needs to look around. Sharing the neighbourhood are the likes of Nike, Reebok and Adidas, which have bought out retail space from migrating Chinese.

A good majority of the 300-odd Chinese tanneries are struggling to survive in the alternate location at Bantala. Chinese beauty parlours have vanished from the city’s map.

Braving the ruins are the city’s Chinese food outlets. “Still, the money from restaurants is a fraction of what we used to make in tanneries,” says Paul Hou, an owner.

The Chinese recollect how the 1962 China war led to the end of Chinatowns in the North-East and Mumbai. “I fear the end of our Chinatown is quite near,” says Lin.