I never knew this.. this is sad: What happened to Chinese-India's in 1962
In the bus back to Toronto, the group asked Bobby Wong, in his 70s, to sing. Looking at him and at the other passengers, I assumed idly that he would break into a Chinese song. After all, these folks “looked” Chinese.
Then Bobby sang, and he sang “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh” (“This is a strange story”), the lyrical hit from the 1960 Bollywood hit Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (“My Heart is Mine but My Love Belongs to Someone Else”). It nearly brought tears to my eyes, for two reasons. One, here was this Chinese-Indian man who left India several decades ago, sitting in a bus on the highway from Ottawa to Toronto, singing an old Hindi song. It was charming, but there was also something inexpressibly sad about it. Two, to my chagrin, I realized my assumption was the same one that, decades earlier, sent Wong and thousands of others to a detention camp in Rajasthan. At that time, their only offense was that they “looked” Chinese.
On the morning of Aug. 24, 2017, Bobby and some 50 other Chinese-Indians gathered in the parking lot of the Splendid China Mall in Toronto. They had planned something rather remarkable for the day: an expedition to the Indian High Commission in Ottawa to hold a peaceful demonstration and hand over a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After more than 50 years, this tiny community had decided to speak out and ask the Indian government for redress for the injustices they had endured.
For what happened to them was unjust indeed.
Starting in November 1962, the Indian government detained nearly 3,000 Chinese-Indians in a prison camp. An obvious parallel is the United States’ incarceration of 100,000 Japanese-Americans two decades earlier. The reason for both was war—World War II in 1942 and the India-China border war in October and November 1962. Their respective conflicts spurred the world’s two largest democracies to suspect the loyalties of thousands of their own citizens, solely based on their appearance. Suspicion quickly turned into incarceration.
Like the Japanese in the U.S., the Chinese have a long history in India. Starting in the late 18th century, they arrived as traders, tea-plantation workers, cobblers, dentists, and more, settling mostly in small towns across India’s northeast. As the generations slipped past, several families became integrated enough that they spoke only Indian languages. They were so much part of the local fabric that, in some of those towns, you can still find precincts known as “Chinapatty” (the best translation might be “Chinese ‘hood”).
In the bus back to Toronto, the group asked Bobby Wong, in his 70s, to sing. Looking at him and at the other passengers, I assumed idly that he would break into a Chinese song. After all, these folks “looked” Chinese.
Then Bobby sang, and he sang “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh” (“This is a strange story”), the lyrical hit from the 1960 Bollywood hit Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (“My Heart is Mine but My Love Belongs to Someone Else”). It nearly brought tears to my eyes, for two reasons. One, here was this Chinese-Indian man who left India several decades ago, sitting in a bus on the highway from Ottawa to Toronto, singing an old Hindi song. It was charming, but there was also something inexpressibly sad about it. Two, to my chagrin, I realized my assumption was the same one that, decades earlier, sent Wong and thousands of others to a detention camp in Rajasthan. At that time, their only offense was that they “looked” Chinese.
On the morning of Aug. 24, 2017, Bobby and some 50 other Chinese-Indians gathered in the parking lot of the Splendid China Mall in Toronto. They had planned something rather remarkable for the day: an expedition to the Indian High Commission in Ottawa to hold a peaceful demonstration and hand over a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After more than 50 years, this tiny community had decided to speak out and ask the Indian government for redress for the injustices they had endured.
For what happened to them was unjust indeed.
Starting in November 1962, the Indian government detained nearly 3,000 Chinese-Indians in a prison camp. An obvious parallel is the United States’ incarceration of 100,000 Japanese-Americans two decades earlier. The reason for both was war—World War II in 1942 and the India-China border war in October and November 1962. Their respective conflicts spurred the world’s two largest democracies to suspect the loyalties of thousands of their own citizens, solely based on their appearance. Suspicion quickly turned into incarceration.
Like the Japanese in the U.S., the Chinese have a long history in India. Starting in the late 18th century, they arrived as traders, tea-plantation workers, cobblers, dentists, and more, settling mostly in small towns across India’s northeast. As the generations slipped past, several families became integrated enough that they spoke only Indian languages. They were so much part of the local fabric that, in some of those towns, you can still find precincts known as “Chinapatty” (the best translation might be “Chinese ‘hood”).
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