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The Deoliwallahs

A Virtual Book Talk with the Authors

moderated by Swagato Ganguly (Editorial Page Editor, The Times of India; CASI Spring 2022 Visiting Fellow)

Joy Ma & Dilip D'Souza
Wednesday, March 2, 2022 - 10:00
A Virtual CASI Book Talk via Zoom — 10:00am EST | 8:30pm IST




(English captions & Hindi subtitles available)

About the Book:

The untold account of the internment of 3,000 Chinese-Indians after the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Just after the Sino-Indian War of 1962, about 3,000 Chinese-Indians were sent to languish in a disused World War II POW camp in Deoli, Rajasthan, marking the beginning of a painful five-year-long internment without resolution. At a time of war with China, these "Chinese-looking" people had fallen prey to government suspicion and paranoia which soon seeped into the public consciousness. This is a page of Indian history that comes wrapped in prejudice and fear, and is today largely forgotten. But over five decades on, survivors of the internment are finally starting to tell their stories.

As several Indian communities are once again faced with discrimination, The Deoliwallahs records these untold stories through extensive interviews with seven survivors of the Deoli internment. Through these accounts, the book recovers a crucial chapter in our history, also documenting for the first time how the Chinese came to be in India, how they made this country their home and became a significant community, until the war of 1962 brought on a terrible incarceration, displacement, and tragedy.

About the Authors:

Joy Ma grew up and was educated in India. She attended Lady Shri Ram College and graduate school at the New School for Social Research in the US. She enjoys travelling, meeting people and writing. Joy lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, two sons, her mother and Willie, the family dog. She was one of a handful of children born in the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan.

Dilip D'Souza was educated in Pilani, Providence, Delhi, Rishi Valley, Bombay, Cambridge, Austin and places in between. Once a computer scientist, he now writes for his suppers: about political and social issues, travel, sports and mathematics. His writing has won him several awards, including the Statesman Rural Reporting award, the Outlook/Picador nonfiction prize and the Newsweek/Daily Beast South Asia Commentary.

About the Moderator:

Swagato Ganguly is a CASI Spring 2022 Visiting Fellow and was the Editorial Page Editor of The Times of India from 2009-21. He obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, and has worked since then on editorial pages of Indian newspapers, commenting on national politics and international affairs. He is currently a Research Affiliate, Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, Harvard University; Adjunct Fellow, Gateway House; and Consulting Editor, The Times of India.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Tariq Thachil:

Hello everyone, and welcome to CASI, the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Tariq Thachil, and I'm the director of CASI. I'm delighted to be able to host this special event, not our normal Thursday seminar but a special event on The Deoliwallahs virtual book talk with the authors, Dilip D'Souza and Joy Ma, whose recently released book is the subject of today's presentation. I'm not going to take too long because I want to introduce our moderator who will introduce both the authors and moderate the session, Swagato Ganguly. And so before turning it over to him, let me just briefly introduce all of you to him.

Swagato has been the editorial page editor of The Times of India from 2009 to 2021. He's currently a consulting editor there. He actually obtained his PhD in comparative literature and literary theory right here at UPenn in 1998, and has worked since then on editorial pages of a number of Indian newspapers commenting on national politics and international affairs. He currently also holds an affiliation as a research affiliate in the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. And his contemporary research interests lie in strategic affairs, geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific region and Indian foreign policy more generally. His two most recent books are Idolatry and the Colonial Ideas of India: Visions of Horror, Allegories of Enlightenment, which was published by Routledge in 2018. And then he edited Destined to Fight: India and Pakistan (1990 - 2017), which was published by Times Group's Books, again in 2017.

He's actually going to be a visiting fellow here at CASI. He's scheduled to arrive in just about two weeks. We are delighted to be able to host him for a few months here in Philadelphia. And while he's here, he's going to be researching the timely subject of the geopolitical triangle between India, China, and the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, so we're delighted. He's the perfect person to moderate this discussion and we're delighted that he's able to do so.

Before I turn it over to him, just to let you know what the format is going to be. Swagato will introduce our authors, and they will talk about their project for about the first 35, 40 minutes of our session together, and then we'll open it up to Q&A, which Swagato will moderate. Please enter all your questions in the chat feature. You can just enter them to everyone in the chat feature and in the chat box and Swagato will pick up your questions and get to as many of them as possible and that'll take us through the hour. So thank you once again everyone for joining us. And Swagato, over to you. And thanks again to Dilip and Joy as well.

Swagato Ganguly:

Thank you, Tariq. And welcome, Joy Ma and Dilip D'Souza. Joy Ma grew up and was educated in India until she left for graduate school in the US. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. And Dilip D'Souza was once a computer scientist, and then he moved to writing and journalism. He writes now about political and social issues, travel, sports and mathematics. His writing has won him several awards, including the Statesman Rural Reporting award, the Outlook/Picador Indian Non-Fiction prize, and the Newsweek Daily Beast South Asia Commentary Prize.

Joy and Dilip have co-authored The Deoliwallahs, which is an untold story from India's post independence history that's very movingly and beautifully narrated. It also has many echoes in the world today, where the tensions between ethnic and civic nationalisms have once again come into play and have been foregrounded in India and many other parts of the world as well. And the theme of the book is foreshadowed very well in the preface, where Dilip writes about being on a bus on a Canadian highway about five years back and he's with a group of former inmates. I'm sorry, I should have said that the book is about the internment of about 3,000 Chinese Indians at a prisoner of war camp, at a former prisoner of World War II era prisoner of war camp at Deoli in the state of Rajasthan soon after the 1962 India-China war.

And so the book begins with Dilip writing about how he's returning with a group of former inmates of Deoli on a Canadian highway. They've just been to a demonstration in front of the Indian High Commission in Ottawa, where they're asking that their experience be acknowledged and while they're returning... But I think Dilip can tell the story better about a certain event that happened which perhaps belied your expectations while you were coming back on the bus.

Dilip D'Souza:

You want me to tell the story, Swagato? Is that right?

Swagato Ganguly:

Yeah. Why don't you tell it? I think you can tell it better.

Dilip D'Souza:

Okay. So let me also say before I start, thank you so much to CASI and to Tariq and to all of you for tuning in here. Joy and I are truly grateful for the chance to talk about our book every time we get, and this is an honor, really, to be a part of UPenn and doing this. So the story that you're talking about, Swagato, is when in 2017, in August of 2017, about 50 Chinese Indians who were settled in Toronto decided that they would like to make this representation to the Indian High Commission in Ottawa and hand over a letter addressed to Prime Minister Modi saying that we would like you to consider an apology for what happened to us in 1962. So when I heard that they were going to do this and that they were going to take a bus from Toronto to Ottawa and hand over this, I decided I needed to be on that bus.

So I took a flight from here in Bombay and went to Toronto and I joined these people on the bus. And what you're talking about is the way I begin the book, which really was an eyeopener for me in a lot of ways, my reaction to this. Because here were all these people who for better or worse looked Chinese sitting around me in this bus. And one of them, Ying Sheng Wong, who is known to all as Bobby, Bobby Wong, whom I hadn't met but I knew often because I'd seen him in a film that we talk about and so on. Anyway, so there he was, and he is chatting to us, all of us, mostly in Hindi. And then people say, "Bobby, come on. Sing a song for us." And I thought well, here's this Chinese-looking man, he's going to sing a Chinese song but he breaks out into Ajib Dastan Hai Yeh. [inaudible 00:08:03]. You know that song, and most Indians will know that song. It's an old Hindu song.

And here was this man who's emigrated from India probably 30 or 40 years ago. He's gone through the experience in this camp. He's in a sense betrayed by India and is living in Canada. And what does he sing? He sings an old Hindi song. And to me, it not only opened my eyes about what was I doing thinking this guy is Chinese but also opened my eyes about what India meant to him and to so many people like him. So that's my story.

Swagato Ganguly:

So I think one often presumes what the cultural affinities of a person or even the political affinities of a person are by the way the person looks. But that can be very deceptive. In reality, the Chinese-Indian community has deep roots in India, particularly in Eastern India, in Bengal and Assam, which goes back for quite long. And in Kolkata or Calcutta, I think it's better to say Calcutta because it was known as Calcutta during the events that are described in the book. Calcutta where both Joy and I grew up was a very cosmopolitan city. It has cosmopolitan origins in the sense that it was set up by the English in the 18th century as a free trading port, which attracted people really from all over the world, including from China, going way back to the 18th century. And since then, people have settled down in India, they've integrated into Indian lifestyles and in the places where they live.

So when I was growing up in Calcutta as a middle class, Bengali, a typical middle class Bengali boy perhaps, I was very aware of the Chinese community that we often used to go to restaurants in the Chinese part of town. And there should be a particular smell there which Joy describes in the book and which I also remember, which is the smell of tan leather and animal hides because the leather tanning industry in the city was often in the hands of the Chinese community. And so if we needed let's say to buy a shoe or a shoe fixed, it wasn't like today when you would go to a mall and pick up a shoe and then throw it away after it's used, we would usually go to a shop. There was a Chinese-Indian shop to get it fixed, to buy a new shoe or to get it fixed if it got worn out.

Anyway, the point of this long preamble is that although I was very aware of the Chinese community in Calcutta, I had no notion whatsoever about the only story or the story of the internment of close to 3000 Chinese Indians till I read this book. So this book was quite a revelation. So to begin with, Joy and Dilip, could you tell us something about the history and long term presence of the Chinese community in Eastern India, which perhaps not everyone in the audience is fully cognizant of.

Joy Ma:

Sure. I could start. I can start from my family's perspective and then actually on the audience. Sometimes there are people from Assam. So my family, my granduncle, he came as a first person to India and he went and apprenticed in Assam where the tea industry was more established. And as you know, tea came from China. It is a fascinating story of how the British East India Company and the government sought to break the monopoly of China on the production of tea and look to their colonies to produce tea. So samplings of tea were smuggled out of China, and then they tried it in [Etham 00:13:03], they tried in different areas and of course, Sri Lanka too.

And so my granduncle had come out from China. And at that time, Assam was the most as I mentioned, most established tea estate were there. And so he learned the tea industry, and actually we're not tea growers but what our family is are builders. And so there was definitely a demand for the factories, building the factories, building of structures. And so that's an area they got into. And they were general contractors and they were also sourcing the carpenters who came from their village and around their village to come and build. And so over the years, he moved from Assam to what is known as [Aligodoor 00:13:50]. And so that's a area near Siliguri and the town where we were established was called Hasimara. And so he built a company with his brothers. It was called [Mucha Brothers 00:14:03] and they were very successful in that area. And all the tea plantations would contract with them so they would actually support the tea garden with the master carpenter in residence.

And so that person would stay in the factory, stay in the tea plantation and fix things as needed. And if they needed more help, my grandfather who inherited the company would send people.  So that was a story of my family. They were in the sort of like in what was termed countryside. But then there was a whole migration of people to the city because the there's more opportunity, there's more community. And so the community in Calcutta actually grew to be very robust and very busy with the community. I think the Chinese established themselves as having good restaurants, having good salons, having good dry cleaning and those were the niches they filled. And I just wanted to address something that you had mentioned Swagato that there was one China town that was the [Danra 00:15:16] area, right? But then there was another one that was actually in Calcutta's city proper, it was less known. It was [Deriti Biza 00:15:23], Deriti Biza.

And so over there, we would have like a morning event. So there was a parking lot. And in the morning before the cars came in with the people who started work at 9:00. From 7:00 to 9:00, there would be a breakfast Biza. And so first it started with just a few Chinese items. And then over time, it expanded to having all sorts of vendors there and they just cleaned up at 9:00 and they disappeared. I think they might still have it. I'm not sure. But that just gives you a sense of the robustness. And then of course since Assam was such a booming tea garden, a lot of Chinese settled in Makum a little bit in [Debuka 00:16:09], Tinsukia and they looked right about that a fair amount. And there's still like relics of the Chinese community there. I think it's more blended right now, but yeah. That's [crosstalk 00:16:28].

Dilip D'Souza:

Can I just say something about this word relic that Joy used. And that truly is. What I love to point out to people when I talk about this is that you can get onto Google maps and look at a map of Tinsukia or of Makum, which is a little further east, which was actually the last town from which people were brought to Delhi. But you can look at Google maps now, and you'll still find a neighborhood or streets called Chinapati, which is a reference to the Chinese being in that area all those years ago. And the Chinese neighborhood really was in those towns of ethnic Chinese were in those areas. And I think that it's still called Chinapati today. And when I was in Tinsukia, once or twice people when I was asking them for directions, I was told go to Chinapati and you'll find the restaurant or whatever you're looking for. So that's really like a relic of... I mean, that's a good word for the Chinese presence in those towns.

Swagato Ganguly:

And Calcutta is perhaps one of the few cities where if you get into a cab and say, "I want to go to Chinatown," the cab driver will ask you, "Which Chinatown?" And then you have to specify Diriti Biza or whatever. So Joy, could you tell us something about what happened during or soon after the 1962 India-China war when armed policemen might come knocking at doors of Chinese-Indian families and take people away sometimes giving very little time for preparation or to pack some belongings. Was there some kind of prior notice that something like this could happen? And all members of families taken away or just some members of families taken away? How did it happen?

Joy Ma:

Yeah, so it's a bit varied. So for [Ying Marsh 00:18:38], I write about her in the book. Her father was actually taken a month before the general internment. So this was in [Döjö Ling 00:18:46]. So he was taken and he was kept in Döjö Ling jail. And then a month later, they came to collect her, her brother and her grandma. And then they didn't reunite until they went to the... No, they reunited in jail. For the others, these were boys in boarding schools. It was different. So there was [Andy Share 00:19:14] who was in a boarding school and he was just called at breakfast by the prefect or the headmaster and said, "Can you come to my office?" And when he went to the office, he saw the police officers and the police officers said, "Just gather your stuff, should be a couple weeks." And so he actually even took his football, because he was playing football and then so really cascade.

So the next person is Ying Sheng Wong and Bobby Wong. And he heard about these boys being rounded up and taken in [Shalong 00:19:53] and their family was the next. And Michael who's here, Michael Chang, his family also they came at night and just asked them to pack up. There was very little information given. It was very vague about where they were going, how long it would be. And so a lot of people, not even the people in the book but the people who were caught first. So in my family situation, the carpenters and the workers got taken first and they were taken without their wives. It was very, very, quite random. So communications, I think were not very coordinated. So in our situation, only the men were taken because they had Chinese passports. And then in other areas, like in Assam, the whole family went if they were given an option. And so when you asked about it, the general internment started in November 17th, 1963. It was a day after the war officially ended but it was different depending on who was doing the taking.

And so likewise when they landed in the camp, it was also very disorganized because I don't think... From what I hear, like the first people who were taken, they were just taken as I mentioned. They didn't have anything. And so even when they were being given food, they had no utensils because the caMp didn't have any utensils to give. And so you're talking about what do you keep dal in? It's like a soupy kind of stew. They were literally using whatever they had like caps. And it was really awful, the full stays. But the thing I want to bring up is also the lack of communication. I mean, back in those days you didn't have a lot of communication but like the fact that they were bringing whole bunch of Chinese into the camp, people didn't understand that these were actually people who were born in India, could speak Hindi and were really quite entrenched in life in India.

And so the officials were shocked that they could talk in Hindi. And so of course there was some education going on. It was like we were here, we were born. And so the camp was really unprepared for it. So that paints a picture of what the... It's a small segment of what happened but all the people who were in the books gives you some idea of how in the middle of the night, there's a knock at the door, very little prep. And then you're just taken after several days, waiting for more people to be collected, put on a train that had the words enemy written outside of it.

Swagato Ganguly:

And you were actually born in the camp. So did conditions improve at the camp later? Was there a sort of period of initial, absolute chaos but things improved a little bit later? And what happened to things like healthcare, if people felt sick, whether doctors and also education of young people, which was obviously disrupted by the camp experience for young people of a certain age. So how did young people spend their time? Were there sports facilities or the kinds of things people do at the camp?

Joy Ma:

So no, there was no activities, no organizations of any sort to support young children. So Andy at some point he became a tutor. They were self-appointed tutors. There was this guy, in our opinion, in our circles was called [Guru 00:24:01]. And he was just a do it yourself kind of person. And he taught people very practical things. There was a tutor and I think Michael talks about it. And after a while, the guy didn't have any books. So he was teaching the same thing over and over again. And you talk about years for these children. And there was a lot of boredom when you read the book, you get a sense of how isolated and how bored these kids were especially for the teenagers. It was a very disruptive time. Some were ripped out from schools and most of people never went back to school again because it was such a gap.

You can imagine your own children. If they missed like two, three weeks, you're already panicking about school. We're talking about years. And when they went back to school, if they did, they were much older than everybody else. And so it was really, really a terrible lost in years for all the children and the teenagers who went in. As far as those conditions of the camp, in the beginning it was utterly chaos. They had these group cooking, how should I put it? Group cooking activities or I'm not getting the word, but basically they would say, okay, this group, you are in Barrack, whatever. It's about five, six families. You're going to take all these supplies then you got to cook.

And cooking for a lot of people is really difficult. You can barely cook rice for yourself that doesn't get burned. And then they had to cook in the open fire. It was awful because not only was it difficult for people cooking it. So they took turns. And so just from a practical point of view, the fire was not controlled. And so when the food was bad, and it was served to everybody else, already all these people who were so sad and isolated, they really got very angry when the rice was burned or uncooked or the vegetable was burned, which would've happened. You're talking about roaring fire, can barely cook on it. So it created a lot of misery for the folks who were, and dread when it came to your turn to cook, it was just a nightmare.

And so my mother was lucky. She was able to find a connection who had a cook. And so she would pay the cook through her rations so everybody got like five rupees per month or something. And so she would use these coupons to pay him. And he was able to cook clearly because he could do it. Then from that point, they decided that was a bad idea after the camp representatives from the Chinese community communicated this. Then they broke it down to everybody would get their own rations. And then like at nine o'clock every day, you would go to the gate of the camp and collect your food and come back. And so that got a little bit better. But besides that, there was a movie perhaps once a week, but there were no other activities that I heard.

Dilip D'Souza:

Since you talk about the situation the camps were going through, can I just read a small part from the book, few paragraphs?

Tariq Thachil:

Yes. Yes.

Dilip D'Souza:

So then home minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri actually visited the camp in 1963 at some point. And then went back to Delhi after meeting all the people in the camp. And from other stories I've heard, the people in the camp surrounded him and asked him, "When are we going get released and please improve conditions," whatever. So anyway, he went back to Delhi and he went back to parliament and here's just three paragraphs from the book. In August that year, there was a discussion about the internee in Rajasthan. JS Pillar member of parliament asked how many internees at the Deoli camp had refused to go to China. The minister of state for home affairs, that's Lal Bahadur's deputy [Aram Hajar Navis 00:28:14] told him, "595."

"So were they prepared to go to Formosa?" Pillar asked. "No, they want to remain in this country," he was told. "How many devenues were there in the camp?" Pillar asked. So the total comes to 2249. Then [Nsri Ramaredi 00:28:34] MP asked about these 595. Were they refusing to go to China because that country's government had been following international perfidy and all that sort of thing. This is a direct quote by the way. Lal Bahadur Shastri answered saying he had not discussed exactly this question with the prisoners but he had in furthered the present policy of the Chinese government is not acceptable to them. And that they were happy to remain in India, which was a free country and had a democratic setup.

Now, Shastri must remember just returned from the camp. So he told the [Rajis 00:29:07] about the internees he met there were quote, exceedingly happy, especially I found the women and children fully satisfied with the arrangements made and the facilities, provided in the camp. I really want to put that out, that phrase, exceedingly happy. Our then home minister who then became prime minister of this country told the Rajis about that these prisoners like Joy's family were exceedingly happy in that camp. I really want to know what that means.

Joy Ma:

So thank you Dilip for bringing that up because I'd like to share what happened in the camp for the people who actually went to see Lal Bahadur Shastri's talk. And so at one point they were really excited he was coming. And so they went and my parents went too. And so he said, this was a group who maybe before the last ship, or I think that's when it was timed. And he said, "Okay, those of you who want to live in India, you can return to home. Those who want to go, you're free to go, a free country." And so he said, "Those people who want to stay, you come to this side and those people who don't want to stay, you go that side." And so everybody sort of sorted themselves out. And so my parents went to the live in India side because dad was born in India. Mom was born in India. That was where their home was.

And so they chose it because they were promised that they could return home. That was the most important thing to them. And clearly as you know, that never happened. And so my mom actually had no idea that Lal Bahadur Shastri had eventually become the prime minister of India. And so I mentioned prime minister at one point and she was like, "No home minister." And we had an argument about it. And then I realized that she just never knew and took her back a little bit. She was taken aback and we paused. And so that was just a terrible realization for me that that's pure evidence of losing all your time. So that was what transpired in the camp and interesting to see what was reported in Rajis about.

Swagato Ganguly:

Deception, that's what politicians typically do. But some people actually went to China, I believe on ships. And I think that was actually very terrible time to go to China because it was the great leap forward and people were dying of starvation in China. But people underwent varying durations of incarcerations. Some people were let off after one year, the maximum period seems to be about five years of incarceration. And Joy, your family was actually one of the worst afflicted. I mean, your family stayed for five years in the camp and some people went to China. Was it that just some people lined up when Lal Bahadur Shastri came and said, we want to go to China and they were deported and the rest but even among the rest of us, sort of varying degrees of in incarceration. So what decided that? Based on what principles?

Joy Ma:

I really don't know. All I can say is I think there were three ships that came, three batches of people who returned to China, who went to China, I should say, because a lot of them were born in India. That decision had been made before Shastri came to the camp. And I don't know what the policies really are. We don't have access to that kind of information of how they decided to let people out. So I don't know.

Dilip D'Souza:

Yeah. But the only thing to add to that Swagato is that at least my hackles rise when we say things like they were repatriated, or they were returned to China because they had nothing to do with China most of these people. They grew up in India, they had roots in India, they spoke only Assamese and Hindi and so on. And for us to then say that these people wanted to go to China or they was repatriated to their home country, that's nonsense. Their home country was this country and it's this country that should have taken them back home to their real homes. I just wanted to put that out.

Swagato Ganguly:

But as opposed to state actions, there were occasions which you write about in the book. There were occasions when ordinary Indians showed a great amount of humanity. There was these doctors, [Lohit Convo 00:34:29] was one of them who were on the train to Deoli looking after sick people. There was an Assamese novel that was written about the plight of the Chinese internees, Chinese-Indian internees. Could you talk a little bit about that perhaps?

Dilip D'Souza:

Okay. So Lohit Convo is a doctor I met in Tinsukia. And there's a connection to the novel. There's a novel written by this well known Assamese novelist called Rita Chowdhury called Makum. It was called Assamese which is the Assamese name for Makum. I mean, Makum, which is Assamese name for Makum, which is the town in... So she wrote this novel about this story. And it came out in about 2010, 2011. So around that time, I met Lohit Convo. He was still a practicing doctor. And he told us this story about how he had been asked at the time of this incarceration. He was just told, he was a young doctor, fresh out of medical school. And he was told there's this train going and there are be a lot of people in it and they need some doctor medical attention. I mean, they may need, so we need a team of doctors to go with the train.

So he gets on the train and with a few other doctors and they go for six days traveling west to Deoli. And he just happens to notice that most of these people are Chinese looking or all of them, in fact. But he also notices and he tells me that most of them are wearing this Assamese, the women at least were wearing this Assamese outfit called the mekhela chador, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. And then he goes there, maybe there were a few colds and things that he attended to on the way. And then he spends a day or two there and he gets on a train again and comes back. And that's the end. He's forgotten about that story till many years later.

And when he's telling me all this, he says, "This is what shows that we are different from those Nazis in Germany. We Indians have humanity because we put doctors on that train. So I put that in the book just without comment because I mean, I would like our readers to judge for themselves whether that really shows humanity. But apart from that, what really struck me and that's the connection to this novel is because his son then, the old man got tired and he went away and his son was talking to me and he said, "We only found out last year about my father's experience, 50 years later."

So I said, "Well, but why? Why didn't he ever tell you? And what happened last year?" He says, "Well, this book got published and he read the book. And then he came to us one day and said, "The stuff that she's writing about, it's not just fiction. It's not just a novel." And so the son said, "But why? How do you know?" And he says, "Well, I was on that train that he writes about." And that really struck me since that really captured for me in a sense this whole amnesia that we are talking about. Here was this guy who was on the train but had forgotten about it in a sense for 50 years.

Swagato Ganguly:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, the reference point is not really concentration camps like there only wasn't Auschwitz or Gulag, I mean, the difference point would more be, I guess the Japanese internment of Japanese in America during World War II but that has sort of memorialized much more. I mean, the people sort of memorialized...

Dilip D'Souza:

Is it a consolation Swagato to me, it really isn't.

Swagato Ganguly:

No. It's just an accurate description. I know it's not.

Dilip D'Souza:

Yes, we didn't have gas timbers and it wasn't a concentration camp like the Nazis had, but the fact that you took these 3,000 people and took them away against their will, that's a painful episode in itself.

Swagato Ganguly:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Joy Ma:

Yes. And I think I want to add this point that I know we don't have anybody really saying this but it seemed to me like the internment at Gulag was about 20 years after the Japanese internment. So it seemed like a playbook that somebody had picked up and said, "Okay, we can do this." But they didn't follow through on all the rest of the, I'll put it in quotes, the benefits or whatever activities that the Japanese Americans got, which they had some education, they had schools, none of that was also brought in. And I'm not editorializing this but just wanted to add that.

Swagato Ganguly:

Actually I had a slightly different question, which is why I brought that in, which is that the Japanese American experience is a lot talked about, but the only experience is hardly known about. And it is only very recently that people have started talking about it. So that is what I really wanted to bring up. So clearly there was a lot of stigma around the experience, which took a lot of time to overcome from talk about.

Dilip D'Souza:

Stigma is one word. A lot of the people, Joy will corroborate me in this and explain a little further. They just felt ashamed or hesitant to talk about this for many years. But for me, I'm not Chinese Indian but what really gets me is how did all of us forget about it? We were not part of this camp. This whole thing happened but yet 50 years later, 60 years later, most Indians don't even know this happened. How did that come about? Joy, do you want to talk about the reticence or the stigma among the Chinese-Indian community?

Joy Ma:

Sure. So for the kids, the teenagers who are going in, the question that keeps coming up like this is decades later, they ask, what did we do wrong? Why were we treated as criminals? So the stigma is real and true. The fact that everybody forgot about it and didn't come to their aid. There was no international outcry that there was an internment of any sort. It was very quiet. It was swept under the rug. And so there's a lot of simmering questions and anger and doubts and a lot of the people who were in the camp eventually immigrated when they could. And it wasn't a pleasant thing to talk about. So there's actually one person who didn't talk about it for 40 years. He went to work, he never talked about it. And then when he went back to India, so this was Steven Wang. When he went back to India, it was such an emotional moment. It really came out. He wanted to touch and feel on things he had left behind.

So I would say it is not pleasant. You need to find community. And so some of the boys who went to camp, they remained lifelong friends. And so when Bobby Cheng Wang went to Toronto over time after he settled his family, he was able to think about this organization. It's the AIDCI, and it provides support and community for the people who were interned. It's based in Toronto. And they do a fair amount of work with keeping the community together and also taking certain actions, writing letters to the Indian government, to the prime minister and so on. And so it took a lot of time to overcome the shadow of the camp. In fact, if you read the book, Eva Chang, she's the second generation. She never went to the camp but her dad did. Michael went to the camp and that just cascades down to the future generation.

So the effects of camp is it's a presence. For me, it was always a presence. I was born there and my mom would say, on my birthday, she would say, "I went to the hospital at 10:30 at night alone." Dad wasn't allowed to go with her. So from the gate on, she had to walk to the hospital on her own and deliver really quickly. And so yes, the camp was a presence for all of us. It doesn't overwhelm us. I think a lot of people have resolved that issue but we've decided that it's not to be forgotten and that's why it gives us something to work towards. That's important.

Swagato Ganguly:

And after going through this terrible experience of incarceration, it wasn't as if that when people got released from the camp, it was a release from their troubles because a lot of people lost their property, lost their livelihoods. Many of them were not allowed to go back to their hometown, so their original places. They were just dumped in Calcutta many of them, sometimes without any money. And Joy, your family had a particularly harrowing experience in that regard. But it's maybe also inspiring in some sense, in terms of how your mother dealt with what happened. Perhaps you could talk about that.

Joy Ma:

Yes. I can give you an idea of what happened. So as we talked about it, we were one of the last families who left. And then when they reached, where would they have gone to Hara, I guess. When they landed in Hara, my dad and a bunch of other people were taken to a jail called Kamahapi. And so dad continued to be in jail for another six months. And during that time, there was my mother, a single mother with three children, trying to establish herself and Calcutta can be a difficult place especially when they see a single woman. She had all sorts of barriers. She'd had some help from the family. But what I didn't learn till after the book was over was I was as a child, I was terribly traumatized. I used to cry for my dad the whole time. And the city terrified me, all the honking because my home was dearly and I wanted to go home.

And in Calcutta, you'd hear these honking and it's a busy city, and it would freak me out. And then I got sick. And so mom had to deal with all these things. And the one thing she knew she had to do was get my brothers back in school. And so she went to several schools. There was sort of a distant family member who went with us and trying to introduce us to these schools. And they just said, "Do these boys know Bengali?" And we're like, "No, we don't study Bengali." We were up in the hills. That wasn't a requirement in the schools that they were going to in Cal. And so they rejected them. That was quite a few schools. And so she went to [Saint Xavier's 00:46:37] and she had a change of thinking. And she just went ahead and told the fathers of what her situation was. But my brothers had to write a test and based on that, they were accepted into Saint Xavier's. So she was very grateful that there was some humanity and that's I think where the humanity was.

And then eventually dad got released but he had a hard time. He had a lot of issues with not being able to go back. And he decided to fight it, which is even more difficult. But he was a very strong man and he just decided he had the right to go home. And so he never did but eventually we moved away from Calcutta and settled in Nepal. I would invite, Swagato we talked about it that Michael should probably say something. His journey was also quite harrowing when he told me about it and it's documented in the book. And then of course, if we have time my brother.

Swagato Ganguly:

Okay. Yeah. Can we bring Michael in? And we have a couple of questions from Tariq Thachil which I think would cover some of these points as well. And perhaps Michael could tackle them. Okay. Let me read out the questions. One point in the book was how a lot of the most acute difficulties internees faced occurred after they were released. Could you discuss how post-release experiences of trying to go back home? You've covered that a bit but maybe Michael has his own angle on that. Two, can you talk a little more broadly about how you found subjects willing to speak about their experiences? No, that's I guess more directed at Joy and Dilip because they wrote the book but perhaps Joy and Dilip can talk about that after Michael.

Joy Ma:

Michael can unmute. Yeah. Hey Michael, can you unmute yourself?

Swagato Ganguly:

We're having difficulties. Yeah. So maybe Joy and Dilip you could talk about how you found subjects willing to talk about their experiences.

Tariq Thachil:

And you could maybe connect it in the thesis question as well, which is how did the people you spoke with and interviewed remembered the past? Was it based on memory and oral histories? Were there other sources, maybe records and letters that were saved by the community? So a little bit about how you found the subjects and then what shaped their memories. Thank you.

Joy Ma:

Sure. Go first. Yeah. 

Dilip D'Souza:

No, no, you should take it. That's what I'm saying.

Joy Ma:

So for a long time, I thought about this story as my story because you can only tell your own story. But I had a hard time writing about it. Having to reveal myself to all my friends, I hid that portion from. Most of my friends are from India. I went to school till I was in college. And I suppose it wasn't the most difficult thing to say but it also didn't seem that I would be supported but that's a different issue. So anyway, the point of that being that I found this when I wrote an article for Outlook based on my friend asking me to write it. And it was mom's story about the day she got interned. And it was Chinese New Year on 25th on 1963. And so when that came out, I started getting connected with all these people. And they said, "You should go to Toronto." I went to Toronto. And I met everybody, including Michael and Andy and Ying Shang and everybody was there. People who came to me that said, "I remember you as a baby. I used to hold you." And then somebody else came and said I was born there. And so it took time to build a relationship but it was like a community that I hadn't tapped into because everybody just keeps it to themselves.

And so when I was ready to write the book, Dilip and I wrote a proposal and then I approached them. I had been talking to them for a long time, and they were ready to talk that we had finally arrived in the time. And I didn't realize the AIDCI had been part of the reason why they were ready to communicate this. And they meet pretty regularly. They are lifelong friends. They talk about the camp often. It doesn't consume them but what it did was make them available to tap into those memories. And a lot of writing the book was you get the information and you have to go and research it and you make sure that it syncs up.

And so one of the feedback I got from the book is, some of it is so common. And I was thinking that's very similar. And my whole thing is that was by design. There was nothing to do in the camp. And what they're saying is the same, no matter where you go. And so that's how I was able to talk to them. There was still a lot of people who do not want to be reminded about the camp. I've gotten locked out of relationships and people won't talk to me. So that is also continuing. It's not like everybody's rushing to tell me all their stories. But that was also a reason that we met Dilip in 2015 in India, excuse me. And Dilip knew the people enough, I think. Dilip I'm speaking for you but you went for that last journey because I think some people were familiar. Yeah. Sorry, I'll go.

Swagato Ganguly:

And finally Dilip, could you say something of the enabling legislation for confining Chinese-Indians that was passed in 1962, the Defence of India Act and other legislations. And also do you see echoes of that in the current CA and RC legislations or promise legislations and actions which is ruling the country, select a great deal of discontent in country in recent times?

Dilip D'Souza:

Well, so in 1962, the government wanted to do this to the Chinese-Indian, send them off to prison. But they wanted this legal framework to do this. So they passed a number of laws. There was one that dated soon after independence called Defence of India Act or ordinance, I can't remember. I mean, I can't remember whether it was an act. I need to go back and read the book actually. So they put in the language and then passed a number of other acts over those three or four months between let's say August of 1962, and maybe February of 1963, where they enabled this whole incarceration in different ways. And it just talked about the Foreigners Restriction Act. So certain areas were supposedly restricted to foreigners. And that was used against the Chinese-Indian. Why they were considered foreigners is a question in itself. But that is a kind of thing that they used to incarcerate these people.

I think this also feeds into what Shastri said later that they wanted to tell the world that we did this according to certain principles and it was not just a random thing that we did. And so they needed this legal framework. And really, it was just a fig leaf. That's what it was. So all these laws enabled this and in a sense, all of them really asked the question who is a citizen of India? And how can you determine that? Who is a citizen, who is not? And you choose these guys to do all these things to and then effectively, they're not citizens of India. And that's why I think there are parallels now with this attempt to pass the CA, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the NRC, because put together, they raised the same questions.

And in fact, a few of my Chinese-Indian friends Joy included, see these parallels happening again in India. In different ways, we're questioning citizenship. And we're starting to find ways to deny the citizenship to certain people in certain ways, which is exactly what happened to the Chinese-Indians. And that's why there's a parallel. And that's why I think we should learn from history what we did to people then was in no ways defensible if you ask me. And I think if we do pass the CAA and we go down that path, we're going to be repeating the same mistakes. And we're doing it in different ways too. We started building prison camps for people who will be detained under the CA and RCX, which is exactly where we had a prison camp in 1962 where we sent these people. So we have prison camps again. I mean, why are we repeating this history? For one thing, we don't even remember the history and now we are repeating it. The whole thing seems so bizarre and twisted to me. Sorry it gets to me when I talk about it and I get sort of heated about it. I'm sorry. Carry on.

Swagato Ganguly:

Yeah. And Joy and so many other Chinese-Indian families have had so much difficulty establishing their citizenship in India. It goes back again to that sort of distinction between civic, civic notion of nationalism and citizenship where anybody who adheres to a certain idea and declares his affiliation is a citizen against the ethnic notion where, how people look or behave or the language they speak  determines their citizenship. [crosstalk 00:58:59].

Dilip D'Souza:

The fate they follow, Swagato.

Swagato Ganguly:

The fate they follow. Yeah. And once again, the world is creating so many refugees. If you look at the Ukraine situation today, we seem to be back at the same point almost as 1962. That's I think maybe another [crosstalk 00:59:32].

Dilip D'Souza:

Wars do that. I mean, they create those kind of situations.

Swagato Ganguly:

Yeah. So I guess we are out of time.

Dilip D'Souza:

Is that right?

Swagato Ganguly:

Yeah. Thank you very much for compiling these very moving narratives into this book.

Dilip D'Souza:

Can I show the book by the way. And I do want to point out to those who haven't seen the book that that is Joy's family on the cover. That's Joy's mother [Effa 01:00:16] who left us last year. Her older brother is [Lindon 01:00:21], right Joy? Who also died some years ago and William who's I think on the chat right now is there and there. So there you are, Joy's family on the cover of our book. Before Joy was born.

Tariq Thachil:

Yeah. I just put the link. If everybody who might be interested, I'm not sure your preferred book vendor. I put the Amazon link. I wish they were independent bookstores I could put up there but I'm just putting the easiest one for people to obtain the book. I recommend it very highly. It's a very compelling and quick read. And we also have a link to the book on our events page, on the CASI web page. So first of all, let me also thank all three of you, Swagato as well as Dilip and Joy for having this really engaging conversation and taking us through really a forgotten period of our history and one that needs to be remembered for many reasons but including the fact Dilip as you were pointing out, that this is the 60 year anniversary of this internment experience. And so we should have a commemoration of that as well. And so thank you so much for doing the hard work to bring these stories to light. And thank you Swagato so much for moderating the conversation. We look forward to having you at CASI soon.