It would be difficult to estimate the number of plates of Hakka noodles consumed in India, but it would be safe to assume that the number would be large. This in sharp contrast to the number of Indians of Chinese origin who remain in India. The majority of them belong to the Hakka community from whom the dish borrows its name and it is worth recalling that the word Hakka literally means guest as the Hakkas were an itinerant community, their identity not associated with any geographical region. The question of who is a host and who is a guest is as old as human existence and one can find an ethics of hospitality at the centre of epics from the Iliad to the Mahabharata. In the world of modern nation-states, this ethic is translated into a legal axis of the citizen and the alien, and the contemporary turbulence in India testifies to how laws of citizenship may violently displace people, rendering them as legal strangers or aliens.
Like strangers often do, Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza’s Deoliwallahs has arrived unannounced in the winter of India’s political discontent with a timely message from a forgotten chapter of the nation’s history. The book tells the story of the internment of approximately 3,000 Indian-Chinese during the 1962 war. The Chinese community in India dates back to the late 18th century and generations of Chinese have been born in India, know no other home and have merged with the local community through marriage and trade while maintaining a distinct cultural identity.
This community found itself caught in the crossfire of the Indo-China war in 1962 when the Foreigners Act was amended to enable the State to arrest and detain “any person not of Indian origin” regardless of whether they were Indian citizens or not. The Defence of India Ordinance similarly allowed authorities to arrest people suspected “of being of hostile origin”. Approximately 3,000 Chinese people, including women and children, were arrested, primarily from ‘sensitive’ towns, including Shillong, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Makum. Families were torn apart, properties were confiscated and these overnight strangers were huddled into packed trains and taken to Deoli in Rajasthan where many would spend the next five years in an internment camp. This sordid tale of arbitrary arrest and detention should serve as a political stain and scandal in the history of India similar to the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II in the US. That it does not is indeed the greater scandal and Deoliwallahs is a corrective to this collective amnesia.
Joy Ma, one of the co-authors, was born in Deoli after her family was arrested, while D’Souza is a well-known journalist who wrote one of the first long-form pieces about the internment. Their painstaking effort intersperses oral and personal histories within the larger political history of the Indo-Chinese relationship, reminding us of how critical it is to retrieve individual and private memories from the totalising histories of nations. Many of the narratives gathered in the book are culled from survivors, many of whom live in the US or in Canada. An overseas group, Association of India Deoli Camp Internees (AIDCI) 1962, was formed with the intention of documenting testimonies and seeking an apology from the Indian State. It is telling that the book does not have too many testimonies from Chinese who continue to live in India, for whom Deoli is not just a matter of memory, but a continuing fear. During the 2017 Doklam stand-off, many Indian-Chinese families told their children to say that they were from Nagaland if asked.
In addition to its invaluable task of recalling the injustices meted out to a “minuscule minority”, this book needs to be read urgently in conversation with contemporary struggles for citizenship as it reminds us that hospitality is a legal project and strangers are made by law rather than through the accidents of geographical birth.
