Introduction: Ma Zhucai's Transculturalism and Interpellation

This chapter analyses narratives and recent representations of the Ancient Tea Horse Road (ATHR) trader Ma Zhucai (1891–1963), who developed Kalimpong as the headquarters of his business empire as he charted and moved in and within the trade connections between the 1910s and the 1960s from southwest China. The narratives here bifurcate in two separate Mas: the official Chinese patriot Ma Zhucai (the Memorial-Ma) and the Kalimpong-based trader-smuggler Ma Chu Chai to his English-speaking contemporaries (or the IB-Ma). The former representation emanates from an edited volume whose title is best translated as Diqing Literary and Historical Materials, vol. 10: Memorial of the Patriotic Overseas Chinese Leader Ma Zhucai (hereafter Memorial). The latter representation is from the archives of the British Indian colonial state (mainly of the IB) and the postcolonial Indian state along with ethnography done in 2016–2017 in Shangri- La, Yunnan and Kalimpong. The argument that develops in these Memorial representations is a robust picture of an idealised Ma embodied in the Chinese nation, zhonghua minzu, protecting its borderlands. What emerges unfailingly is the icon of an ideologically interpellated Chinese trader who crossed bounteous borders, from Gyalthang, or Shangri-La, in Kham-Yunnan through Lhasa in Tibet to Kalimpong in India, yet remaining loyal to his motherland. Here we critically contextualise Chinese patriotism and nationalism and its concomitant politico-cultural technologies of memorialising by unpacking Ma's 41 years in Kalimpong and the geographic and economic entanglements with a GMD and CCP China.

Gyalthang (Shangri-La), Ma's native place, is located in the easternmost foothills of the Himalaya mountains at around 3,300 meters above sea level, seen from a Chinese perspective as in the ‘northwest corner of present-day Yunnan province in southern Kham. From 1725 until 2001, this area was referred to as Zhongdian in Chinese.’

China as an idea and entity is everywhere today, both materially and symbolically. One way of looking at it is to address the present and future in a world that is profoundly interconnected, although with a resurgence in the idea of borders and barriers. We have a changed mediascape, our planet's sense of brokenness, isolation and fragmentation still infusing the post-Brexit and post-Trump world of nationalism and populist politics with troubling irresolution, but we must also recognise events along the Silk Roads since 2015, where there has been a narrative of strengthening ties, cooperation and a network of relationships with immense global reverberations and continual shifts. This book is not so much clearly concerning these complex geopolitics, notably vis-à-vis India and China, but about looking back and looking forward, in intersecting timeframes, at how these relationships are effected and affected, constrained and cracked. The book could have taken a different form but is confined to relating the representations and shenanigans around a border town during an exacting period.

The burden of the book has been to trace how China figured in the sociopolitical imaginary of the British and thereafter in the postcolonial Indian state, as well as in communist literature in China itself. More specifically, the book considers the Kalimpong border regions between the 1940s and the 1960s (also a consequence of its earlier history of settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) as its main case study to explore these issues. The book's primary subject remains—even more so in the twenty-first century—relevant in terms of the border claims in the region and the anxieties that those provoke. The existential angst is very much present, one could say, in relation to the people of Chinese origin but Indianised in varying degrees, still living in the area or in the diaspora of Kalimpong/Indian Chinese that proliferated around the world.

Empire and Border-Crossings

In the dying years of British India and the first flush of postcolonial Indian statehood, a clear continuity of laws and policy can be read, especially in relation to the registration of aliens. The small-scale strife of the Great Game at these Himalayan borders in the town of Kalimpong was coming to a close even as the registration of Chinese nationals continued under a cloud of suspicion over a period of twenty years at the Foreigners Registration Office. The spectre of spies, the reflux of the Great Game, the Tibet Question and eventually the 1962 Sino-Indian War haunt the distinction between ‘Japanese’, ‘Tibetan’ and ‘Chinese’ nationals and largely remain fuzzy. It is the anxious state's process of separating the ‘Chinese’ from their ‘Japanese’ and then ‘Tibetan’ (also subdivided as Amdowas, Khampas, half-castes, and so on) counterparts that led the charge to register ‘Chinese nationals’ under the British Indian registration of foreigners acts. Marking differences was a way of categorising and classifying in these registration processes such that boundaries could be constructed for the body political and the body social. The nervous nation's and the disciplinary state's rationale for capturing and interning dangerous ‘Chinese’ later is a part of this narrative.

Kalimpong as a ‘Nest of Spies’

Situated just a kilometre away from Kalimpong Police Station, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School (see Figure 4.1 for a map of the town) opened its doors for the first time in June 1941. Established by three wealthy entrepreneurs, Ma Zhucai, Liang Zizhi and Zhang Xiangcheng, the school developed as a branch of the Calcutta Mui Kwong School. The primary purpose of the school was to provide education for the children of Chinese refugees from China and Southeast Asia who had fled to the hill station during the Second World War. The curriculum initially consisted of Chinese-language studies, complemented with Tibetan and English; class lectures on the Chinese anti-Japanese war effort were also held. Apart from transmitting and preserving ‘what was and continues to be regarded as Chinese identity … and links with the ancestral homeland’, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School performed, unwittingly or otherwise, a dual function: like its counterparts in Calcutta, it served as a political playhouse where the factional struggles between the GMD and the CCP were staged after the 1950s.

I grew up and went to school in the multi-culture of Kalimpong—the town that is the focus and main protagonist of this book. My father, a trader-adventurer, landed up in Kalimpong from Rangpo, a town across the border in the Kingdom of Sikkim, which was then a British protectorate. His father in turn had been working in Singtam (also in Sikkim) for a firm with connections to Kalimpong. This was on the heels of Colonel Francis Younghusband's ‘opening up’ of the route to Tibet in 1904. My father never really made it economically, nor did he sojourn in Lhasa as many businessmen were then wont to do. Coming of age, not without kvetching, in the Tenth Mile area of the town, I noted there was just a residue of the Indo-Tibetan trade, with descendants of merchants using the conduit via Kathmandu while still hoping that the Jelep-La border would one day reopen. The Chinese families still living in the town mainly ran restaurants or shoe shops. Tibetan refugees, lamas and aristocrats had a considerable presence in the town environs. The mule trains were but a distant memory for old timers as army trucks trundled up and down the roads carrying supplies and military hardware.

I remained quite clueless about the potholes in the ground of history on which I daily trod. It was only when I relocated to the United Kingdom (UK) for my doctoral work, on a different topic, that I kept encountering material on Kalimpong in the British Library, London. It was then that the urge to someday write a book on the town took hold of me. This was not a bad beginning for a scholar specialising in postcolonial studies. It was only much later that this work began to take some sort of shape, its contours cut and circumscribed by the continuities and discontinuities of the colonial experience in Asia. Although the Tibetan side of the story at the border had been written about, it seemed to me that what was lacking was the presence of China in Kalimpong, with all that this implied for the larger story of China–India relations before and after 1947.

A sense of politics does not generally unfold easily as an unequivocally observable analytic category with significances and meanings that are, of necessity, revealed and concealed. The aim of this chapter is nevertheless to analyse, as clearly as possible, the People's Daily's representations of the border town of Kalimpong in the 1950s and 1960s. Kalimpong, as a meeting point or a metonymic space, came to play a pivotal role in the border politics of the PRC and the ROI for three reasons: (a) Historically a British trade post since the mid-nineteenth century, Kalimpong was favourably located on the Lhasa–Kolkata trade route—the same route used by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the early 1950s to transport supplies from China to Tibet after the Battle of Chamdo. (b) A sizeable Tibetan population lived in Kalimpong, especially after the PLA invaded the Kham region, when refugees started to stream into Kalimpong.6 This Tibetan population included residents, traders, refugees and, most importantly for this chapter, influential members of the Kashag (or the Tibetan governing council). (c) A diasporic Chinese population lived in Kalimpong, many of whom were later interned in Deoli after the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Drawing on archival material from the People's Daily, fieldwork notes, along with interviews conducted over a period of six months, and many published primary and secondary sources, we shall attempt to show how Kalimpong functioned as a metonymic ambit in which ROI–PRC relations were to play out in the 1950s and 1960s.

Akin to Pravda's status in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at its height, the People's Daily, as an official organ of the CCP directly controlled by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, provided direct (and sometimes oblique) information on the policies and viewpoints of the government.

That bit on the ‘messy map’, the corner around Kalimpong, has been on edge in more senses than one. During the Doklam crisis of 2017, as China and India faced off against each other, the tension of a looming skirmish—if not full-scale war—radiated through this junction between China, Nepal, Bhutan and the former Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. This tense dynamic rumbled over into a replay in the Galwan Valley standoff in May–July 2020, as skirmishes were also reported during July–August on the border between Sikkim and China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

Anxieties flared up in Kalimpong. Kalimpong, after all, is a privileged prism, a unique entry point for looking not only at the India and China undercurrents but also at China in India. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow in this book. While the events covered in them start in the 1910s but are mainly between the 1940s and early 1960s, this overture attempts to corroborate the longer history of how Kalimpong was intimately connected to the northeastern border leading into Tibet and China. This history is largely inaugurated by British frontier anxiety as well as the lure that Tibet as a ‘forbidden’ land held for the colonial imaginaire in its singular way of living, seeing and making of the world. Thus, the ‘opening’ of Kalimpong along with the ‘opening’ of Tibet is recounted in this chapter, first in the section on frontiers and Lord Curzon (1859–1925) and then in the section on survey, settlement and Charles Bell (1870–1945).