India, China, and the World by Tansen Sen

Author:Tansen Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

India, China, and Global Connections

Malacca was one of the first new sites of interactions between Indians and Chinese that emerged as a result of the expansion of imperial powers in maritime Asia. The Ming court’s intervention in Malacca’s relationship with Siam and the establishment of the “Official Depot” by Zheng He at the port created an alternate node for ships sailing between the Chinese coast and the Indian Ocean littoral. By the time the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean world, Malacca was already a hub for Chinese and Indian traders operating their commercial networks that linked the South China Sea region to the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. The subsequent few centuries witnessed the emergence of Batavia, Singapore, and Penang as other such sites of interactions under the European colonial presence in Asia. New sites of exchanges and interactions also appeared in China and India. These included Calcutta, Bombay, Goa, Shanghai, Macau, Hong Kong, and Kashgar. Additionally, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tokyo became a center for intellectual discourse between Indian and Chinese scholars, some living there in exile. As argued in this chapter, perhaps the most notable development with regard to new sites of interactions was the advent of common meeting grounds for Indian and Chinese beyond the Asian continent. British Guiana and Mauritius were two such places highlighted in this chapter.

These new sites of interactions, which replaced the previous meeting grounds such as Dunhuang, Palembang, and Chang’an (present-day Xian), facilitated diverse forms of exchanges and circulations. Many of these sites were important nodes in the circulations of commodities such as opium, tea, and cotton. Others were created as plantation centers to serve the needs of European enterprises, governments, and consumers. Some were also political centers, from which the European powers administered their colonial empires. Each of these places fostered a wide range of interactions between Indians and Chinese. While in Calcutta the encounters took place between Chinese immigrants and local Bengali, Armenian, and Anglo-Indian communities, in Shanghai the Chinese confronted Indian soldiers and Sikh guards. In parts of the British Empire, the Malay world, British Guiana, and Mauritius, on the other hand, migrant Chinese and Indian laborers mixed and formed their own unique partnerships and relationships. The intermingling of Indians and Chinese at diverse places across the globe defined this phase of imperial connections.

These interminglings shaped positive and negative perceptions, led to the creation of new types of cuisines, and produced shared spaces where cultural traditions of the two groups of people were juxtaposed and sometimes merged. Some of the examples related to mutual perceptions were discussed above. With regard to cuisine, a distinct Chinese-Indian recipe developed in Calcutta and became part of Indian eating traditions. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, the intermingling contributed to the mixing of Indian and Chinese ingredients by newly formed communities such as the Baba Nyonyas in Malacca and Penang (Pampus 2017). The presence of Chinese temples in Calcutta, the Sikh gurdwaras in Shanghai, the erection of Hindu places

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