For more than a century there was a Chinatown in upper Assam, a small and settled corner of the tea country that drew no particular notice. Carpenters, dentists and shopkeepers raised their families there, speaking Assamese in the bazaar and Hakka at home. Then, in the winter of 1962, a war being fought hundreds of miles away in the high Himalayan passes reached down into the tea gardens and emptied the Chinatown almost overnight. Its people were declared enemy aliens, loaded onto a closed train, and carried two thousand miles across India to a camp in the Rajasthan desert, and many of them never came home. For decades the whole episode was allowed to slip out of memory, until the novelist Rita Chowdhury spent years digging it back out and gave it to Assam in her 2010 novel Makam, published in English as Chinatown Days.

The Chinese who came to the tea country

The Chinese presence in Assam was far older than most of the people who later turned on them ever realised. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, as colonial planters learned to raise tea on Assamese soil, Chinese tea-makers were brought to the valley to teach the craft of curing the leaf. A community took root around the tea districts of the far upper valley. It settled above all at Makum, in what is now Tinsukia district. Over the generations the descendants of those first labourers were joined by later arrivals, and they became carpenters and cabinet-makers, leather tanners, shopkeepers, and dentists who pulled teeth in small front-room surgeries. They married locally and took Assamese names alongside their own, folding so quietly into the life of the place that the lane where they lived was known simply as Chinapatty, the Chinese quarter.

What made them ordinary in peacetime made them look dangerous in war. The tea districts of upper Assam lie close against the eastern Himalaya, in the country that runs up toward the frontier with Tibet and China. The tea-garden world the Chinese belonged to was itself a population the colonial economy had assembled out of many origins. The Assam Chinese were only one thread among many in that mixed industrial society, neither more nor less foreign than the labourers brought from central India to pluck the leaf. For a hundred years and more, nobody had thought to ask where their loyalty lay. They were Makum men and Makum women, born in Assam and buried in Assam, as much a part of the bazaar as the Marwari trader or the Bengali clerk.

The war and the law

The reckoning came from far away. On the twentieth of October 1962 the war between India and China broke open along the disputed Himalayan border, and within weeks the Indian army on the eastern front had collapsed. Chinese troops poured down through the North-East Frontier Agency and came within striking distance of the Assam plains, reaching the outskirts of Tezpur before Beijing declared a unilateral ceasefire in late November. The panic those weeks produced in the valley was total. Tezpur was evacuated, its treasury currency was burned, and its jail was thrown open in the expectation that the enemy was about to arrive. In that fear, a community that had lived in Assam for generations was suddenly seen not as neighbours but as the face of the invader.

The fear was soon given the force of law. In December 1962 the government enacted the Defence of India ordinance and rules, which authorised the apprehension and detention of anyone suspected of being of hostile origin. The wording was broad enough that a Chinese surname or a Chinese spouse was reason enough to be taken. There was no trial. Across India some thousands of people of Chinese descent were arrested under these powers, from Calcutta and Bombay and Darjeeling as well as the northeast, and the small community of the Assam tea districts was swept up among them. In Makum the police came to Chinapatty and took whole families, the Assam-born along with the foreign-born, the elderly and the children together. The houses were locked and left, and most of what was inside, the shops, the tools and the furniture, was later auctioned off as enemy property for next to nothing.

The long road to Deoli

The internees were gathered first in local jails, at Dibrugarh and elsewhere, and then put aboard a closed train that carried them clear across the subcontinent to Deoli in the Rajasthan desert. The camp there had been built as a prisoner-of-war facility two decades earlier, and now it held thousands of Chinese-Indian internees in the dry heat. A great many of them were children and old people whose only offence was to have been born into the wrong family. People who had spent their lives in the wet green of the tea country were held for years in a desert prison, and some of the oldest and the youngest did not survive the heat and the conditions. The last of the internees were not released until the middle of 1967, after roughly four and a half years behind the wire, and those who were let out often found there was nothing left to return to.

The cruellest stroke was the breaking of families. From 1964 the authorities began deporting internees to China in batches, choosing who went and who stayed in a way that survivors remembered as arbitrary. A husband might be sent while a wife was kept, or a parent deported while a child was left behind. Several thousand were sent out of the country altogether, while others chose, or were allowed, to remain. Those who returned to Assam came back to auctioned homes and a suspicion that did not lift, and for years they were required to report to the police and to carry permits to travel. Some of the deported were never permitted to come back at all. Many of them never again saw the family members who had been placed on a different list. The Chinatown at Makum did not reopen, and although the lane is still there and some of its old houses still stand, the community that built it was gone.

The novel that remembered

For nearly half a century the story stayed where it had been left, unspoken in Assam and almost unrecorded, a silence that suited everyone who would rather not remember. It was a writer who finally broke it. Rita Chowdhury, a Cotton College teacher and novelist who had already won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2008 for an earlier historical novel, Deo Langkhui, spent years tracing survivors and their scattered descendants across Assam and China. Out of that research came Makam in 2010, a title that carries the meaning “the golden horse”, published in English in 2018 as Chinatown Days. The novel did more than tell a forgotten story, for it put names and faces back onto people who had been carried off as a mere category, and Chowdhury herself became a public advocate for the recognition of Assam’s Chinese-origin community. A history the valley had tried to forget had been written back into its memory by one of its own.

The Chinatown days are over. The tannery, the dentist’s chair and the carpenter’s bench are long gone from the lane at Makum, but the story of the people who were taken from it is no longer lost. A novel carried it back into the memory of the valley, and the lane still stands to be walked.