The Archives as a Source of Social History: Studying Belonging of the Indian–Chinese Community

Introduction: What Is an Archive?

Archives often speak about how identities and meanings are created and change over time. Dube (2020), while speaking about Dalit identity and their religion, wrote that archives were ‘ongoing, unfinished, open-ended’ processes contingent on the authoritarian politics of the state. Archives are building blocks of history and may often provide more answers than official narratives of events. The significance of this article is to locate how the ambiguity of archival material is often a boon in disguise to anthropologists looking into complex events in modern society, wherein official narratives are also contingent on similar politics that are produced by the state.

Archives are of myriad interest to academicians from various backgrounds. They are repositories that house significant materials that help us to historicize our world. Archival material is usually carefully stored in a particular order. One invokes the use of archives when one is seeking to trace and uncover gaps or imperfect historical facts. Archival researchers often, therefore, look upon various source materials, and depending on value assumptions they make of the social world which they investigate (Drake et al., 1994 Gaillet, 2012; Ogborn, 2014).

In a discussion around archival research, L’Eplattenier (2009) talks about combining both methods and methodologies of using archives. She states that while methodologies help researchers set their goals for research, it is the method that gives clues to how we get to the task of carrying out research. In the case of the study of archives, one goes back to the College English (CE) journal issue of 1999, where multiple authors (Buckley et al., 1999; Brereton, 1999) published about their own experience of working in the archives, and they raised several questions, as follows:

What should be in the archive?

How can we secure access? Which tools should be used to explore the past?

What is present or missing in the context of the research in the archive?

Can access now be improved upon in future through better techniques, and will the nature of access change too?

This raises the question of how to define or even describe an archive for what it is. Archives are viewed as a primary means of creating new epistemologies. They are not ‘inert repositories of artifacts but rather a layered, historical record of dynamic stories’ (Tirabassi in Ramsey et al., 2010, pp. 170–171). Archives, therefore, go beyond the curator’s or archivist’s vision, as the subjectivity of the researcher can alter the original goal for which an archive was created. This becomes visible through the subjective pursuits and disciplinary frameworks of the researchers involved in the process of conducting archival research.

The authors’ doctoral dissertation explored the evolving conceptualization of what it means to be an Indian citizen for the people of Indian–Chinese origin. The author’s research interest was sparked by an assessment of the episode ‘loss of citizenship’ for many in the community in the wake of the 1962 Indo-China War. However, in the course of the author’s ethnography, when it came to interviews with the community, which was largely based in the twin colonial port cities of Kolkata and Mumbai, it became apparent that only a handful of elderly people could narrate any incident of the 1962 era. In this context, it was realized that the project would require some background information on not only the events of the 1962 war but also a discussion that would bring forth the community as it survived in the pre-war years, including the colonial period.

It was not as if nothing was available; some people in the community had produced an online forum called the All India Indian–Chinese Association. The website had some content on events celebrated by the community in Kolkata, especially Chinese New Year, Dragon Boat Race and All Soul’s Day. There were some descriptions of what the organization stood for, but nothing about the history of the community, except for one mystifying fable of a shipwreck and a Chinese sailor who survived it and then became a sugar trader in Bengal.

This is the story of Tong Atchew, or Tom Achii. No one whom the author interviewed truly knew if these were two different people or the same person. However, there were interesting tales about this character. Some of the material the author had come across about the community told of Atchew dealing in sugar and tea. It became so popular that the then Governor General of British India granted land to Atchew to build and run a sugar factory near the outskirts of Kolkata. Some of the author’s respondents went so far as to say that Atchew rode a horse and the land through which the steed rode was granted to him.

These varied introductory sources reinforced the need to locate public records of both the colonial and post-colonial periods to understand how the presence of the community had been represented. The goal was not only to locate these descriptions but also to delve into the worldview of the writers. The author wanted to see if, and how, the Chinese community spread and made a home for itself in the colonial capital of Kolkata. Alongside, it was also important to see what happened within a decade of Indian independence when they were forced to go through surveillance, deportation and loss of rights to citizenship.

The Nature of the Archives and the Underlying Logic of Their Use

Archives come in many forms: these may be seen as printed material such as newspapers, journals, personal diaries or biographies, which are found in physical archives. However, at present, many of these materials are also found in online databases, along with photographs and videos. The material that the author majorly referred to for conducting archival research may be divided into three major types: (a) material present in newspapers, magazines and journals; (b) Government Gazetted Notifications, parliament debates, legal documents of the state; and (c) personal documents, including people’s identification cards and others. The author’s use of archival research began with the use of microfilms of the Bengal Gazette and newspapers that covered the war period of 1962. Both sets of public records were available in the National Library in Kolkata.

The Gazette threw up various references to Chinese people settling down in the city, working in the port and working as carpenters. These insights helped the author immensely in establishing rapport with many of his informants when he began conducting his ethnographic fieldwork in 2017. This was especially helpful because his initial plan to focus on the 1962 war and its aftermath was not yielding much primary data.

After the initial days of fieldwork in 2017 in Kolkata, the author gradually sensed that his initial ease of access to participants was on the wane. Either his phone calls to respondents who had been initially quite forthcoming were going without an answer, or his physical meetings would end up in polite denial. In some cases, doorbells and knocks on the doors of their establishments, namely restaurants, beauty parlours and so on, were also left unanswered. The author was caught in a web of gatekeeping by certain individuals amongst the Indian–Chinese, and it seemed that three months after he began his fieldwork his patience to continue with it was on a knife’s edge.

Appadurai (1986, p. 357) states that gatekeeping concepts in anthropology ‘seem to limit … theorizing about the place in question and that define the quintessential and dominant questions of interest in the region.’ He emphasized that as anthropologists confront the structurally complex space of the metropolis, they struggle because of their scholarly training in writing ethnographies of simple societies. Tribal hamlets and peasant villages are where anthropologists cut their teeth in their chosen field. The ease of access for participants in such societies is relatively trouble-free. However, as highlighted in the previous paragraph, it is not the same when it comes to urban fieldwork, where participants may individually or even collectively thwart any effort at building rapport.

Very soon the author realized that speaking directly about the 1962 war and its effect on the community drove them towards a defensive mindset. It was the root cause of such acts of gatekeeping that began to frustrate any attempts of gathering data from the community. It was then that the archival data came to the author’s aid. He was able to then use a life-history approach with his participants to recover and reanimate rapport-building. Further, the archival data also helped him to frame the major thematical sections of the thesis and, subsequently, its final chapters.

The first chapter was a combination of the archival data, which provided the basis for comparison of the Chinese and other diasporic communities settling in colonial Kolkata, that is, the Jews, Armenians and Parsis. While the Parsis were favourably seen as part of the ruling class of colonial society, it was interesting to note that the Chinese were seen as highly efficient workers, especially when it came to large-scale woodworking projects. In contrast, the British were also suspicious of the community as they maintained a very inward life, which the colonialists wished to penetrate.

Stoler (2006) notes that studying the colonial period cannot just be about piecing together chronological material; rather, archival studies of colonial periods can be better utilized to locate the politics of the archiving, especially with a focus on the documentation of facts and fiction and the changing nature of conventions of inclusion and exclusion in the archival material. This is best exemplified by the comparison of how the different diasporic groups have been represented in the colonial period in Kolkata. When it comes to ethnographic studies, we also tend to avoid simple resolutions of research questions with our informants. The archival method can also be used to resist tautological assumptions in a chronological listing of events alone. The recovery work then gains further legitimacy when it comes to the investigation of the society and cultures of the past.

This takes the author to his second set of archival material, that is, entries in the British-established Intelligence Bureau (IB) of India, the oldest equivalent to secret services in a colonial nation-state. Some entries in the IB files would regularly portray Territy Bazaar, the site of the first and oldest Chinatown in the city of Kolkata, as a source of threat, and the local government officials and municipal authorities were asked to keep a close watch on the homes and workplaces of the Chinese. This is a tradition we reencounter in the material around the 1962 war. The only change in the latter case was that it was the Nehru-led Indian Government that now suspected the Chinese living in Kolkata, who had no connection to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), of establishing liaisons with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This case resulted in heated parliamentary debates over the matter of how to deal with the situation.

Information from old files of the IB from the colonial era was the hardest to obtain as it required special permission from the Department of Home Affairs of West Bengal. Even the files, when made accessible through such permissions, only provided restricted information. The author was not allowed to utilize the full report, make any copies or photograph it. The author could only take notes from the original report and submit whatever he noted down for editing before they were made accessible to him for the purpose of the research. This was then the second instance of gatekeeping, one that was upheld to keep certain aspects of state polity both in and out of the public record as per its dictate.

For his research, the author required first-hand information on how the 1962 war unfolded and how it was being perceived by the people of the country. The author also felt that it would be interesting to see if there were any direct reports of the Indian–Chinese people being placed on surveillance, or worse deported. This led him to pore through various national dailies in circulation during the final few months of the year 1962 and the beginning of 1963, which was the duration of the Indo-China border war.

A newspaper archive is a wide palimpsest of memories that are representative of the recorded past of the nation-state. In Anderson’s (1983) classic study of how the idea of nationhood and nationalism spreads and functions, he coined the term ‘imagined community’, which includes a collective culture, ritual practice and literature that are fundamental for people to imagine a community beyond their own families and households. So, how does one imagine having shared values of kinship, language, symbols which are crucial to identity and nationalism? Anderson pointed out that the best possible way that people imagine themselves to be part of a national collective is through the circulation of newspapers, books, journals and other print media. The assumption behind this was that print media are consumed by all. Ultimately Anderson depended on the collective notion of the capitalist production of print media, which is the same for all despite individual diversities.

Anderson’s contribution to the collective notion of state was not just limited to how people ‘imagined’ the nation. Parliament archives, which the author accessed next, were quite telling on how politicians of the Indian state were prejudiced against the Indian–Chinese people. The Lok Sabha sessions were very clear in their anti-Chinese stance, and the border issue was seen as a major security issue. Thus, not only reports in the news but also the Lok Sabha debates archived on the official website of the Lok Sabha, Government of India, are a true testament to how the country felt about the raiding Chinese Army in the Northern and North-Eastern borders of the country.

The mood that was reflected in the news was largely reflective of how the lawmakers also visualized the Indian–Chinese. The debates reveal many expletives that have become synonymous with India–China relations as they have developed over the years. The exception in the case of 1962 was that the words ‘untrustworthy’, ‘deviant’, ‘suspicious’, ‘criminal’ and ‘anti-Indian’ were all being used for the collective diasporic group that had no political or social relations with the PRC or its policies.

Thus, the author was able to piece out how the reports of deportations, surveillance in neighbourhoods and even detention for many in Deoli, Rajasthan—a faraway colonial period prisoner of War camp, which was socially and legally justified. This, supplemented with ethnographic narratives of the lived reality of the 1962 war period, provided the main argument behind the changing notion of ‘belonging’ for the Chinese. It was as if a sharp wedge had been forcibly pushed into their collective notion of citizenship, creating a before and an after akin to many of the refugees of partition of India who never really understood why a sudden territorial division sprung up around their lives.

The author’s third and final set of archival material references came from interactions with the community members themselves. These included their identity documents, passports, permit letters to start registered businesses in the cities of Mumbai and Kolkata and diaries prepared by their own association.

Most of the people who provided this material hesitated to do so when the author began the research in March of 2017. However, by September of that year, using a combination of archival data and ethnographic methods, the author was able to gather narratives of the community’s belonging. In this process, not only was the author able to discuss their present life in the post-1962 period as they lived it, but also their historical belonging in the colonial period till the Indo-China War of 1962. One of the most poignant insights that came out of these interactions was how the present had been shaped by the past.

Nora (1989) discloses that personally used material when treated as archival documents designates ways in which social memories have traces of people’s lives. The locations of social memories are filled with traces of the social lives of people. Government records, personal letters, diaries and even video and audio recordings of personal communication all represent the social setting in which these materials were or are produced. Archives therefore produce an epistemic discourse of past history.

Through personal objects, we establish ownership in various ways; we look for the lost names of individuals, families and even communities (Yale, 2015). Based on Foucault’s (1970) thesis, personal objects connect people to the context in which they were produced or used. Objects therefore represent a means through which such individuals or a community establish entanglements with society. Thus, one can visualize not only a specific memory but also the politics, religious affiliations and dominant beliefs prevalent in society as means to connect with the past. Personal documents which double up as public documents almost always end up as a means to establish their owner's relationship with modern society.

However, linking personal documents to narratives of social memory poses the risk of omissions and wrong connections made between the individual and the social world. Derrida (1996) forewarns archival researchers about the possible ‘violence of the archives’. He states that the practice of archiving began with the psychological need to solidify social memory into what we designate as public memory. Here, social memory is largely focused on how individual stories and recollections of people from the past interact with existing narratives of commemoration. The commemorations could either be public or personal, that is, they could be a memory held by family members of someone who died in war. However, when the same family pays their respects at a cemetery for deceased soldiers of war, then the same social memory becomes a public one.

A Final Assessment

A regular development with the research on archival methods has been how we understand archival research itself. Archival material has taken on new meanings, and we are constantly dealing with an ever-changing stock of it getting digitized. Digitization of archives not only includes private or personal material but also government records. A significant aspect of the process of preparing archival material was rooted in the question of the politics of inclusion and exclusion of such material. Largely, these were dependent on the larger sociopolitical or cultural contexts in which the documents or material had been produced and for whom. If in the past, the questions around archival research revolved around the ethics of publicizing them, presently the question of ethics has shifted to sorting which is authentic and which is not amongst the records we deal with. This is especially important given the nature of the digital domain and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content on the internet, where fiction and reality often intertwine, making it a difficult task to distinguish between the two.

The proliferation of meanings in archives is largely seen by scholars as a symbol or metaphor for the representation of an identity, as a record of memory produced by people of a particular cultural setting. The history of collecting, analysing and making public archival records requires quite a lot of laborious work. There is quite a lack of research on how archives are created, material and data procured, analysed and classified into relevant divisions (Cook, 2011). Archiving involves a perception of difference, that is, the old is different from the current time. Archival research allows us to grapple with viral trends in modern times. It also helps us to better grasp how nation-states are faring under the effects of globalization. It is especially relevant when we want to connect the complexities of the globalized social world wherever it intersects with the local or regional ‘ethnoscapes’ we inhabit (Appadurai, 1990).

In connection with the discussion above about archival methods and the problems of sorting data and the ethics involved, a successful archival research methodology involves a similar approach to ethnographic research. In both cases, we learn to utilize various kinds of archival material, be it public records or personal documents, to substantially answer questions that arise during the course of the research. In the author’s case, he divided his archival material into three types: (a) material present in newspapers, magazines and journals, (b) Government Gazetted Notifications, parliament debates and legal documents and (c) personal documents, including people’s identification cards and others. It allowed him to locate various facets of the community, both in a historical sense and in terms of how the past connects with the present of the Indian–Chinese people.

During the course of research in the archives, the author also faced familiar gatekeeping processes such as access restrictions to the material, making copies of the material and even long waiting periods. This was not only due to governmental restrictions on public records but also to the mistrust that comes from people allowing researchers access to personal documents. While the latter may be accessible once good rapport and trust are built with people, government records may not be accessible at all or only to the extent that the gatekeepers make an exception about the research.

Despite these issues, archives represent a means through which an individual entity or a community and their entanglements with society can be opened up for analysis. This is especially useful for those conducting any kind of research on personal memories of individuals and for those involved in public commemoration, whether on national level or as a shared public memory. Archives, much like a spider web, can tie up many intricate bits and pieces that can then lead us to study these memories as a means to gain insight about a particular period in the past and even answer questions about how such archival research may provide insight about the present. Above all, this is where the archival method is most useful when it comes to challenging established historical narratives.