Sauces, Spices and Immigration: The Genesis of Kolkata’s Chinese Cuisine
By Toonika Guha
Territy Bazaar is home to Kolkata’s old Chinatown. While some of the food items here are considered typically Chinese, sesame balls and dumplings give way to Indo-Chinese dishes like pakoras and Tibetan momos. Photo by Aanya O’Brien.
Nestled in the bylanes of Kolkata’s Tangra, or new Chinatown, are many small restaurants, some nameless, that serve up noodles coated in lard for breakfast. Here, breakfast is believed to closely resemble Hakka flavors.
YouTuber Trevor James, who goes by The Food Ranger, talks in one of his videos about how when he travelled to Calcutta right after a visit to China, he almost felt like he was back in China. While the flavors may be reminiscent of traditional Chinese cooking, this isn’t the Chinese food that the people of Kolkata know and recognize. And yet, the wontons are sold as “singhara noodles” here, using the Bengali word for samosas to familiarize the locals with the concept of wontons.
In another part of town, before the pandemic, the streets of Kolkata’s Territy Bazar came alive every morning with the smells and sounds of its famous Chinese food market at the old Chinatown. Between the early hours of six and nine, the small street would teem with activity as vendors would hawk Chinese delights to locals and tourists alike. From steaming baos to momos to wontons to spring rolls, every morning would be a food festival on these streets.
While some of the food items here are considered typically Chinese, sesame balls and dumplings give way to Indo-Chinese dishes like pakoras and Tibetan momos. As the day wears on, one can see the stalls manned by people from the Chinese community dwindle, only to be replaced by vegetable and kochuri (a Bengali breakfast food) stalls. Although many consider the market to have deteriorated in its standards long before the pandemic swept across the world, this mish-mash of cultures and cuisines is, at the heart of it, the story of Chinese food in Kolkata, and by extension India.
It’s not just these two markets where one finds Chinese food. If you take a walk down any main road in Kolkata, it’s hard to miss the street food joints that dot it. Kolkatans love their snacks and street food, and many dishes are unique to the city. One of the most popular cuisines for adaptation is Chinese food, or what we know to be Chinese food. Almost every neighborhood and street corner has its own resident chow mein seller, banging woks and pans to serve up an Indian versions of popular Chinese dishes.
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According to food writer Indrajit Lahiri, better known as Foodka, the Chinese community first came to Bengal in the 18th century, when a Chinese merchant by the name of Tom Ah Chew received a land grant from then-Governor General Warren Hastings to start a business in Achipur or Ichapur. He established a sugar refinery, intertwining the business of sugar with the Chinese community in India forever, since sugar is referred to as cheeni in Bengali and Hindi, a word associated with the Chinese population, although now considered to be racist in many contexts. It is believed that Ah Chew had little success in his business of international trade before he moved to Bengal, and his sugar refinery met with a similar fate. When the refinery shut down, many of his employees, most of whom were from the Guandong province of China, moved to the closest city, which was the capital of the British empire in India. And thus, the Cantonese population came to be in Calcutta, settling in the old Chinatown of Territi Bazaar.
The Hakka population came to Kolkata in the 19th century in a few installments, due to several wars and a rebellion. In the early 20th century, parts of the populace left Territy Bazar to establish a new Chinatown in the Topsia area of Kolkata that is now referred to as Tangra.
While the Chinese population thrived for a while in these areas, it was not without strife. In the mid-1900s, for example, after the Sino-Indian Wars many people from the community were deported to the Deoli region of Rajasthan, due to deep-seated suspicion on the part of the government and public. The Deoliwalahs by Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza takes a deep and sensitive dive into the lives of these deportees during their time in Deoli, where Joy herself was born.
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According to owner Dominic Lee, the green chili sauce that is an integral part of some Kolkata Chinese dishes was first created by his grandfather, the original proprietor of Pou Chong Brothers. Photo by Aanya O’Brien.
One of the most significant products of this intermingling of cultures has been the genesis and growing popularity of Indian Chinese cuisine. According to Dominic Lee, a fourth-generation owner of Pou Chong Brothers, one of Kolkata’s most famous Chinese sauce companies, when the Chinese community first settled in Kolkata, some of them set up small restaurants for their own community. Over time, these establishments began to attract locals too, so they adapted the food to cater to a wider audience, using local ingredients in their dishes.
While some of the dishes seem Chinese in name, their flavors are believed to be very different from what one might find in mainland China. For example, many vegetarian Chinese dishes in India feature paneer, which is an ingredient that is unique to Indian cooking. Further, if one were to order a schezwan dish in India, it would almost never contain Sichuan peppercorns but instead tomatoes and dried red chiles. The chili chicken, a Kolkata staple, is very different from what one would get in any part of China. Lee recalls a trip that he took to China, where he ordered a “chili chicken” dish, but instead of the soya sauce and green chile doused dish that he is familiar with, he ended up with an extremely spicy plate of food that had a lot of red chiles.
The chow mein sold on every Kolkata street corner, too, is a unique dish. Made with Indian-Chinese sauces, spices, green chiles and ajinomoto, it is often served up with a topping of chopped raw cucumbers, onions and frequently beets (referred to as “salad” by the locals).
According to Lee from Pou Chong, the green chili sauce that is an integral part of this dish was first created by his grandfather, the original proprietor of Pou Chong Brothers. The thick green chili sauce is not just an important component of the street style chow mein, but it’s generously used in other Indo-Chinese dishes like chili chicken, chili paneer and more, with a dash of chopped green chiles in many cases. Although chiles were introduced in India in the 16th century by the Portuguese, the abundant use of green chiles is an Indian cooking tradition that’s become an integral part of Indo-Chinese food.
Lee believes that the tangy taste that is associated with Kolkata’s famous kathi rolls is from the kind of chili sauces that were originally introduced to the city by his grandfather over 60 years ago.
“When my father established Pou Chong Brothers, many establishments started using our sauces,” he says. “Locals who came to work in these establishments learnt the use of these sauces from the shops. Soon both these workers and the public understood how tasty these sauces are and started to add them to their kathi rolls.”
Now, almost all roll stalls serve their dishes with a heavy dose of tomato and chili sauces, and in many cases, the brand that they use is Pou Chong. This exchange of culture between these sauces and food doesn’t end here. Today, Pou Chong Brothers also sells kasundi, a traditional Bengali mustard sauce, proudly alongside their Indo-Chinese sauces, gaining just as much recognition for this product.
Today, the green chili sauce (there’s even a popular red variant) is a staple in Indo-Chinese food across India. While Pou Chong largely remains constrained to sales within Kolkata due to a smaller distribution network, bigger brands such as Chings, Weikfield and Delmonte now sell varying versions of the green chili sauce. Yet, the demand for Pou Chong remains strong due to its signature flavor and texture. For people who have grown up in Kolkata, like me, this flavor is associated with the Chinese food of our childhood.
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If the old Chinatown of Territy Bazar, home to the Pou Chong Brothers, is the original Chinatown of Kolkata, across town in Tangra, the newer Chinatown houses some of the more famous Chinese family-run restaurants, such as Big Boss, Golden Joy, Beijing and more.
According to Jeffery Liao, one of the owners of Golden Joy, an establishment that makes its own unique cooking and dipping sauces, the community has adapted the food that they sell and it has very little connection to China. The flavors have been adjusted to suit the local palate, using spices and ingredients that are locally available.
In fact, the dishes have been adapted in such a way that even within India, Chinese offerings often differ. The golden fried prawns, which is one of Golden Joy’s more popular dishes, is difficult to find in the same shape and form outside Kolkata. The honey chili potato, a popular street food in Delhi NCR, is a dish that one would rarely find in either of Kolkata’s Chinatowns.
“We don’t see ourselves as just Chinese,” Liao says. “We are very much Indian. So the food we serve is also a mixture.”
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While many, including Lee and Liao, believe that Kolkata is the birthplace of Indo-Chinese cuisine, food critic Vir Sanghvi says it was Golden Dragon and House of Ming by the Taj group of Hotels in Bombay and Delhi respectively, where the more popular and recognizable form of the cuisine was born. He refers to this as Sino-Ludianvi cuisine, although it is colloquially referred to as Chinjabi (Chinese plus Punjabi) food now.
Like most food and drinks businesses, both of Kolkatas Chinatowns have been affected badly by the pandemic. Although many restaurants are reopening now, many establishments in these regions remain closed due to health concerns. Even the bustling Territy Bazar market is a mere shadow of its former self.
While the Coronavirus, racist attitudes and escalating tensions between India and China have not always made for the best conditions for the Chinese community, the food, which is now “as Chinese as rogan josh,” according to Sanghvi, is still very popular and continues to win hearts across India.
There were reports of people abstaining from eating Chinese food early this year, due to imagined associations with the coronavirus. One post on a popular Indian food bloggers group said that due to strained Indo-China relations, they would be blocking posts made by any members from China. Both Liao and Lee, however, say they have not seen such attitudes among customers, many of whom still remain loyal.
“I have personally faced a lot of racism as a person from a Chinese background,” Liao recalls. “Growing up, in school I was often the only Chinese boy in the class, and I’d get called all sorts of things. During the pandemic, while we haven't faced racism from our customers in the restaurant, I have faced it personally. I have had people call me ‘corona’ on the streets. But I don’t take it to heart anymore since I have faced it many times. Further, I know that the people who are calling me ‘corona’ don’t know any better due to lack of awareness.”
Both Lee and Liao acknowledge that business is bad due to coronavirus, but they believe that it has more to do with the fear of venturing out at all. And they may be right in assuming that India’s love for Indo-Chinese food is here to stay, if all the social media posts about homemade Indo-Chinese food are to be believed.
