Eating at Tiretti Bazaar's Sunday Breakfast Market

Kolkata is the only city in India that boasts of not one, but two, Chinatowns. Athena David explores the unique culture of Kolkata’s Indian-Chinese community, beginning with Sunday breakfast at Tiretti Bazaar.

It is early morning in Kolkata, and Sun-Yat Sen street in Tiretti Bazaar is immersed in a sea of white fog. The street is lined with dilapidating colonial buildings that can barely be seen at this hour. Clinging to the shopfronts are the signboards of businesses housed within — furniture shops, sauce factories, butcher shops and noodle shops — lettered in Bengali, Hindi, English and Chinese. Below, dotting the pavement, vendors sell colourful fruit, seasonal vegetables and the best catch of fish from the river Hooghly.

Beside the vendors, hawkers have set up bright, makeshift stalls — fiery and steaming, with items that are particular to Tiretti Bazaar. Locals and tourists arrive early on Sunday morning to partake in an experience unique to Kolkata — the Sunday Breakfast Market at Chinatown.

Kolkata is the only city in India that boasts of not one, but two, Chinatowns. The first and oldest, is centrally located in Tiretti Bazaar, and the younger Chinatown on the outskirts of the city, in Tangra, a locality that has become famous for its tanneries and restaurants. Despite Tangra being the more popular Chinatown between the two, the old Chinatown or ‘Cheenapara’ as the locals call it, will always be acknowledged as the first Chinese settlement in Kolkata, where the earliest ancestors of the Indian-Chinese community established a thriving base, dating back more than two centuries.

Dim sums at the Sunday Breakfast Market | Image by Farha Kazi

“There are so few of us now that most people don’t know about the Indian Chinese community here, let alone the two Chinatowns of our community,” says Robert Hsu, a member of the Indian Chinese Association. “The first of our elders arrived in this city, worked hard and built homes, lives and identities for themselves and their children here so many years ago.”

The Old Chinatown at Tiretti, unlike most Chinatowns around the world, has no gate to mark the neighbourhood. Elsewhere, the Chinese community typically constructs a paifang, an ornamental gate with an inflexed archway, that serves as a landmark for Chinatown. But the Old Chinatown in Kolkata shares public space with, and continues into, neighbouring areas that bear the mark of different immigrant communities that have also settled in Kolkata — there is the red bricks of Bow Barracks signalling India’s Anglo-Indian heritage; the Armenian church that stands proudly not so far away, and the Parsi Temple of Fire that bears the mark of a rich Persian community that settled in Tiretti Bazaar. Within the cornered alleyways of Tiretti Bazaar and its surrounding streets, lies a sense of shared community, where nothing stands truly isolated. Together, they make up an area that was once called ‘Grey Town’ by British colonisers.

‘Grey Town’, was not a reference to the physical appearance of the Bazaar, nor to the rainy Kolkata skies, but to its placement between ‘Black Town’— the Indian quarter that lay in the north, and ‘White Town’– home to European settlers, in the south. Tiretti Bazaar, named after its Italian founder, Edward Tiretta, a Surveyor of Lands under British employ, became a flourishing commercial centre and an integral part of Grey Town. If Black Town was the Indian quarter and the White town, European, then Grey Town, with a strong immigrant population of Armenians, Greeks, Portuguese, Parsis, and Chinese, could be called the multicultural quarter of Kolkata.

A port city, Kolkata was a prestigious centre of trade, its access to East Asia only adding to its allure. Such an advantageous location resulted in traders establishing new ventures in the city, the most notable of which was the British East India Company, who chose Kolkata to be its capital in 1772.

It was during this time, that the Chinese settler Yong Tai Chow arrived in the Bengal Presidency; a trader noted as the first recorded Chinese settler in India. With support from Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, he set up a sugar mill in Budge Budge, with several Chinese workers in his employ. Though he passed away a few years after the construction of the sugar plantation, at what is now known as Achipur, his legacy is alive in the word used for sugar in Bengali — ‘chini.’

The settlement of Achipur laid the initial foundation upon which many Chinese entered the Bengal Presidency. Fifty years later, by 1820, the British East India Company began to establish tea plantations in India, in a bid to overthrow China as the largest tea-traders in the market, to establish the largest monopoly on tea. To this end, many Chinese workers were brought in to serve as tea planters in the green, hilly regions of the North-East, specifically Darjeeling and Assam, in addition to the traders and ship workers that had already arrived in the port cities. As more and more Chinese arrived into Kolkata, the need for a community and cultural space became evident. Chinatowns were formed in areas that were densely populated by the community — China-Patti in Makum, Assam, Chinatown in Mumbai, and Cheenapara in Kolkata.

The principal communities that began to emigrate to India were the Cantonese, Hakka and Hupei communities, primarily from the Southern part of China. A large majority of the population settled in Tiretti Bazaar, and started their own businesses. The Cantonese, gifted craftsmen, took up jobs in carpentry and furniture; the Hupei became well known as dentists; many of the Hakka took up jobs as shoemakers, and opened up their own leather businesses, as well as restaurants. Much of the Indian-Chinese community continue to practice the same professions as their families did, until recent years.

Old Chinatown was a world of its own — containing temples of ancient gods, noodle factories, dormitories for future settlers to live in, until they made a life for themselves; sauce shops that used traditional methods of fermentation, provision stores with products from Hong Kong and China; leather factories that provided custom-made leather for the shoe shops; Chinese-language schools for children to learn both aspects of their identity. Many started their own printing presses, for the elders of the community, written mainly in the Han script. There is even a street named after Dr.Sun Yat Sen, the Father of Modern China. Chinatown created an ecosystem for a self-sustaining community, in which they were able to equally nurture both parts of their identity — Chinese and Indian.

Central to this community at Tiretti, is the Sunday Breakfast Market. Like most immigrant communities who find that food is an active and tangible way to preserve culture, the Indian-Chinese of Kolkata set up stalls selling dishes that were once only known to its own. But since then, the open-street market piqued the interest of passers-by, and with time, the larger city began to look forward to Sunday morning breakfast at Chinatown. Food became a bridge between the two communities.

Sunday Breakfast Market | Image by Farha Kazi

However, it is all a matter of timing. At the wrong hour, Tiretti Bazaar is like any other market in Kolkata, and since Sun Yat Sen street is near Poddar Court and other commercial offices, the road is used for parking for most of the day. But at the right hour (those in the know will arrive at 5:30 on Sunday morning),the market comes alive for a breakfast feast in a bustling market, and then disappears before sunrise, till the Sunday next.

The inspiration behind all the dishes here is rooted the traditional Chinese dim sum. Dim sum, or dim-saam, is often misunderstood as a dish in and of itself, but it is in fact, a style of Chinese cuisine that follows the practice of serving a variety of bite-sized dishes, such as dumplings, rolls, and tiny desserts, as accompaniments to be had with tea. Historically, dim sum was served in the local tea houses of the Guangdong province in South China, where travellers along the Silk Route would stop for a bit of tea and rest. Through time, the tradition of dim sum became an integral part of family gatherings. Later, it even became commonplace for people to stop by a tea-house for a hearty meal of dim sum in the early hours of the morning, before leaving for work. Dim sum is, therefore, an active part of the tradition and lifestyle of people in China.

This tradition continues at the Breakfast Market to this day, kept alive by the Indian-Chinese at Tiretti. However, dim sum is served not in tea houses, but in the open air market, where customers and passers-by can stroll through the market and choose from a wide variety of dishes, with an accompaniment of ‘cha,’ both the Bengali and the Chinese word for tea.

Local residents waiting in line for food | Goya Journal | Image by Farha Kazi

“It has been this way for so long. Our childhood is filled with memories of Tiretti, and of course, Fat Mama! Everybody remembers Fat Mama,” says Dorthy Ah-Yi, a Kolkatan who has rarely missed the Breakfast Market at Tiretti Bazaar.

Fat Mama, or ‘phi bho’ (phi rhymes with chai), was a lady that cut a larger-than-life figure in the community. Fat Mama ran a food stall at Tiretti Bazaar between the ‘50s and ‘70s, and the food she prepared is said to have been unlike any other, with people returning for refills.

Her specialties were fish dumplings and glass-noodle soup, boiled and salted noodles poured into a steaming fish and vegetable broth; chicken julienne served along with stir-fried noodles; prawn wafers or prawn papad — crisp, white, salted wafers, thinly lined by a deep pink colour along its edges, and zongzi — sticky white rice, wrapped in green banana leaves that she wrapped in old copies of The Statesman, a hat-tip to the the ‘Old Lady of Chowringhee’, as the newspaper was known.

All these dishes could be purchased for as little as ‘char-annas’, but their taste is remembered as inimitable. Ranjan Smith, an old-time Kolkatan whose father would take him to eat at Fat Mama’s says, "I remember waiting in a crowd for Fat Mama’s noodles. When we first reached the market, the benches were a biscuit colour, but the crowds were so dense, that by the time we finally got to sitting down, the benches had gone from biscuit-coloured to jet-black!"

Fat Mama is no more, but her legacy continues; many vendors in the bazaar sell the same dishes she once did. There are newer additions of course, such as toufu kok, a meatball soup with filling of minced fish and pork, topped with soy sauce and spring onions. The unique dishes of Tiretti are primarily cooked in one of two ways — fried in 'dekchis' as the locals say, or in metal steamers that vendors flamboyantly open every so often, to release a trail of fragrant steam that mingles with the morning mist.

There is mee kou pan, sesame balls, yeow ctza kui, haam sueen peng and panteras — fried, savoury dishes with meat stuffing, coated in rice flour or breadcrumbs, and fried in bubbling oil, till it takes on an inviting golden crumb. Steamed foods include bao zi’s, small bites of baos (steamed buns) with a variety of fillings. There are also cha siu bao, and siu mai — buns stuffed with ground or barbequed pork, and tai pao, which is twice the normal size of a regular bao, with a similar filling.

The Sunday Breakfast Market is perhaps one of the few ways in which the Kolkata-Chinese represents themselves through food, and interact with other communities. In an effort to promote the market, to help community and local stakeholders of the market to take pride in their heritage, the Community Art Project composed a song called ‘Cheenapara — where food and communities meet,’ which documents the variety of dishes served at the Sunday Breakfast Market.

Almost imperceptibly, the people and buildings significant to the community have begun to disappear. Hap Hing and Co., No.10 on Sun Yat Sen Street, for the longest time, was the most popular landmark at Tiretti – known for its rich brown interiors, unchanged for decades, complete with bright red Chinese calendars on the walls, and yellowing tubelights that illuminate curios on glass shelves. To many tourists, this was the first glimpse of life at Chinatown, given its placement in the heart of the bustling market. Here, they would learn of Chinatown from Su Lan or Stella Chen, the proprietor of the store. Within the community, Stella’s was the go-to for Chinese provisions and medicines, dried Chinese mushrooms, Haw wafers, orange peels, red rice, and other ingredients specially ordered for the community.

“The shop used to be run by Stella’s father before her, and they would order all the traditional ingredients from either China or Hong Kong. Times were different then,” says Dorthy Ah-yi. “I remember how all the ladies of the community would meet up for jasmine tea from Hong Kong and gossip about the community’s happenings over tea sessions,” she laughs. Thomas Chen, a singer and composer, adds, “my mother would take me there to feed me Haam Sui Mui, or salted plums, which are always good to eat when you have a sick tummy.” But now, both Stella and Hap Hing are no more. The shop has shut down, and with it, a century’s worth of memories of a beloved cultural landmark.

But there are other landmarks that still occupy cultural space in Chinatown, in the interiors of Tiretti. In Blackburn lane, one is immediately confronted by a majestic two-storied brick-red building with a large balcony, from which more than one celebrity from a different era has waved to fans below. This was Nanking, a restaurant founded in 1924 by the Au family, and believed to be the oldest restaurant serving authentic Chinese food in Kolkata. Nanking was a favourite with the crème de la crème of Kolkata society.

Nanking’s fame and success inspired the opening of other Nankings in different parts of the country, most notably the Nankings in Hyderabad and Mumbai, both of which served the same dishes so beloved in Kolkata. The Nanking in Mumbai was joined by Luko, Flora, and Fredericks, that together made up the five original Chinese restaurants of Mumbai, offering the first experience of a cuisine that was novel to the city.

The difference in cuisines was ultimately bridged with the creation of the Chicken Manchurian, an invention by Nelson Wang in the ‘70s. It was at Fredericks, a Chinese restaurant in Colaba, that Nelson Wang, an Indian-Chinese resident from Kolkata, began his career as a chef.

As one of the city’s more well-known restaurants, Fredericks catered to a famous clientele, from film stars to cricket players. One day, Raj Singh Dungarpur, who was president of BCCI and of Cricket Club India at the time, placed a catering order with Fredericks. Nelson Wang stepped in, and grabbed the opportunity to cater for the prestigious party at CCI. Wang experimented with Indian and Chinese flavours to create dishes that fused the complementary flavours of both cuisines. The result was unlike anything his guests had tasted before. With Indian spices and Chinese sauces, Nelson Wang created the Chicken Manchurian, a dish that was an instant hit.

Mumbai saw several iterations of the Chicken Manchurian, the most famous of which was the Gobi Manchurian, a recipe that substituted chicken with cauliflower, to please vegetarian diners, catapulting it to cult status. Gobi Manchurian became to Bombay what chilli chicken is to Kolkata.

Nelson Wang gained favour with the high-society of Mumbai, and eventually went on to open his own restaurant, China Garden, where both Chicken Manchurian and Gobi Manchurian were served alongside Gin Chicken and Chicken Lollipop. Although neither Chinese nor Indian, he added Date Pancakes and Darsaan-Vanilla Ice-Cream with Honey-Glazed Fried Noodles as dessert options on his menu — and these remain favourites at many Chinese restaurants across India even today.

The success of Nelson Wang and his restaurant was a significant achievement, given the political climate in the post-war years of the ‘70s. It is also telling of two things — the resilience of the community and the love that Indians have for Indian-Chinese cuisine (or simply ‘Chinese’ cuisine, as it is known to us).

Back in Kolkata, Nanking has been replaced by Eau Chew. On the floor above was Toong On church, visited every Sunday by the Christians of the Indian-Chinese community. There are several temples to be found in Tiretti. These temples also serve as clubs, inside which members sit around Mah-jongg tables brightly lit by low-hanging lights, snacking on samosas and snacks from the market, with the incessant gong of temple bells in the background. Some are reading The Overseas Chinese Commerce of India or Seong Pow, the only Mandarin newspaper in India, written in the traditional Han script, that was kept alive by the singular efforts of KT Chang, who passed away last year.

Ming Tung Hsieh, author of A Lost Tribe says “The clubs have always been the main cultural centre where the community meets. But as the population of the community decreased during war time, so did the members of our clubs. Our way of life was forever changed after 1962.”

It began in small numbers, in the years that led to the war. Indian-Chinese citizens were picked up and put in local jails. No one from the community could believe they were being looked at with suspicious or mistrust; nor could they believe an internment camp was being prepared. They were, after all, ordinary citizens who had lived their whole lives here. Indian citizens of Chinese origin, of all ages and states of health, were taken away – infants, along with their parents, children taken in their school uniforms, sickly elders and pregnant women — to Deoli in Rajasthan.

“There is no word for what Deoli was to the community… In Chinese, we refer to the internment phase of our lives as chi chung yin, or gathered-together camp,” writes Hsieh. The sudden displacement and shift in reality proved to be too much trauma for most; together with such deep humiliation in a land they considered home, many died in the local jails, if not on the trains to Deoli. Many died within the barbed wires of the camp, under the scorching, unfamiliar heat of Rajasthan, with little hope of returning to life before the war. They were buried in the sand by family or friends, alongside other prisoners of war. Close to 3,000 were interred.

Life inside the camp was cruel; an entire community confined to a life with ingredients and food that were unfit for consumption. Occasional comfort came through a family member from the outside who would send noodles or zong-zi, a memory from back home. But there was also terrible uncertainty, because there was no knowing that family on the outside wouldn’t get arrested, or be deported back to China.

Life outside the camp proved to be as difficult. People lived in constant dread of one sound: the midnight knock on the door. The community was under constant watch; Chinatown at Tangra was sealed and freedom of movement was a thing of the past.

Eventually, after years of incarceration, some emerged from the camps, only to realise that their lives had been irrevocably altered. Their properties had been seized, and there was very little in terms of acceptance from neighbours in such a fraught climate. But in a show of great resilience, the community crawled back to their feet; children who could return to their education completed their studies; those who lost jobs put their skills to use and acquired employment and built their lives again, slowly reintegrating into their hometown. The community worked hard, constantly having to prove their identity, casting aside both pride and hurt.

There were hardly any celebrations during those difficult years. And they didn’t resume until much later, after it was more or less certain that those unlucky years were behind them. “I had never experienced Chinese New Year until we came out,” says Joy Ma, author of The Deoliwallahs, who was born in the camp. “It was only a few years after coming out of there, did I realise how important it is to the community, and how much fun it is. There was no such celebration inside the camp, but I do remember relatives would sometimes send New Year cookies to us.”

Chinese New Year is the most anticipated festival of the community. Festivities go on for five days of the first week of the New Year. Chow-mein is served at the Kali Temple at Tangra, dance troupes perform routines they have prepared for all year; Tiretti Bazaar is filled with bok choy and lettuce leaves, a favourite of the dragon, who visits each house during the week and accepts this as offering.

The people wait for the dragon to arrive with its rumbling tummy, to bless them. There is a lion dance that recounts ancient myths, accompanied by the drums to signify the lion’s roar. People from all neighbourhoods come to attend the festivities that end with fireworks at Tiretti. Houses are scrubbed clean, and filled with an abundance of mandarin oranges, neatly assembled to inaugurate the New Year. Oranges represent gold, and the more oranges in your home, the more luck for your New Year. Visits are made to the temples at Tiretti, where prayers are offered for good health and prosperity, and remembrance of ancestors. And finally, respects are paid at the place where it all began — the temple at Achipur, on a boat ride as pilgrimage, to give thanks to the founding father of the community.

In the years after the war, many left the country to make a fresh start elsewhere. The largest population migrated to Canada, and like their ancestors before them, opened restaurants in their new hometowns. But this time, their cuisine and roots were Indian-Chinese.

“These restaurants are very popular abroad, and is probably the only place where Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis are united — over their love for desi Chinese food, as they call it there,” says Dominic Lee.

In Canada, the community once again formed their own institutions. The Overseas Indian Chinese Association is an important feature of their new lives abroad, and shared food, language and love for film unites them. The community often meets for ‘cha’ and ‘adda’ in the same way that they did in India, with interactions fuelled by samosas and chaat. “Despite everything that happened to us, my father never lost his love for jabelis, samosas and jhal mudi. Despite his health, he still loves the food from back home,” shares Joy Ma.

The Indian-Chinese have come a long way from where their ancestors began. Many left the country, carrying bitter memories of the war; and within India, the community is rapidly diminishing — and with them, India loses an important thread of its diverse cultural fabric. In new home countries around the world, many still pine for Chinatown, and memories of Fat Mama’s glass noodles in the narrow gullies and bylanes of Tiretti Bazaar. In his award-winning documentary ‘The Legend of Fat Mama,’ Mr.Rafeeq Ellias holds on to these collective memories, “Fat Mama is no more. But she is probably up there in a Chinatown above, still making those heavenly noodles. And the Chinese, like trams in Kolkata, are going, going, going, but not gone.”

Banner image credit Rafeeq Ellias.
Athena David is a final year student of history who writes about the origins of food. You can follow her work here.

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