Archival Afterlives and Ethnographic Musings: Calcutta’s Tiretta Bazaar Chinatown in the Past and Present

This article explores the different historical representations of the Tiretta Bazaar Chinatown in central Calcutta (now Kolkata). Once the main residential and commercial hub for the city’s Chinese community, it hosted shoemakers, carpenters, dentists, restaurateurs and practitioners of traditional medicine. Situated in the colonial city’s liminal ‘grey town’ between the ‘black’ and ‘white’ towns, it functioned as an interconnected enclave shaped by migrant labour, transnational networks and everyday sociability. Today, however, Chinatown is often perceived—even by Indian–Chinese residents who remain in Calcutta—as a space of the ‘Other’, reflecting deep social and spatial distancing from its past. However, rather than viewing Chinatown as an isolated space, as the vast majority of the archival material also does, I argue that it is a deeply connected area. These connections are shaped by the imaginative and material practices of the Indian–Chinese in Chinatown today.