Boats get ready for Dragon Boat Festival in Calcutta Boating and Hotel Resorts, East Topsia Road, on  June 5, 2022 in Kolkata, India. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

NEW DELHI – A mood of festivity returned among the sizable Chinese community living in Kolkata, the capital of India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as a happy crowd gathered in the past week to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival.

As part of the festivities, more than 1,500 people assembled at the Calcutta Boating and Hotel Resort on June 5 for celebrations organized in collaboration with the India-China Cultural Development Association.

Dragon Boat Festival, one of the oldest traditional festivals in the world, is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth Chinese lunar month. In Kolkata, the Chinese community celebrates the festival every year with a slew of events, including a Dragon Boat Race, a series of lion dances and cultural performances. This year, the festival returned after a two-year hiatus due to COVID restrictions.

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Kolkata celebrates the festival with a daylong festival of food, art and cultural events and a beautiful boat race. Every year it is quite a sight to see the fast and furious race. Narrow boats with ferocious dragon heads slice across a lake.

Other community members also help us to organize the festival, and today it is a unified festival. Robert Hsu, Organizer of Dragon Boat Festival celebrations in Kolkata

The festival is marked by community gatherings and enthusiastic consumption of steamed rice dumplings cooked with meat, peanuts and other ingredients and wrapped in green leaves bound with string.

Every year the boat race has five teams competing against one another across the lake. The teams have seven members each, comprising youths of Chinese descent and their friends.

The boats are prow-designed to look like a dragon’s head, the rear is carved to look like the tail. One person sitting in the front beats a drum to encourage others and keep time for rowers, while the rest of the team works the oars.

The festival includes eating zongzi, or Chinese sticky rice dumplings that are a traditional food for the special occasion.

“This is an important festival for people of Chinese descent," said Robert Hsu, who has been involved in organizing the Dragon Boat Festival celebrations in Kolkata for many years.

“Our first Dragon Boat Festival was organized in 2015, supported by The Indian Chinese Association, without any boat,” said Hsu, from a third-generation Chinese immigrant family in Kolkata.

“In 2017, we received our first five dragon boats from China, gifted by the then Chinese consul-general in Kolkata,” he said.

“Other community members also help us to organize the festival, and today it is a unified festival,” Hsu added.

China’s current consul-general in Kolkata, Zha Liyou, inaugurated the Dragon Boat Festival last week, saying the celebrations are live testimony to the remarks of Chinese leaders that “China and India don't pose threat to each other but provide development opportunity to each other”.

"We should be able to draw inspiration from our civilizations, identify and tell our good stories, great stories, success stories and stories of compassion to be shared by the billions of Chinese and Indians, just as we are doing now," he said.

Zha’s office has put in whole-hearted efforts to promotion of Sino-Indian friendship, and the consul-general said he has witnessed similar sentiments being returned from all the friends gathered at the festival.

“The festival has wider significance in today’s world. It sounds like a parable of our times,” said Fang Chung, a third-generation Chinese living in Tangra, a Kolkata neighborhood that has been a hub of the Chinese community in the city since 1910.

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“This is an unforgettable experience. We are delighted to make the event a grand success after two years of COVID restrictions,” a member of The Indian Chinese Association said.   

The return of dragon boat festivities has also delighted small businesses operating in the area.

One of the teams at the Dragon Boat Festival in Kolkata, India on June 5, 2022. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

“It’s good for various parties, including visitors. There will be lively scenes here again,” said Amir Ali, owner of a small bakery selling traditional Cantonese pastries in Tangra.

The event this year was held against the backdrop of steady development of China-India relations and fast growth of exchanges and cooperation after China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, paid a visit to New Delhi in March.

Chinese migration to Kolkata started in the late 18th century, according to scholars Jayati Bhattacharya and Coonoor Kripalani, who conducted extensive research on the Chinese community in Kolkata.

Right from the days of the scholars Huen Tsang and Fa Hein, the Chinese were coming to India and some of them stayed and made India their home. The Chinese in India trace their historical origin to a sailor-merchant who arrived in Calcutta (the former name of Kolkata) in the late 18th century, according to historians.

The Chinese community in Kolkata was thriving at one time, with some estimates putting their numbers at 70,000 at its high. Most of them immigrated in the 19th and 20th centuries, when India was under British colonial rule.

Now, the Indian Chinese population of Kolkata numbers around 2,000, though there is no official count, said Hsu.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.