Mandarin graffiti anchor Tangra’s familiar poll ritual

KOLKATA: On Thursday afternoon, Tangra witnessed a familiar election season ritual: men moved through the neighbourhood with paint buckets and brushes, covering walls with campaign slogans, much like elsewhere in Kolkata ahead of the polls. But in this pocket of east Kolkata—home to over 1,000 Chinese residents—the words stood out. They were written not in Bengali. They were in Mandarin.

The unusual campaign scene unfolded in Tangra’s historic Chinatown, where members of the Chinese community painted political graf-fiti in support of Trinamool Congress’s Kasba candidate, Javed Ahmed Khan, for the April 29 assembly election.





In a city where wall graffiti remains a significant feature of electioneering, Tangra offered a version shaped by its own cultural identity.

Part of KMC’s ward 66, Tangra is known as much for its Chinese eateries as for the community that has lived here for generations. Though far smaller than it once was, Kolkata’s Chinese population continues to maintain a visible presence in the neighbourhood — through celebrations of Chinese New Year and its rows of eateries — and that identity finds reflection in the campaign slogans on the walls.

Steven Lee, a Tangra resident, said he and his friends have been writing wall graffi-ti in Mandarin for nearly a decade. “We’ve been doing political graffiti for the past 10 years. Our association with Javed uncle goes back decades — our families knew each other from the days when Tangra still had its tanneries,” Lee said. His family was traditionally involved in the tannery business.

The slogans painted across Tangra’s walls included familiar campaign phrases such as “Joy Bangla” and “Khela Hobe,” but rendered in Mandarin script rather than the Bengali typically se-en elsewhere in the city.

In Tangra, residents said, the use of Chinese in political messaging carried significance beyond electioneering. “The community feels secure and reassured by such gestures. It shows our representatives are not oblivious to us. Messaging in Chinese suggests they want to communicate with us in our own language,” said Mark Wong , another resident who took part in the painting.

Most of the Chinese residents still living in Tangra today are fourthor fifth-generation Kolkatans. Their roots in the city run deep, through trades such as leather, shoemaking and food.

The city’s Chinese population, estimated at nearly one lakh in the 1960s and 1970s, has dwindled to only a few thousand. The decline began after the 1962 Sino-Indian war, when many families felt alienated and migrated. Another wave of migration in the 1980s took families to countries such as Australia and Canada in search of better opportunities. Later, the closure and relocation of Tangra’s tanneries further dwindled their numbers.

While campaigning among local residents, Khan described Kasba as a constituency shaped by diversity. “My constituency is like a mini India, with people from different parts of the country and different languages and cultures living here. Kasba is also a microcosm of Bengal, where everyone lives peacefully,” said Khan, who was present when the wall graffiti was being written. He later campaigned among the Chinese community.