Scholars find Chinese help for Bengal freedom fighters

KOLKATA: City researchers have recently discovered a forgotten link of the Chinese community’s smuggling of firearms to Bengal freedom fighters in the 1920s, triggering discussions of the lost connection during historic tour walks at Chinatown.

Kolkata-based anthropologist and travel company owner, Chelsea McGill, posted a newspaper clipping from 1926 on her social media pages earlier this month, which detailed the exploits of colonial police officer Charles Tegart in curbing an arms smuggling operation into Calcutta (now Kolkata) by Chinese ship carpenters. “We found the newspaper clipping by searching for the keywords—‘Calcutta’ and ‘Chinese’—in the British newspaper’s archives. “We found that the Chinese community in Calcutta primarily supported Sun Yat Sen’s revolution by sending money and supplies. KMT (Kuomintang) returned the favour after they had defeated the emperor in China,” said McGill. The KMT or Kuomintang, was a National People’s Party, performing as a secret revolutionary party under revolutionary statesman, Sun Yat Sen, in 1894.

Published on September 9, 1926 in the Englishman’s Overland Mail, the news clipping reads, “An interesting resume of police work in Calcutta is given in the Annual Administrative Report for 1925 by Sir Charles Tegart...some daring attempts to smuggle arms to revolutionaries are described in the report...” “The newspaper report sees him (Tegart) trying to curb attempts by the Calcutta Chinese community to smuggle in arms sent by Chiang Kai Shek of China to aid Bengali freedom fighters,” McGill, who included this snippet as a regular feature in her company’s Chinatown heritage walk, added.

“Most of the Chinese community elders passed away without much documented history. I have not heard of this while growing up,” said Chen Yao Hua, president of the Chinese Association of India. In 2016, Burdwan scholar Arpita Bose accessed intelligence reports from the West Bengal State Archives to publish ‘The Kuomintang in India with Special Reference to Calcutta (1900-1962)’ in Sage Publications. “General Li-Hich Chun contacted Bipin Ganguly in 1914 to assure him of the supply of arms. Chinese arms smugglers supplied arms to the members of Anushilan Samiti, the most active revolutionary group in Bengal. KMT members also visited SN Tagore and Nalini Ranjan Gupta to discuss the possibility of smuggling arms from China to India,” Bose’s study reads.