HOME TRUTH: Leather processing is inextricably linked to the lives of the Chinese

For the uninitiated whose knowledge of the Chinese is limited to the menu cards of restaurants, Hakka is a dry and burnt brown variety of noodles. Actually, the Hakkas are a Chinese minority group with a unique language and age-old customs. The word "hakka" means guest and the migration of this outgoing group in the 19th century created Chinatowns in most big cities of the New World-San Francisco, New York, Chicago. And in Kolkata too. Their numbers in the east Indian metropolis swelled to around 11,000 after Independence until the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict halted immigration.

Now after 30 years, the 5,000-odd Chinese in Kolk ata, who constitute well over 90 per cent of the Chinese in India, are jittery again. This time it is because the Supreme Court has ordered the closing of tanneries on the eastern fringes of Kolkata. The city has 531 tanneries, of which Tangra, or Chinatown, has 230.

The Tangra Chinese, rather like the Amish people of the West, are caught in their own time warp, manufacturing finished leather from raw skin and hide, mostly at home. They do their part of the job-of socking, liming, pickling, chroming and tanning-under the unwavering attention of a patriarch. The factory is usually located on the ground floor of the house, the labour under close watch of family members peering from the living quarters and the high compound wall guarding the operation from outsiders.

The unconcern of the Hakka tanners to the world outside is evident in the greenish sludge flowing down the drains, heavy with the chromium waste that bespeaks the hazard of cancer. The tanners have been told to relocate their businesses to an ultra-modern tanning complex, the Calcutta Leather Complex (CLC) in Bantala, 17 km south of Tangra. Besides manufacturing facilities, CLC has provisions for providing 40 million litres of water a day, a key input for tanning. But the Chinese tanners, most of whom have booked land at Bantala, are having second thoughts. Not only is the cost of labour a lot cheaper in Tangra, but moving away from their loved ghetto will bring cataclysmic changes in their lifestyles.

The riches of the leather economy have brought to the community the taste of good life. The Chinese run restaurants in a big way, and the English-educated new generation is moving into corporate careers. The serpentine and pot-holed road in Tangra is lined with restaurants bearing such oriental names as Beijing, China Pearl and Kim Ling, drawing customers in droves for not only the supposedly authentic fare but the low prices because the sales tax is avoided by "arrangement". Plus, there is also the "benefit" of excise-free liquor. There are Ford Ikons and Honda Accords parked behind the high walls. The parents are no longer satisfied sending their children to the neighbouring Pei May Chinese High School; they're being sent abroad for graduate courses after school in St Xavier's or Don Bosco.

However, behind the comfort of the palatial houses in Tangra, the glitter of taffeta skirts and the opulence of the "uncles and aunts" from Toronto holidaying in Kolkata during the Chinese New Year festivities of the lion dance, there is the overpowering smell of raw hide and the accompanying assurance of income. "The tannery is the umbilical link between us and India," says Paul Chung, assistant principal of Don Bosco School in Kolkata.

The Hakkas were driven from their original home in present day Xianjiang province around 250 a.d. by drought and the invasions of locusts. Over the next 1,500 years they moved southward to Kwantung (Canton), and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) the reigning Manchus drove them across the seas.

The "guest people" have forgotten most of the Hakka customs and languages in the West but not in India. Chung calls Kolkata the "purest Hakka centre" outside China. The insularity of the Hakka life was guaranteed till recently by the boundary of the city's Chinatown, where the law of the land had to stop in deference to the oriental settlers who came to Bengal over 200 years ago. For more than a century and a half, the Hakka people have been a quaint extension of Kolkata's cosmopolitan life. The British, French and Portuguese left after Independence. The city will lose a part of its soul should the self-effacing Chinese also pack their bags.