Chini ka Chakra and how little we know about China and ourselves

I read Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel in 1993. It had been given to me as part of a writing award, and on a passenger train from Delhi to Lucknow, puffing on a cigar (an extremely inappropriate high school graduation gift), with my feet propped up on a bedroll, I consumed Mr Tharoor’s inventive satire on Indian politics, using the Mahabharata as template. In the satire, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi becomes the sage Ganga Datta, Mohammed Ali Jinnah becomes Karna, and China becomes Chakra. Tongue in cheek, Tharoor describes how, since Chakra sounds like the Hindi word for sugar (shakar), the “Hindi-Chakra” slogan had a sweet resonance to the Indian nation. 

Mr Tharoor is a man in love with words – sometimes too much so – but in this book his wit works wonders, and I was particularly impressed and amused by the felicity of how he changed names. The Chini/Chakra swap seemed to me pure genius. It was only a few months ago that a friend explained to me that actually our term for refined sugar, or “chini”, actually does come from the name of China. Sugar made from sugarcane is an Indian invention, made around 800 BC, but it was generally of the coarse, brown sugar variety, or just plain guhr. The Chinese began making sugar sometime in the 7th century AD, and in fact the Chinese ambassador to the court of King Harsha, Li-I-piao, was tasked with the job of smuggling information on how to make the excellent sugar that India made. At that time sugar was causing a major trade imbalance, with India exporting significant quantities to the Chinese Empire – unlike now when we buy pretty much everything made in China. 

The secret of Indian sugar was smuggled by the ambassador back to the Chinese court in 647 AD. According to my friend, although the Chinese liked the sugar, the Emperor disapproved of the brown colour, so the technique of making refined sugar, or the white crystalline structure we tend to call chini, came about. There is another possible story. According to Marco Polo, the 13th century Mongol conqueror of China, Kublai Khan, imported sugar makers from Egypt, and they brought their technique to China. Egypt was already making refined sugar by then, fine rock sugar that we refer to in India as “misri” – Misr being the old name for Egypt. It was this fine sugar which would have then come from Kublai Khan’s court to India, and thus been called “chini”.

The thing is that even the best etymologists can only speculate on the roots of this word, of how sugar, something invented in India, comes to wear a Chinese name. This is, unfortunately, on par with our general understanding of Indian-Chinese interactions. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that India had imprisoned hundreds of people of Chinese origin after we lost the 1962 war. Bear in mind that these arrests happened after the war, not during it. No court heard the case, and no judgement was delivered. It was strictly an action taken by the Home Ministry on the recommendation of the Intelligence Bureau. Little distinction was made. Grandmothers, pregnant women, children were all carted off from their homes in Calcutta and around the Northeast, to an internment camp in Deoli, Rajasthan that had once held WWII prisoners of war. 

A couple of weeks ago I met some of the survivors from the experience. One of them, Joy Ma, was in fact born in the camp. One of the men, Steven, I think his name was, was a teenager at the time. He spent three years in the internment camp. When he returned, no school would accept him because he was too old for the class he could attend. He choked up as he told us about how his daughter had failed at a Spelling Bee competition. While the parents of the other children had been able to support their children, his education had been crippled, and he felt he had failed his child. 

We know nothing of these people, despite the fact that China is already our biggest trading partner, and obviously the most powerful country in Asia, with whom we have the largest border dispute in the world – more than a 4,000-kilometre stretch across the eastern Himalayan region. There are two water basins which connect us, the Indus and the Brahmaputra (called the Yarlung Tsangpo in China) impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the region, but we know little about their details. At one time we hosted more than 30,000 people of Chinese origin, many of them fleeing the civil war, famines and tragedies of China. Today we support a few thousand. We do host the Dalai Lama, and almost 100,000 Tibetans who have fled the failures and problems of Chinese policies, but how much do we talk about them? China has spent more than $400 billion in Western China, becoming a South Asian actor by default, and the only thing that interests us is the $45 billion it has pledged to spend to make a corridor across Pakistan. Surely we need to know a little more?