The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment by Joy Ma

The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment Reviews

• 
  Krutika Puranik

  • r e v i e w •
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  The Deoliwallahs have been carrying the feeling of betrayal for over half a century without any respite. The cold and apathetic manner in which our government performed back in 1962, ultimately drove away thousands of Chinese-Indians from our country. Their only fault was the way they looked and perhaps for having ancestral ties with China. But these Chinese-Indians were as Indian as their neighbours next door, conversing in Hindi rather than in Chinese. Their simple lives were uprooted in an instant, leaving them broken for years and affecting the next generations in ways that couldn't have been imagined.
  ~
  After the Sino-Indian war in 1962, Indians breathed a sigh of relief but little did they know that this would later affect an entire community. Written by Dilip D'souza and Joy Ma, The Deoliwallahs is a detailed analysis of what pushed the government to put thousands of innocents in a camp for years and the toll it took on the detainees. It is said that the first Chinese to land in India was back in 1778 who went by the name Tong Atchew. He was given a plot by Hastings in Calcutta and this marked the beginning of Chinese life in India. A detailed history of their businesses and expertise have been listed down in the book, giving a clear background about their lives before they were interned. After the War, the Indian government found all the Chinese-Indians suspicious in spite of them living in the country for decades, speaking native languages and carrying decent work ethics. Around mid November 1962, just few weeks after the War ended, thousands of them were taken into custody.
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  They were transported by train to Deoli in Rajasthan, where the camps which were previously used by the Japanese prisoners stood grimly. It is important to know how worried they were throughout their journey as all their questions went unanswered. Many of the detainees recall how other villagers used to rush to the platform, calling them enemies and telling them to go back to China. The food was hard and barely edible and many of them weren't able to buy their own food because they weren't permitted to carry money. Their hopes further sunk when they arrived at the camp. A depleted building was to be their home for the next few years. The food that they were given was uncooked, filled with worms and devoid of any plates or cutlery. Many managed to eat using their rusted tins. The children were refused formal education, old people died without proper medical facilities and babies were born in the camp. One of the detainee recalls how his father's dead body was mutilated, with eyes being taken out and multiple lacerations on his body. When Lal Bahadur Shastri visited the camp, he made promises to look into their imprisonment but ultimately did nothing. When they were released, the government had siezed their property, they were forced to pay income tax and their old jobs were taken away. With nothing to support their families and due to unbearable hostility from their neighbours, they were forced to emigrate.
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  This book contains interviews of many detainees who recall their horrible times back in the camp and the feeling of displacement that follows them even today. It's heartbreaking to think how their own government and people turned their back against them. This is in no way an easy read and I say this because of how furious I felt while reading about their unfortunate lives forced onto them by the government. We know about the countless Japanese-Americans who were detained and about the Nazi concentration camps; it's shameful that we aren't aware of our own country's concentration camp, as the detainees call it. I highly recommend this.
  ~
  Rating : 4.5/5.
• 
  Katya Cengel

  I consider myself rather well traveled and informed, yet I had never heard of the 1962 Chinese-Indian internment. In reading “the deoli wallahs” I came to understand that I was far from the only one. In the book I learned that even Indian citizens were largely unaware of the fact that their government had imprisoned thousands of their own people during the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The citizens imprisoned were ethnically Chinese, but for the most part they had been living in India for generations, spoke Hindi and had little direct connection to China.
  
  As author and interment survivor Joy Ma writes the stigma and effects of the imprisonment have lasted a lifetime “made deeper by the lack of information about the incident”. In the “deoli wallahs”, which she co-wrote with Dilip D’Souza, she attempts to fill the void and document what happened by recounting the stories of those who were interned in an old POW camp in Deoli, Rajasthan for five years. One of those stories is told by a then teenage boy who is asked to collect the body of his dead father only to find his father has no eyes and horrible scars on his chest and hands. Like the boy, we never learn what happened to his father after his father became ill in the camp and was sent to a hospital. We only know what his son saw when he went to retrieve his father’s body and thus are granted a small glimpse of some of the confusion and hurt the boy must have felt.
  
  The book opens with Joy’s own story. Born in the camp, Joy does not remember the details older survivors do and wonders years later why her family does not participate in a large Chinese New Year celebration. When she asks her mother, she is told that they were interned on New Year’s Day in 1963. “I didn’t want to celebrate it after that,” her mother says.
  
  That is just one example of the lingering impact of what Chinese Indians went through. Another is their general exodus from the country following their internment. The book puts this in context by interspersing May’s oral histories with historical and political background written by co-author Dilip D’Souza. The style works nicely and makes this book a compelling and important read for anyone interested in human stories. It is also serves as an important reminder of what can happen during times of conflict and fear when it is easy to scapegoat “the other”.
  
• 
  Apratim Mukherjee

  This is a book about a shameful episode in modern Indian history.I being an Indian,like many others,didn't even know about Deoli camps as this chapter was brushed away from most history books.It is a book which should be read by all Indians,so that one day,Indian government can,if not apologize,acknowledge the wrongs done to the Chinese-Indian community.
• 
  Mei Mei (readersreadingnook)

  Here’s the thing with books – they tend to trigger a series of emotions known and unknown. Most of it being relatable. You connect with the characters, their lives whether good or troublesome. When you finish reading the book it brings you a sense of joy, heartbreak, calm, and much more. You feel that you have lived a life through the book. This book unsettled me.
  
  The Deoliwallahs is a memoir of sorts about those people who were put into the Chinese internment camp at Deoli in 1962. It is their tales of horror, fear and displacement overnight, something that haunts them till today.
  
  Having read ‘Remnants of a Separation’, I knew I would learn a lot from this shared past of my community and ancestors. My parents never spoke to me about it. The day I began reading it, I thought of asking my parents. I asked them if they knew anything about the ‘forced’ internment? They politely shut down the topic and moved on to discussing other things. I believe that even if they didn’t have to go through that experience, it is something that they never want to talk about. They would have probably grown up hearing it from their parents, friends and extended families. I do understand that they don’t want this to come out again fearing that it might affect our current happy lives. Many others in the book, recount their experiences with resentment and are unable to forget what that fateful day in October of 1962 brought along with it.
  
  Read it for the long forgotten (I guess a minuscule for many) history of India that most of us probably never knew or heard about.
  The country was going through a lot, still is, with the recent passing of the Citizenship Amendment act and all the debate about NRC until the pandemic hit us.
  Read the book and you’ll know why many of us, including me, still need that assurance that we are ‘home’ and the fact that we may look different because of our ethnicity but we are still Indians.
  
  A lot of you may feel that my review is biased but it isn’t so.
  I loved the book for the sheer simplicity of reasoning the authority for the incarceration of so many people without any or enough proof. And I didn’t like the book as it could have done away with the repetition of facts given by each of the survivors. I feel a lot more has not been said or avoided due to fear.
  
  This isn’t necessarily a partition story, but for me the internment of 1962 somewhat runs parallel to that of the former. Both times, people lost homes, loved ones, lost their hard earned life savings, and still struggle with identity crisis.
  
• 
  Jack Greenberg

  Did you know that in 1962 when the border war broke out, racism, prejudice, and war-time hysteria led India’s political leaders to make a number of legal changes which allowed the forced relocation and internment of 3,000 Chinese-Indians? I didn’t before reading this book...
  
  I would highly encourage those unaware to pick up a copy and educate themselves about this shameful chapter of history. Never again begins with never forget.
• 
  Ritika

  I first learned about this book at its Mumbai launch held at the Nehru Centre. The irony hits me only now as I sit down to write down my thoughts. Under whose leadership the Chinese-Indians were incarcerated, their stories were – perhaps for the first time – being discussed in public, at a venue named after that very politician. The launch was held before the corona lockdown, when the protests against CAA-NRC were raging all over the country and police brutality continued unabated. At a time when the national conversations on citizenship, identity and bigotry are rife, the story of The Deoliwallahs needs urgent attention from the Indian state and the brahmanical society that has normalized bigotry and fascism.
  
  In this literary partnership, Joy Ma has documented the accounts of Chinese-Indian survivors of the internment, while Dilip D’Souza provides the historical & political context in which the Indian state gave itself the legitimacy to incarcerate its own citizens, by branding them ‘of being of hostile origin’. A train was arranged to take about 3000 people – including senior citizens and children – to a detention camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. That a large majority of Indians do not know about this is just atrocious. This fact is hidden from us so that the state can, shamelessly, enjoy a noble narrative for itself w.r.t. the Indo-Chinese geo-political hostility. Dilip D’Souza even mentions a sitting MP who remorselessly defended the Indian state’s actions in a conversation. Fucking disgusting.
  
  I feel that we need a national policy on reparations if the Indian state wants to even begin to redeem itself. The brahmanical state & society have wronged so many people and communities without ever pausing for perspective and doing the right thing. Shame!
  
• 
  Apurva Nagpal

  4.5⭐️
  
  Have you read any book that made you realise how little you knew about certain things and events from our history or how little we’ve been taught about it?
  
  The Deoliwallahs is by Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza tells the true account of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment, a conveniently forgotten chapter from our history.
  Shortly after the Indo-China War of 1962, about 3000 innocent Chinese-Indian citizens were rounded up from the Northeast states of India and were sent to a former WW2 POW camp in Deoli, Rajasthan leaving behind their occupation, livelihood and in some cases their families too.
  Their fault? Because of the way they “looked”.
  
  The stories of the survivors resonate with a similar experience of humiliation, from the time they were taken away to the camp to the years they spent there, the way they were treated inside and after they were released. It shares some truly heartbreaking details about how this incident left it’s scars not only on the ones who attended the camp but also the generations it followed.
  
  The book also draws an interesting parallel between the 1942 Japanese-American internment and this 20 years successor incident, but also carefully highlights the differences between the two, making us realise how mishandled ours was and the internees have never been offered an apology for the same.
  
  I have to be honest, I knew very little about the events that followed the war and this was such an eye opening read for me. We often read about the victims of war and their stories may break our hearts and we hope that these stories may never be repeated but can we ever be sure? Can we ever be free of racial prejudices?
  
  A highly recommended read!
• 
  Kavity

  A historically important story, one that needs to be told and re-told across generations, written in such a tedious manner that it is simply impossible to parse through the pages. Really wish it had been written slightly better, because this story and those people deserve that.
• 
  Delson Roche

  What an enlightening read this book is!! To begin with, I was not aware of the internment of Chinese Indians in India and the episode is absolutely disgraceful.
  The stories narrated are absolutely, heart-breaking and the injustice meted out is unacceptable. The authors have very simply and eloquently explained the backdrop that led to the Indo-china war and the present day standoff. This for me was a very interesting read and I learnt a lot.
  Other than the stories, is the relevance of this episode today to NRC and CAA bills that the government is so enthusiastic to pass. When we don’t learn history like this Deoli episode then we repeat our mistakes again. The author has devoted one thought provoking final chapter on this and is something all of us should contemplate on- especially if you want to live in a just society.
  I am sure there are many more stories and more pain and hurt that probably escaped this book. But in all, I was moved by the book and strongly recommend it.
• 
  Aditya Lakshay

  This book quite simply serves its purpose.
  This book exists to highlight the injustices meted out to Chinese Indians post the 1962 war with China. It serves as a memoir of the harrowing experience these families had to undergo, because they supposedly of Chinese Origin and were, in truth, caught up in the post war idiosyncrasies that nation states do.
  In the wake of news of "Concentration Camps" being set up all over the country, one need not look further than this book to estimate the impact such measures taken by the government have on the "internee". Not limited to deplorable conditions in the camp, a complete stigmatization in the society, loss in livelihoods and trauma. A trauma they bear in their heart, more than 60 years down the line seeking closure where none seems to be forthcoming.
  A great read in the current global political scenario.
• 
  Shilpa Rao

  Like most Indians, I had no idea ethnic Chinese settled in India in the mid- and late nineteenth century. That they settled in India as traders, merchants and tea plantation workers, was unknown to me. What is definitely the hardest thing to learn though is how people who had assimilated into the country's culture and traditions were incarcerated during the Sino-India war in 1962. It is heartbreaking to know they did not feel safe to return to live in the country of birth. Hopefully, India not only issues an apology but also teach this in schools.
• 
  Radhika Misra

  I began reading The Deoliwallahs in June this year. Had to put it away.
  
  When you find out things about your own country that you think only other countries did, you obviously don’t accept it.
  
  And this was me, a reader. There were real people and families that faced this.
  
  A sorry chapter in India’s history. One that the country must apologise for. But the way things are now, I don’t see that happening.
  
  Thank you to the authors for writing this important book.
  
  Brilliant book on a subject very few Indians will know about. Easy read. Heartbreaking.
• 
  Sadiq Kazi

  If you have read Rita Chowdhury's Chinatown Days, read this book for the real story of the Chinese-Indians detained in Deoli in the aftermath of the 1962 Indo-China war. Majority of Indians may not even know about this dark, shameful episode in India's modern history. What makes this book relevant today is the question of identity, looks, and what is it to be a citizen.
• 
  Marcy

  This is an important book and an informative one on an episode of Indian history that has largely gone unnoticed. Its unusual format - alternating chapters of history and oral history/memoir - brings alive the relevant context and personal qualities of the Chinese-Indian internment experience.
• 
  Rahul

  This book weaves together historical facts with personal stories about how numerous Chinese-Indians lost their country of birth (India). And narrates a chapter in India's history that a lot of us are unaware of.
• 
  Manasi Hate

  Beautifully written, the untold history of India. A must read book.
• 
  Kakoli

  3.5/5
  
  Reminder of the lesser-known sad chapter of 1962 war. Written in simple language. Repeatitive in parts.
• 
  Sush

  This is a shocking and terrible account of the internment of Chinese Indians in a camp in Rajasthan during and after the war in 1962 - for no reason at all other than their perceived ethnic origins. I’m still so shook that I’ve never even vaguely been aware this was a chapter in Indian history until I saw Pratyusha’s review of this book. Very relevant and filled with cautionary tales for this moment in Indian politics.