Scholars working on India–China interactions have rarely focused on the history and experiences of the Chinese who began immigrating to India over two centuries ago. These immigrants from China also seldom feature in works that deal with the Chinese overseas. In fact, there are only two book-length studies on this topic, the first by the American scholar Ellen Oxfeld entitled Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong (1993), and the second called Chinois à Calcutta: Les Tigres du Bengale (1999) by a French researcher named Julien Berjeaut. In an introduction to a special issue of China Report entitled ‘Kolkata and China’ published in 2007, I lamented that very few Indian or Chinese researchers had undertaken in-depth studies of the Chinese community in India. Zhang Xing's examination of the Chinese- medium schools established by the Chinese community in Calcutta presented in this inaugural volume of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre's Research Series is a step toward addressing this lacuna.

After coming to India in several stages from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Chinese immigrants settled in Calcutta, Bombay, Darjeeling, Assam, Madras, and other cities and states of India. Engaging in carpentry, shoemaking, tannery, dentistry, laundry and, more recently, restaurant businesses, these Chinese quickly carved out their niches within Indian society. Their numbers reached about 27,000 in the mid-1950s (this figure does not include immigrants from the Tibet and Xinjiang regions of China), becoming one of the largest foreign migrant communities in India. Yet they are perhaps also, as Ellen Oxfeld pointed out in her study, the most marginalised minority groups in that country.

This marginalisation is evident in Calcutta, where the Chinese have mostly lived segregated from other ethnic groups. While this isolation, both self-imposed and induced by local cultural and social norms, has helped preserve their traditional Chinese cultural practices and languages, it has also limited their access to the Indian political, economic, and educational systems. The India–China conflict of 1962 was a watershed moment for the Chinese in India. Not only was their allegiance to India questioned by the Indian government, but several thousands were also interned and deported from India.