The soy-laced aftertaste of Calcutta’s old Chinatown
The Statesman | 5 November 2025
Kolkata loves to mythologise its own pluralism; yet here, in the diminishing footprint of India’s Chinese-origin community, “Desi-Chinese” is not branding rhetoric but the residual articulation of a lived history embedded into quotidian food practice. Tiretta Bazaar, then, is no frozen postcard from a more cosmopolitan yesterday, but a functioning micro-ecosystem negotiating shrinkage, reinterpretation, and the incremental appropriation of a community’s culinary customs.
Better identified as Calcutta’s Old Chinatown or “Cheenapara,” Tiretta Bazaar is anthropological evidence of the city’s appetite for hybridity. The early-morning food economy here, much like elsewhere in Kolkata, does not rely on aesthetic allure to validate its relevance. The faint vinegar in the air, the disciplined warmth of pepper, and the unfussy geometry of dumpling folds operate as cultural text.
In Tiretta Bazaar, Chinese food has not been merely consumed; the city metabolised Chinese presence and reissued it as something regionally legible. Popular culture acknowledges this subcontinental mutation ~ in Srijit Mukherji’s Dwitiyo Purush, the rogue Khoka is coded through his preference for chicken chowmein and chilli “phees”. That choice is not simply character quirk, but sociological attestation that these Chinese dishes are arguably native to the city’s pavements. This significant gastronomical assimilation ~ now taken for granted in Delhi’s dhabas and Mumbai’s mall food courts, especially in the era of Swiggy and Zomato ~ owes its earliest credit to this gritty Calcutta neighbourhood.
However, walking through these narrow alleys today makes one realise how the romance of that layered hybridity sits uncomfortably against the very real decay of the site. The bazaar, stripped of all its sheen, is a grease-stained cluster of rickety tarpaulin counters, miscellaneous plastic stools, and unkempt ladles that smell more of burnt oil than of lineage. Much of this is also the inevitable consequence of demographic thinning, as the Chinese-origin population in the city has steadily contracted over decades.
The past here feels less like heritage and more like a municipal discard, tolerated merely because no one cared to curate its sediment. The fact that a cultural hotspot of such magnitude ~ that once housed over 20,000 ethnically Chinese residents ~ is reduced to this perfunctory, detritus is not simply unfortunate; it is symptomatic of our collective negligence.