On November 22, 1953, a tiny Reuters dispatch from Leh appeared in The New York Times with the headline “Indians get out of Red Sinkiang”. “After a journey of 500 miles through the western Himalayas, nineteen Indians have arrived here from southern Sinkiang in Communist China,” the wire service reported. These were believed to be the last Indians who left the western Chinese province (now spelt in English as Xinjiang), ending a presence that is believed to have lasted at least several hundred years. The group was led by a vice counsel in Kashgar, who looked after Indian interests for three years after the Indian consulate in the fabled city was closed.
The exodus of Indians fearing Communist rule in Xinjiang, which took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, closed a long chapter of history where people, goods, ideas, religion and culture moved in both directions across the Himalayas.
Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar Xuanzang, who visited India on a pilgrimage in the 7th century CE, travelled through the Khyber Pass and Hindu Kush to Kashgar and Khotan before heading back to eastern China, carrying with him sacred manuscripts. Indian Buddhist culture once thrived in the Khotan Oasis and spread from there all the way to the eastern coast of China.
Like Xuanzang, a community of traders from different parts of the Indian subcontinent travelled to Xinjiang either via Badakshan, Afghanistan, or Kashmir and Gilgit or the onerous and treacherous path from Ladakh through the Karakoram Pass, Karakoram Mountains and the Taklamakan Desert.
“The one from Ladakh, which was much frequented by the traders, was a gruelling test of endurance and determination, with at least four mountain passes averaging heights of over 17,600 feet having to be crossed,” Madhavi Thampi, who taught Chinese history at Delhi University for 35 years, wrote in her book Indians in China, 1800-1949. “The journey to Yarkand in Xinjiang took on an average 38 days.”
Indian traders are not known to have documented the rigours of the journey, but in 1925, Russian artist, writer and philosopher Nicholas Roerich wrote about his trip from Kashmir and Ladakh across the Karakoram Pass in great detail: “It is impossible to describe the beauty of this multi-day snow kingdom. Such diversity, such expressiveness of outlines, such fantastic cities, such multi-coloured streams and streams and such memorable purple and moonlit rocks…At the same time, the striking sonorous silence of the desert. And people stop quarrelling with each other, and all differences are erased, and everyone, without exception, absorbs the beauty of the mountain desolation.”
Leaving aside the romantic writing of Roerich, this was a journey that came at a heavy cost of human and animal life. The trail across the Karakoram Pass was littered with the bones of dead humans and animals. It was rare for caravans to make the trip without loss of life or goods.
The Great Game
Located in the heart of Central Asia and sandwiched between an expanding Russian Empire and British India, Xinjiang was one of the main theatres of the Great Game, the diplomatic and political confrontation between London and Moscow in the 19th and 20th century.
Indian traders began crossing the Karakoram Mountains long before the British colonised the country, and the presence of an Indian community in the western fringes of China was seen as an asset for London. Attempts to set up a diplomatic mission in Xinjiang were in full swing in 1890 when Francis Younghusband went on an expedition to the area. His interpreter George Macartney would stay on in Kashgar. It however took 18 years before the Chinese agreed to recognise him as the consul general, giving him the official right to intervene in legal matters when it involved Indians.
CS Cumberland, a British major who visited Xinjiang in the 1890s and wrote Sport on the Pamirs and Turkistan Steppes, was of the belief that Indians helped enhance British soft power in the region. He wrote, “I consider that the friendly feeling and respect shown to Englishmen in Chinese Turkestan is entirely due to the reports of our traders.”
Punjabi Domination
Caravans of horses, mules and camels took Indian spices, tea, cotton, sugar, opium and dyestuffs to Xinjiang. From the other direction came carpets, charas, green tea, silk, precious stones, gold and silver.
Until the 1940s the cities of Yarkand, Kashgar and Khotan had active and clearly visible Indian communities, comprising of traders from Punjab, Ladakh, Kashmir and Sindh’s Shikarpur. Most of them would stay in their own serais.
“The actual trade between India and Sinkiang via the high Karakoram Pass was controlled by Punjabi Hindu merchants from the town of Hoshiarpur,” French historian Claude Markovits wrote in his book titled The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947.
These Punjabis mainly belonged to the Khatri caste and worked both on their own and as agents of other traders. “They were in general treated well by the Chinese authorities, although they had to bear some discriminatory measures such as not being allowed to wear turbans or ride horses within the town,” Thampi wrote.
Many of these traders would split their time between Xinjiang and Punjab, with some managing to accumulate vast fortunes. The British authorities managed to recruit some of them to work as informers and interpreters, and also to keep an eye on Russian activity in the region.
The British were happy to reward such traders for their services and loyalty. A declassified letter dated October 26, 1893 shows the approval of a monthly pension of Rs 50 to one Jowala Bhaggat, a trader who moved back permanently to Punjab. “Jowala Bhaggat, now between 70 and 80 years of age, is the well-known Yarkand trader who rendered on many occasions, as the correspondence submitted shows, conspicuous services to the British Government and its officers from whom he holds very high testimonials,” HC Fanshawe, Officiating Secretary Punjab, wrote in the letter to the Foreign Department.