Review-An Alternative Passage to India

An Alternative Passage to India-From Border to Border 

International workshop by Chung Shefong on 25th September, 2014


Professor Chung Shefong's workshop on her documentary leads us to know the lives about Indian Chinese, which weren't told. She got interested in this project by chance on her first visit to India.

We went through different chapters and see these vivid stories of Chinese immigrants who went to Kolkata, India as early as 200 years ago. As she told us in the very beginning that she is into migration and migration music, and many form of art came from the experience of being diaspora. Firstly she showed us a piece of Hakka music from her production as an illustration of migrants' music. As a young girl, she was very interested in Indian music and culture and finally she went to India though her Alternative Passage.  The documentary contains a lot of historical and cultural information about India and China. We started with Chinese diaspora's livelihood in the beginning of the immigration, how they survive and what kind of occupation they took.  Then we moved to the very chaotic time, the second-world war and Indian independent war.  During that period, the documentary showed us what are the different attitudes towards British, towards government.

This workshop about the documentary and the making of this showed us the attitude towards making something from life, experience and perspective. There are many difficulties and challenges all along the way. While I believe that making things shown and known is  a great success like Professor Chung Shefong did for From Boarder to Boarder presented us the unknown and multidimensional history of the small Chinese community in Kolkata, India.

P.S. Sorry that I forgot to take a photo.(I was too absorbed in)