About Us
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Aileen Chen was born into an Indian-Chinese family and grew up in the heart of Kolkata. Surrounded by stories from her community, she developed a deep fascination for the history, resilience, and lived experiences of the ethnically Chinese people from India and beyond. Fuelled by a strong sense of curiosity and belonging, Aileen began travelling both within India and across south east Asia, with a unique interest — to learn about both her and other cultures in the geographies she visits. Through each journey, she immerses herself in the cultural rhythms of these spaces: from the quiet shrines tucked between noodle shops to the bustling markets echoing with familiar dialects and aromas of home. She enjoys capturing these encounters through her photographs and bringing back anecdotes to share with her family. Her travels are not just about geography but about memory and identity — tracing the footprints of communities that have thrived despite displacement and change. Her passion lies in listening to the voices of the older generation. Their stories of migration, of making do, of joy and hardship, resonate deeply with her. Whether through storytelling, photography, or sharing a meal in a tucked-away eatery, Aileen tries to understand the culture, memory and connections that binds communities. Aileen also strongly believes in the power of education in enabling communities to thrive, and is currently with Mantra4Change, supporting the improvement of government schools in India.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aileen-chen-41b27562/
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Iram Ghufran is a filmmaker and artist whose work lies at the juncture of research, documentary processes and speculative poetics creating a liminal space for resonance, rupture and reflection. Her interdisciplinary practice engages with themes of personal memory, intimate histories and the spectral traces of the inexplicable. Working largely across film, photography and writing, Iram constructs poetic encounters with fragmented archives, speculative testimonies, and haunted geographies. Her work often draws from lived experience, myth and social memory to explore how reality is mediated, narrated, and reimagined. She is particularly interested in cinematic gestures that unsettle the fixities of form, genre, and epistemology, and that expand the possibilities of nonfiction not only as a critical but also a sensuous and ethical mode of inquiry. Through experimental and essayistic approaches, Iram proposes film as a way of being with others - across time, distance and ideology. Iram holds an MA in Mass Communication from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia University (2003), and a PhD from the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts (CREAM), University of Westminster (2023). Iram was a member of the Media Lab at Sarai CSDS from 2004-11, where besides pursuing her independent practice, she collaboratively worked on media art and research projects. Iram co-curated Soundphiles: a festival of listening (2014-16) and Artists' Film & Video (2017) for IAWRT's International Women's Film Festival. Her work has been supported by Arts Network Asia, Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council, Public Service Broadcasting Trust, Sandarbh and Westheavens. Her films have been screened at renowned art and cinematic platforms including Arsenal 4 at Silent Green, Brakhage Centre, Visions du Reel, Experimenta India, Forum Expanded at Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival of India, International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, and Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition among others. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal for Artistic Research published by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). She curently teaches at the Department of Art, Media and Performance, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi National Capital Region.
Jennifer Liang was born a Calcutta Desi Chinese and has remained intricately connected to the community through family, friends, festivals and a deep love for Calcutta’s street food. Concerned by two suicides of young Chinese in Calcutta in a short period (which shook the community), while doing a PG Course at TISS, Mumbai in 1994, Jenny focused her Master’s thesis on understanding performance related stress in the lives of young Chinese of Calcutta. But she got totally immersed when she chose to stay for almost two years (1998-2000) in Calcutta hanging out with the community, reading, researching and especially interviewing elders from different dialect groups. While this helped her make sense of her history and legacy, a lot of the long oral histories recorded by her were with people who are no longer alive and therefore constitutes an important archive of the lived memory of the Chinese in India. With her training in community organising, Jenny brought elders and youngsters of Cheenapada onto one platform, and along with other community members founded the Indian Chinese Association for Culture and Development, which till date remains an important institution of the community. To emphasise the ‘Indian-ness’ of their Chinese identity, the leaders at that time chose to called themselves as Indian-Chinese, contrary to academic norms. Personally, for Jenny, the most adventurous and exciting work of that period was being able to break the crazily thick gender ceiling by starting Fa Mulan, the first ever all-girls lion dancing troupe in Calcutta. Chinese New Year has never been the same after that turn of the century event in February 2000! Mixed-gender lion dancing troupes (or whatever is left of them) are now the norm in Calcutta. Jenny left Calcutta in 2000 and for the next two decades, she got busy being a social worker in the northeast. She along with her partner Sunil Kaul co-founded The Ant, a social development organisation working for rural development in Bodoland, Assam. The Ant works on improving the quality of learning in government schools, development of children & youth through sports, building leadership of adolescent girls & stopping domestic violence. The Ant’s model of mental illness treatment is financially self-sustaining and has now spread across 18 districts of Assam through partner NGOs. Jenny has been a Chevening Gurukul Scholar (2013, London School of Economics) and her thesis then was to look at women’s political participation in local governance in U.K. Jennifer has co-authored a book “Health Inequities in Conflict-affected Areas: Armed Violence, Survival and Post-Conflict Recovery in the Indo-Bhutan Borderlands” which was published by Springer-Nature, Singapore in March 2021. In September 2022, she was awarded the first Niwano Peace Prize Visionary Award by the Niwano Peace Foundation, Japan for her and the ant’s work in conflict transformation. Being a part of the Desi Chinese Project team is an exciting chance to build up an archive, record and share the legacy of the Chinese community in India. One of the pieces she has written at that time is “Migration Patterns and Occupational Specialisations of Kolkata Chinese: An Insider’s History” published by Sage Publication in China Report, A Journal of East Asian Studies 43: 4 (2007): 397 – 410.
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Jenny Pinto is a filmmaker, designer, writer, and researcher whose diverse practice spans storytelling, sustainability, and material innovation. Beginning her career in advertising, Jenny has long been drawn to the textures of everyday life — from culinary histories to climate consciousness. Pinto enters the Desi Chinese story from an interest in the intersection between food and culture and how communities cook up their own histories. She has spent several years researching the food cultures of the Indian Chinese community, exploring how memory, migration, and identity are expressed through cuisine. Jenny is also the founder of Oorjaa, a circular lighting design studio focused on handcrafted lighting made from waste materials — a deeply personal response to issues of sustainability, craft, and ecological responsibility. Her studio’s work blends design with social and environmental engagement, offering a quiet but radical alternative to mass production and consumer excess. Jenny is the author of The Magical, Everything, a book that introduces middle school children to the interconnected worlds of biodiversity, climate change, and human imagination. Across her varied work — whether through film, writing, or sustainable design — Jenny remains committed to storytelling that kindles curiosity and nurtures connection.
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Koel Chatterjee is an illustrator and designer with an interest in food and community histories. An alumnus of the National Institute of Design, Koel is currently a Design Partner at TwentyNine Design and has over 20 years of experience in creating digital products, brand communication and new product and service solutions in the domains of healthcare and consumer lifestyle solutions. Skilled at leading the user experience of digital products, new product development, conducting design sprints, people/trend research, strategic design and communication design. Koel is passionate about food cultures and was the Founding Member of Leaping Windows Cafe, Mumbai. She has been researching food cultures of the Indian Chinese community for over 10 years.
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Lawrence Liang is Professor and Dean of the School of Legal and Socio Political Studies at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi. He studied at the National Law School University of India and Warwick University, and has a PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Born in the Chinatown area of Calcutta, Liang moved with his family to Bangalore, and considers himself a hardcore Bangalorean who speaks Cantonese at home, Hindi, Kannada, and a smattering of Tamil. Equally, at home in Chow Mein and Chow Chow Bath, Liang is an avowed bibliophile and film buff. He co-founded the Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru as well as the Center for Internet and Society, and has played a major role in incorporating Open Source ideas into the cultural domain. He has published widely in scholarly books and journals and is a prominent presence in public debates. Liang was the lead researcher and managed numerous research projects for fifteen years, and has collaborated with leading institutions globally and nationally including Sarai:CSDS, Columbia University, UNDP, Social Science Research Council, etc. He was on the board of iCommons (Creative Commons International). His areas of research interest include Law and Public Culture, Intellectual Property, Free Speech, Law and Literature, Law, Media and Technology, Visual cultures of law and Justice, and Comparative Legal theory. He has also been a distinguished fellow of Centre for Internet and Society and Public Resources.org. Lawrence has published extensively in journals and books and regularly contributes to key debates in leading newspapers and magazines. He has also taught in many of the leading law schools as well as departments of film studies and media studies in India and elsewhere, including Yale University, NLSIU, Nalsar, Bilkent University, amongst others. He was awarded the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2017.
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Vidura Jang Bahadur is a photographer and is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Studies in the program of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University, Evanston. Bahadur's doctoral dissertation, Invisible Citizens, explores the role image-making practices play in shaping how we imagine our individual and collective identities and how these constructions influence our participation and belonging within the diverse communities and spaces we inhabit. Image-making practices refers to a set of visual technologies that inform and are part of both state practices and the encounters that characterize vernacular life. Through an ethnographic study of Indian Chinese families in India and in the Indian diaspora in the United States and Canada, Bahadur interrogates the complex and often competing forces by which individuals imagine broader collectivities and their place within them. This is important, especially in an age of mass dis/relocation and rising ethno-religious nationalisms that often lay an emphasis on visible signs of racial and ideological homogeneity. Bahadur's photographs have been exhibited at festivals and galleries across the world. These festivals include the Singapore International Photo Festival 08, ‘TADAIMA: Looking for Sweet Home’ - part of the ‘AQA project’, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, ‘The Self and the Other portraiture in Indian Photography, at the Palau de la Virreina of Barcelona, and more recently at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of a group show titled 'A Lion for Every House.' Bahadur was part of the curatorial team for the Delhi Photo Festival in 2015, and is also one of the co-founders of the DesiChineseProject, a living archive of the Chinese community in India.
http://vidurajangbahadur.com/​​​​​
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We would be delighted to have more interested people joining us and contributing to the project. ​Please feel free to contact us at < desichineseproject {at} gmail [dot] com >​
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