Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
4.5⭐️Have you read any book that made you realise how little you knew about certain things and events from our history or how little we’ve been taught about it?The Deoliwallahs is by Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza tells the true account of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment, a conveniently forgotten chapter from our history.Shortly after the Indo-China War of 1962, about 3000 innocent Chinese-Indian citizens were rounded up from the Northeast states of India and were sent to a former WW2 POW camp in D...
• r e v i e w •~The Deoliwallahs have been carrying the feeling of betrayal for over half a century without any respite. The cold and apathetic manner in which our government performed back in 1962, ultimately drove away thousands of Chinese-Indians from our country. Their only fault was the way they looked and perhaps for having ancestral ties with China. But these Chinese-Indians were as Indian as their neighbours next door, conversing in Hindi rather than in Chinese. Their simple lives were u...
I consider myself rather well traveled and informed, yet I had never heard of the 1962 Chinese-Indian internment. In reading “the deoli wallahs” I came to understand that I was far from the only one. In the book I learned that even Indian citizens were largely unaware of the fact that their government had imprisoned thousands of their own people during the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The citizens imprisoned were ethnically Chinese, but for the most part they had been living in India for generations...
I began reading The Deoliwallahs in June this year. Had to put it away. When you find out things about your own country that you think only other countries did, you obviously don’t accept it. And this was me, a reader. There were real people and families that faced this. A sorry chapter in India’s history. One that the country must apologise for. But the way things are now, I don’t see that happening. Thank you to the authors for writing this important book. Brilliant book on a subject very few
This is an important book and an informative one on an episode of Indian history that has largely gone unnoticed. Its unusual format - alternating chapters of history and oral history/memoir - brings alive the relevant context and personal qualities of the Chinese-Indian internment experience.
Beautifully written, the untold history of India. A must read book.
I first learned about this book at its Mumbai launch held at the Nehru Centre. The irony hits me only now as I sit down to write down my thoughts. Under whose leadership the Chinese-Indians were incarcerated, their stories were – perhaps for the first time – being discussed in public, at a venue named after that very politician. The launch was held before the corona lockdown, when the protests against CAA-NRC were raging all over the country and police brutality continued unabated. At a time whe...
Like most Indians, I had no idea ethnic Chinese settled in India in the mid- and late nineteenth century. That they settled in India as traders, merchants and tea plantation workers, was unknown to me. What is definitely the hardest thing to learn though is how people who had assimilated into the country's culture and traditions were incarcerated during the Sino-India war in 1962. It is heartbreaking to know they did not feel safe to return to live in the country of birth. Hopefully, India not o...
This book weaves together historical facts with personal stories about how numerous Chinese-Indians lost their country of birth (India). And narrates a chapter in India's history that a lot of us are unaware of.
A historically important story, one that needs to be told and re-told across generations, written in such a tedious manner that it is simply impossible to parse through the pages. Really wish it had been written slightly better, because this story and those people deserve that.
This is a shocking and terrible account of the internment of Chinese Indians in a camp in Rajasthan during and after the war in 1962 - for no reason at all other than their perceived ethnic origins. I’m still so shook that I’ve never even vaguely been aware this was a chapter in Indian history until I saw Pratyusha’s review of this book. Very relevant and filled with cautionary tales for this moment in Indian politics.