Uncovering Urban Legacies: The Chinese Heritage Of Bombay

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. His doctoral thesis explores questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese living across India and in the diaspora. The project builds on Bahadur's extensive photographic work on the community (2003-2015) and disputes easy understandings of nation, national culture, identity, and belonging.

Annie Chen a prominent celebrity hair dresser with over 40 years of experience. She is the 2nd generation of Chinese in India. Her Grandparents are the ones who moved to India during the Japanese Invasion of China. She worked in Dubai for many years and did her training in London, Hongkong, Malaysia. She Started her own Chens Hair & Beauty Salon and was the first to start with Japanese rebonding of Hair in India. She went to Japan to be trained for rebonding of hair She feels herself more of an Indian in India than Chinese and love this Country India.

Madhavi Thampi is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi, and former editor of the journal China Report. She taught Chinese History at the Department of East Asian Studies of the University of Delhi from 1979 to 2014. Her major publications include Indians in China, 1800-1949 (2005) and China and the Making of Bombay (with Shalini Saksena, 2010). She also edited the volume India and China in the Colonial World (2005). More recently, she has coordinated the project to catalogue materials on modern China in the National Archives of India. Her main research interest lies in uncovering various aspects of the interactions between India and China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Sifra Lentin is a Mumbai-based writer and the Bombay History Fellow at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, a foreign policy think tank headquartered in Mumbai. She was awarded the 2018-19 Herbert Katz Fellowship for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for her ongoing project on “Karachi’s Jewish Community”. The books written by her are: the Indian Navy’s Western Fleet coffee table book ‘A Salute to The Sword Arm – A Photo Essay on The Western Fleet’ (April 2007); Our Legacy: the Dwarkadas family of Bombay (March 2018) on the 250-year-old history of the eminent Halai Bhatia Dwarkadas Khimji family of Mumbai, and more recently Bombay’s International Linkages (February 2019), a Gateway House publication. She has also been published in three books: MARG’s ‘Indian Jewish Heritage – Ritual, Life-Cycle & Art’ (2002), One India One People’s book on Communities of India (2006), and recently in Primus Publications Mumbai Socio-Cultural Perspectives: Contributions of Ethnic Groups and Communities (2018), where she has written Chapter 10 on ‘Mumbai’s Jewish Community’. Sifra graduated in English Literature (Hons.) from Elphinstone College, Mumbai, and went on to complete her Bachelor’s in General Law (BGL) from Government Law College, Mumbai. Her earlier career was in journalism with a focus on Bombay and South Asian Jewish history. She is currently a Trustee of the Sir Jacob Sassoon School (Byculla, Mumbai).