Once upon a time in Dehradun, a Chinese man, an Indian wedding

It is no coincidence that the recent shrill political labelling of outsiders and the constant statements against minorities in the state have created an environment where it’s easy to lash out at anyone you think is an outsider. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

When my parents got married in Dehradun many decades ago, my mother was surprised to see the owner of the shop where she regularly bought her shoes dancing enthusiastically in the wedding procession. My father introduced him to her as one of his closest friends who belonged to a Chinese family settled in Dehradun, one of the leading shoemakers in the city. When we were growing up, among the many boyhood stories my father recounted of his friends, our favourite was of a young Kekua uncle watching the late night show of Ashok Kumar’s Kismet some 80 times in a row, coming out of the hall and heading to the Parade Ground to sleep out in the open instead of going home and risking his sleeping family’s anger. A young Chinese-Indian boy spending the night at the park in the centre of the town apparently attracted little attention, definitely no derision, mild curiosity at best and that too probably wore off by the second day of his sleepover-under-the stars.

Nearly eight decades later as 2025 began its gradual slide into the past, residents of Dehradun gathered at a library at the same Parade Ground in the heart of the city on December 30 for a citizens’ condolence meeting for Anjel Chakma, the young student from Tripura who along with his brother was attacked by a group of boys and who later died in hospital. On December 9, when the 24-year-old was out in Dehradun with his younger brother Michael, a group of six, including two juveniles, picked a fight with them and allegedly hurled racial slurs at them, calling them “Chinese” and “momo”. A town that prided itself on its cosmopolitanism suddenly found itself in the midst of the most primitive of all crimes: Picking on someone who you think doesn’t belong.

With people from the hills, a large Nepali population, Tibetans who made their homes and monasteries there after they left Tibet, Punjabi refugees who settled there after Partition and found immense success, a now-dwindling Anglo-Indian community and the many government officers and staffers from all over India who after being posted to Doon decided to put down roots there, it is, ironically, a town where Anjel should have felt at home. It is a city known for its institutions, including the elite Doon School, which with its legacy and pedigree, became a byword for aspiration, spawning a rash of schools called “Doon School” in unlikely lanes and bylanes in towns that had no connection to either the school or the town. Ever since Uttarakhand was carved out of UP in 2000 and Dehradun elevated as its capital, the city has seen a phenomenal growth in private colleges and universities, drawing students from all over the country and even from countries in Africa. But much before this boom, its government colleges got a steady flow of students from the Northeast. It was — and is — common for homes in the neighbourhood of these colleges to rent out to students from the Northeast, primarily from Nagaland and Manipur.

From then to now, the city has changed as has its rhythm and tone. There is more young blood in the city of retirees than ever before but it has also come with a certain brashness, with fights between locals and tourists becoming more frequent. New shiny cafes and restaurants have mushroomed everywhere and Dehradun’s narrow lanes struggle to accommodate its growing traffic. The breakneck pace of so-called development has meant the loss of so many things but it has also spelt opportunities for young boys and girls, from the hills as well as from all over the country. A town already used to being cosmopolitan and modern is now trying to keep pace with New India.

But behind the facade of modernity lies the same tired stereotyping. It is no coincidence that the recent shrill political labelling of outsiders and the constant statements against minorities in the state have created an environment where it’s easy to lash out at anyone you think is an outsider. It’s not as if prejudice didn’t exist earlier, it’s just that it’s so much easier to articulate it publicly and act on it now.

Earlier this year, after the terror attack on tourists in Pahalgam in April, Kashmiri students were heckled by local residents, served an ultimatum to leave over video by a man belonging to an outfit called the Hindu Raksha Dal, prompting them to leave overnight. In Mussoorie, many shawl sellers from Kashmir left after two vendors were attacked, allegedly by locals. In 2023, in another part of Uttarakhand, an abduction case was transformed into one of “love jihad”, a term right-wing organisations use to label marriages of Muslim men and Hindu women, unspooling a chain of events that led to calls for Muslims to leave. In Dehradun, any altercation with a member of the minority community routinely leads to calls for them to leave. In a town where once there were so many outsiders and yet no one was an outsider, new fault lines have been etched.

But there have been pushbacks. This October, when the president of an outfit called the Rashtriya Hindu Shakti Sangathan barged into a room in Rishikesh where a group of girls was rehearsing for the Miss Rishikesh pageant and lectured them about wearing clothes that were against the culture of Uttarakhand, the girls stood their ground. Meanwhile, the murder of Ankita Bhandari, a young receptionist working in Rishikesh, in 2022 has brought together people across the state, demanding justice for her.

This new year, as the snazzy Delhi-Dehradun Expressway gets ready to open, promising to cut the distance between the two capitals and bring more visitors and economic prosperity to the region, let’s hope Dehradun can also build a road that takes it back to its old-world cosmopolitanism and forward to become an inclusive modern city.

The writer is national features editor, The Indian Express. devyani.onial@expressindia.com