Transmitting Knowledge in-between China, India, and Singapore: Curriculum at Chung Hwa School of Kalimpong, 1941-1960

Kalimpong is located in the Darjeeling region of West Bengal, India, and has historically served as a significant border trading post connecting Yunnan, Tibet, India, and Myanmar. In 1941, patriotic overseas Chinese residents in the area collectively funded the establishment of the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School, with a primary focus on promoting Chinese culture. Previous research focuses primarily on the complex role played the school tangled against the transnational machinations of China-India rivalry. The present study instead examines the less explored educational activity of the school utilizing sources from archives, photographic records, and oral history materials from the descendants of local Chinese, Tibetan, and Hui residents. This study details the school’s curriculum development, textbook selection, languages of instruction, and faculty and student sources in a comparative study with other contemporaneous Chinese schools based in Calcutta and beyond over its nearly two decades of operation. Particularly, the Chung Hwa school not only enrolled children of local Sino-Tibetan and other ethnic Chinese merchants, as well as offspring of Chinese diaspora who arrived during wartime, but also opened its doors to local students from Nepalese and Bengalis families, thus becoming a vital educational center in the region. Furthermore, the textbook source at the school reveals a particular connection with Singapore instead of Calcutta in the 1940s, providing a new perspective to examine the transportation route and network in postwar time.