Abstract:
[THOSE 4 YEARS; 2021; 52 mins]: The Nilgiris have gained the distinction of being a geographic indication for tea today. Somewhere behind the present glory is a remote connection with the Chinese which remains forgotten. "Those 4 Years" is an amazing journey into the lives of those Chinese who came to India around the middle of the 19th century... speaking a language unknown to their neighbours when they first arrived. The film journeys across three countries and reams of colonial office records to retrace the places those people came from, the means and mode of their arrival, and how many of them ended up making India their home. Based on extensive fieldwork in Tamil Nadu and Malaysia, and archives in Hong Kong, the film is a history of people, plants and places - as it catalogues their contributions to plantations, locates places and sites associated with their earliest arrival and stay and, more remarkably, manages to locate some of the descendants of those Chinese who arrived in India over 150 years ago.