History is like a thin, bright ribbon—only the small portion we manage to save. What survives are the names, dates, and victories of a tiny fraction of humanity. Everything else sinks into the vast dark: the unrecorded lives, the unspoken griefs, and the unnoticed exchanges that once shaped entire worlds. For every story that enters our collective memory, a million others fall soundlessly away.
Yet now and then, someone bends down into that darkness with patient hands and retrieves a story that should never have been lost. Joe Thomas Karackattu, a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras, is one of those rare seekers—someone who followed faint traces across centuries and uncovered some crucial, forgotten threads of human exchange between India and China, woven over the past 700 years.
Kerala’s ports—especially Kollam (Quilon), Kozhikode (Calicut), and Kochi (Cochin)—once sat at the heart of the ancient Spice Route, drawing Chinese merchants and envoys from the Song and Yuan dynasties. The most active phase of this contact came under Admiral Zheng He of the Ming dynasty, whose seven treasure-fleet voyages (1405–1433) included repeated stops in Kerala. These missions are believed to have introduced fishing techniques embedded in artefacts such as the cheena vala (Chinese fishing nets), still iconic in Kochi. Language and local traditions preserve these traces too—cheena chatti (Chinese wok) and Cheenam Palli (a mosque at Panthalayani in Kozhikode) are among the fossilised markers of that exchange. And what moved along those routes wasn’t just spices, technologies, and ideas—but people as well.
“Being from South India, I was familiar with our region’s long history of maritime contact with China,” says Karackattu. While the Song and Yuan periods witnessed maritime outreach, it is during the Ming period that tribute missions to India became regular. The Ming Shilu (the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty) records envoys from the city-states travelling back on return trips, including from Calicut, Quilon, Cochin, Samudra, Malacca, Hormuz, among other places. Karackattu triangulated these sources with extensive fieldwork and interviews with historians. One Chinese scholar specializing in the Ming era told him of a reference she had seen to an ambassador from “Guli” who had come to China and left behind a commemorative tablet in Fujian. Many scholars would describe migration in general, others would discuss Indian-origin inter-group exchanges but none too specific. Gradually, through contacts, friends, and local intermediaries—most of whom had no specific expertise on Calicut’s past – the list of respondents were narrowed and eventually allowed for snowballed interviews. After nearly 20,000 kilometres of travel – there was respite when the search was zoomed-in on a family in southern China in Guilin (Guangxi province), that went by the name of ‘Ma family’ (with a distinct ‘Guli’ prefix).
From there, he began speaking to people both in Kerala and in China to trace this family. Gradually, through contacts, friends, and local intermediaries—none of whom were historians and none of whom had any particular interest in Calicut’s past—the search narrowed. “They would ask around through their own networks: Has anyone heard of such a family? That informal snowballing eventually led us to Guangxi province, particularly a place called Guinan,” says Karackattu.
Karackattu decided to turn this entire search into a documentary film, despite having no background in directing. He spent hours watching YouTube tutorials to learn the basics. He experimented with framing, relying on a kind of street-smart improvisation to capture the feel of his journey from Kerala to Shanghai, Beijing, and eventually Guangxi. Back then, dashcams were not common, so he fixed the camera onto his car dashboard with 20-rupee double tape so it could record him as he drove.
China helped him in unexpected ways. Recordkeeping there was systematic, especially from the Qing dynasty onward. Families maintained jiapu—written genealogies that preserved lineages with remarkable detail. Karackattu managed to lay his hands on the Jiapu (record of family ancestry) of the “Guli Ma family”, which the family meticulously maintained. It was a revelation - the Ma family traced its ancestry to a man named Ma Like – believed to be a variation of ‘Malik’ or ‘Maliki’—who is recorded to have come from Guli, or Calicut, seven centuries ago as per the family Jiapu (record of family ancestry), marrying a local thereafter.
Since it was a two-way movement of people, Karackattu had already scoured sites in Kerala where he met and interviewed individuals who had fascinating accounts of their family connections to China (mostly through trade). The cephalic head shape and visual features stunned Karackattu. “Their stories were based on oral lore. They can’t prove it, but their narratives preserve the cultural memory of that connection,” he says. In China, by contrast, documentation offered a sturdier bridge.
The search took more than two years before he finally reached the descendants of the Indian man who had voyaged to China. Then, in December 2015, the ribbon of history he had been holding widened into a doorway—Karackattu met the 14th generation of the “Guli Ma” family.
“They were a very simple, middle-class family,” he recalls. “You could tell from their furniture and the setting. They had kept Chinese tea and cut fruits ready for me. They were clearly expecting me and were thrilled, because my friends had already arranged the meeting.”
He had wondered whether his being Indian might cause discomfort, given the fraught political climate between the two countries. Instead, they welcomed him warmly. They were more excited, in fact, to meet a Malayali for the first time. The man traced his ancestry back to Kerala; his wife, though not part of that lineage, extended the same warmth. She used a charming phrase for Karackattu and her husband saying the two were: lao xiang—“old fellow villagers.”
Karackattu remembers the moment vividly. “I felt immense satisfaction that two years of effort had finally led to something concrete—tangible proof, ancestral records, a living family. And at the same time, I was moved by how, despite centuries of intermarriage and complete genetic change, they still took pride in their Malayali ancestry.”
Their genealogical records showed that the fourth and fifth generations of the family had worked for the Ming court; the eleventh generation prospered in business.
The meeting made him reflect on the enormity of that original journey. Someone from Kerala had crossed the seas seven centuries earlier, settled in a new land, learned a new language, and built a life that endured through fourteen generations. “Today we talk about migration in terms of remittances or globalization,” he says. “Back then it was sheer bravery.”
When he told the family that people in Kerala would be thrilled to meet them, they smiled but said their health would not allow such long-distance travel anymore. Still, he made sure they knew how much their story meant back home. His documentary Guli’s Children premiered in Calicut in 2016 and has travelled the world since.
After completing Guli’s Children, another unusual episode of exchange between China and India drew Karackattu’s attention. One thread that stirred his curiosity was the claim that the Chinese had introduced tea to the Nilgiris. As he dug into timelines and compared them with developments in northern India—including the “tea history” linking Chinese from Shanghai to Garhwal—he concluded that the more accurate story involved the British using convicted Chinese workers to introduce cinchona plantations in the Nilgiris.
This time, Karackattu was far better prepared and technically more confident in filming his documentary. He titled it Those 4 Years, referring to the period from 1865 to 1869 when prisoners from the Straits Settlements—British colonies in Southeast Asia—were transported to the Madras Presidency. Triangulating archival records from Malaysia, Hong Kong and Tamil Nadu, revealed the fascinating insight of a small number of Chinese convicts sent to the Nilgiris to work on construction of iconic institutions such as the Lawrence School and also the Cinchona plantations. The records revealed distinct dialects not limited to the Straits Settlements—evidence that it was a Chinese cohort within the transported population from different sites. While most convicts were sent back, some were allowed to remain in India - strangers to the language and culture and yet making India their home.
Though strangers to the language and culture, these Chinese men remained in India. They married local Tamil women, worked on tea and coffee plantations, and sold dairy products, according to their descendants in India. Those 4 Years, which premiered in 2021, was screened in China for the first time recently, with two showings in Beijing.
Both documentaries were entirely self-funded. But for Karackattu, the work is not about money—it is about unearthing stories from the past that can shift the perspectives of the present so that the future can be imagined with greater clarity.