AsiaLENS | "THOSE4YEARS" Free Screening & Discussion with Filmmaker Dr Joe Thomas Karackattu

Oct 19, 2026   6:00 pm  
Film Screening
Sponsor
Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, Co-Sponsors: Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and Center for Global Studies
Registration
Registration
Contact
Alex Chun
E-Mail
park387@illinois.edu
Views
1
Synopsis:
The film 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. It 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. It 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. The film is based on fieldwork in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Southern India. It has been screened in the United States (Penn State University, University of Pittsburgh, New School), The United Kingdom ( King's College, SOAS University of London), UAE, Qatar, China (Tsinghua University, Beijing Foreign Studies University), Malaysia (Universiti Malaya) and across India. (52 minutes) 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ox7R2pTqe0 

About the Filmmaker:

Dr Joe Thomas Karackattu is a Professor with the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Madras. He was a Fox Fellow (2008–2009) at Yale University, Centenary Visiting Fellow (2013) at SOAS, University of London and CISLI Fellow with the India-China Institute at the New School, New York (2017-19). Joe studied Economics at St. Stephen's College (Delhi) and Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi). He was awarded the "Srimathi Marti Annapurna Gurunath Award for Excellence in Teaching" 2024 from IIT Madras, and was previously recipient of the "Young Faculty Recognition Award" 2020 at IIT Madras. Besides publishing two books and several journal papers, Prof Karackattu has also made two non-fiction films on India-China relations, which have been screened across top universities globally.  

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