Stray Birds reproduces images by the late Parsi photographer Sam Tata that include one of Communist troops entering Shanghai in 1949 after the Kuomintang defeat in the civil war.

"This book is a historical inquiry into which, collectively speaking, decades of research have gone," Saran, a former resident of Shanghai who has previously written about Chinese monk Xuanzang, says over the phone from Hong Kong.

Zhang, an associate professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who has studied the "changing image of Indians among Chinese intellectuals", says the book is an attempt to break away from the earlier view in China, whereby many saw Indians merely as subjects of colonial rule until India attained freedom.

"Here we talk about the Indian identity, the regional identity (in India)," he says.

The city, where the first congress of the Communist Party of China was held in 1921, was among major Chinese ports that the British forced access upon after the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) lost in the First Opium War (1840-42). Shanghai also witnessed a bloody battle in 1937 during the Japanese invasion.