Diasporas and Transnationalisms

The Journey of the Komagata Maru

Anjali Gera Roy, Ajaya Kumar Sahoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351788991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

The Komagata Maru incident has become central to ongoing debates on Canadian racism, immigration, multiculturalism, citizenship and Indian nationalist resistance. The chapters presented in this book, written by established and emerging historians and scholars in literary, cultural, religious, immigration and diaspora studies, revisit the ship's ill-fated journey to throw new light on its impact on South Asian migration and surveillance, ethnic and race relations, anticolonial and postcolonial resistance, and citizenship. The book draws on archival resources to offer the first multidisciplinary study of the historic event that views it through imperial, regional, national and transnational lenses and positions the journey both temporally and spatially within micro and macro histories of several regions in the British Empire. This volume contributes to the emerging literature on migration, mobilities, borders and surveillance, regionalism and transnationalism. Apart from its interest to scholars of diaspora and nationalism, this book will deeply resonate with those interested in imperialism, migration, transnationalism, Punjab and Sikh studies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal South Asian Diaspora.

INTRODUCTION

The journey of the Komagata Maru: national, transnational, diasporic

Anjali Gera Roy^a and Ajaya K. Sahoo^b

^aDepartment of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India; ^bCentre for Study of Indian Diaspora, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India

ABSTRACT
More than a hundred years ago, a Japanese ship called Komagata Maru chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous entrepreneur based in Singapore, carrying 376 Punjabi passengers - largely Sikhs but also some Hindus and Muslims - from Hong Kong was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure and forced to return to Budge Budge near Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, detained or kept under surveillance for years. The Komagata Maru has become the site for the contestation over discriminatory policies regulating South Asian migrations to Canada. While the passengers perceived it as a violent instance of the suppression of the freedom and rights of the loyal subjects of the British Empire, the colonial administration justified its action alleging that seditious activities were being carried out on the chartered ship. The resurrection of the Komagata Maru’s tragic journey in Canadian and Indian national memories foregrounds a number of key contemporary debates related to memory and history; imperialism and resistance; racism, exclusion and inclusion; nation and citizenship; mobilities and immobilities; and emigration and diasporas.

Multiple memories

Memorialisation of the Komagata Maru’s tragic voyage must undoubtedly be attributed to the emergence of memory cultures in the last three decades following the discursive contestation between history and memory and the privileging of memory as offering a corrective to official histories through its personal, local and affective focus. The thrust of the Komagata Maru memorialisation, visible in the spate of conferences, special issues and books emerging in the last two years, appears to be on recovering an alternative archive based on the personal memories (Tatla 2007), published sources such as policy documents (Waraich and Sidhu 2014), material artefacts such as photographs (Kazimi 2012), fictional representations (Bhatia 2015; Murphy 2015) or reinterpretations of official sources (Sohi 2014; Mawani 2015). However, these archival and heuristic projects, while recovering the journey and throwing new light on the events, collectively problematise the dichotomy between the construction of history as impersonal, objective and general and memory as personal, particular, local and subjective as they reveal memory to be equally translocal, mediated, contingent and processual. Central to its memorialisation in several national memories, British, Canadian and Indian, is the politics of memorialisation through public apologies made by the Canadian Prime Ministers Stephen Harper on 3 August 2008 and Justin Trudeau on 18 May 2016 and a number of memorialisations in India that raise important questions about the erasures of official histories and national memories and recoveries, about forgetting and remembering that have an important bearing on both history and memory as well as on imperialism, neo-imperialism, domination, resistance, imaginings of nation, community, race, ethnicity, belonging and citizenship.

While the journey is imbricated in the politics of apology in the case of the Canadian nation coming to terms with its racist past, whose lines of assemblage intersect with its other reconciliations such as those with First Nations owners and with Japanese and Chinese migrants, it is in line with the recovery of other narratives of resistance such as the Ghadr and the Indian National Army put under erasure by the dominant Gandhian narrative of non-violence. Connecting the two memory cultures is a single ethno-religious minority whose privileged mobility originating in imperial histories and displacement in two nations interrogates the idea of nationhood, minorities, diasporas, citizenship and national memory itself. The multiplicity of national, regional, sectarian and resistant memories that have come to bear upon the event is visible to the tug of war between Canadian, Indian and Sikh memories to stake their claims to an event that had remained alive only in Sikh or Ghadri memory. The emphasis on the presence of Sikhs on the ship, directing the apology mainly to the Sikh community, and ending speeches with Sikh religious greetings, which are generally exchanged during a religious event by both Canadian and Sikh leadership, pander to a sectarian minoritarianism. This sharply accentuates the mediated nature of memory that elides the dissolution of sectarian, linguistic and class boundaries on the voyage as well as in the militant movement. Despite its originating in a narrative of Sikh mobility and a regional memory, the Komagata Maru voyage assumed a national, even transnational, dimension, whose implications encompassed Indian, Asian, colonised and non-white people under imperialism and neo-imperialism. Komagata Maru’s appropriation in multiple memories foregrounds the processual, contingent and mediated nature of memory making it as unreliable in making truth claims as history.

Komagata Maru’s national and imperial itineraries

Memories of the Komagata Maru simultaneously speak to both official British imperial and Canadian and Indian nationalist histories. The apology made by Justin Trudeau to the Sikh community appears to contain an event implicated in multiple histories within the framework of Canadian racism and multiculturalism in a revised understanding of the nation state in relation to a particular ethno-religious minority, ignoring the fact that the passengers aboard the ship belonged to different faiths. This is mirrored in the Indian nation state’s capitulation to the Sikh demand for recognition of the ship’s significance in the consolidation of the nationalist movement, which appears to have been motivated by a similar desire to appease an alienated vocal minority within the nation. Finally, the commemoration of the journey in the Sikh memory appropriates it in a Sikh narrative of martyrdom. But the spatial and temporal coordinates of the journey transcend the specific agendas and politics of both Canadian and Indian nation states to suggest a wider imperial network of domination and resistance. New scholarship in history (Sohi 2014), legal studies (Macklin 2011) and sociology (Mongia 1999) has incisively engaged with these imperial networks of control and resistance to throw light on the wider repercussions of the event that transcend limited national, regional or sectarian concerns.

Others have engaged with its specific repercussions on the formation of Canadian or Indian nation states. The focus of this scholarship has largely been on the Canadian nation and its relationship with ethnic and religious minorities foregrounding issues of race and migration through returning to a Canadian history characterised by xenophobia, racism and exclusionary immigration policies. The journey has far-reaching significance for the self-constitution of Canada as a nation of migrants in relation to the differential status of its Anglo-Saxon with respect to other migrants as well as the First Nations in view of its explicit racism in the first 100 years of its existence through being ‘a white man’s country’. Canada’s transition from a racist to a multicultural nation is constantly challenged by such instances of ‘White Canada policy’ to test the limits of its official multiculturalism. Revisiting the Canadian dominion’s denial to admit the Punjabi passengers on grounds of an arbitrary legislation that was specifically formulated to exclude Asians from the space of Canada is a timely stocktaking by the Canadian nation of the way it has defined itself over a century. Its self-image as a migrant nation that has welcomed migrants since its inception is severely tarnished through this telling evidence of policies of selective migration that imposed strong deterrents to Asian migrations while admitting North American and European migrants during the same period. Similarly, its celebrated multiculturalism and the promise of inclusive citizenship are revealed to be a myth in view of the history of exclusion as well as other oceanic movements of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, struggling against and fleeing state violence in search of a better life. As opposed to its early migration acts that were designed to protect the rights of new migrants, the Immigrant Act of 1910 that was modified to specifically debar Asians highlights the selective migration through which Canada defined itself as a nation and continues to do so. The journey continues into the ongoing systemic issues of whiteness or racism in the Canadian government’s recent treatment of brown, migrant bodies. The significance of the journey to the Indian nation has been articulated to repressed narratives of resistance such as Ghadr, with the exclusions encountered during the journey viewed as serving as catalysts for the Ghadr awakening. The Indian state’s memorialisation of the journey not only dovetails into its larger political agenda of recovering counternarratives of nationalist resistance that have been buried under the dominant narrative of Gandhian non-violence, but also calls attention to anti-terrorism laws, in which certain ethnic groups such as Muslims, Sikhs and others continue to be arrested and imprisoned, often without charge. The recovery of people’s stories that supplement, modify or contradict official histories of the nation signals the nation state’s attempt to distance itself from the Nehruvian and Gandhian paradigm that has dominated the imaginings of the Indian nation.

Instead of framing it through the lens of the nation state, the journey of the Komagata Maru may be used to chart imperial itineraries since it was set in motion through the routes opened by the British Empire. The ship’s passengers largely comprised those who had earlier moved out of Punjab in the service of the British army or the police force following their production as ‘a martial race’ under the British Empire. The sense of entitlement expressed by them in demanding the right to move was an effect of imperial relations and the hierarchical arrangement of colonised subjects by the British. The journey cannot be read outside the complex network of rights and obligations accorded by the British to the Sikhs as favoured subjects of the empire. In return for defending the British Empire, a system of rewards through preferential recruitment and grant of lands had been naturalised for nearly half a century that Sikhs had begun to expect as their due. The actions of the British and British Indian government throughout the journey appear to have been governed by this special relationship with their colonised subjects, particularly in view of the need for continuing Sikh support in the First World War. Despite the involvement of several nations, the British imperial state’s scale of operation and concerns exhibit an awareness of its implications for the British Empire in general and British Empire in India in particular. Similarly, the charterer’s acute consciousness of the coloniser’s relationship with different colonised groups and the urge to test the vaunted imperial fair play and the continuous journey regulation underline the journey’s imperial impulse. The composition of the passengers who board the ship from different colonial outposts to seek opportunities in the furthest posits the entire British Empire as their playing field. The symbolic import of the journey lies in its foregrounding of imperial systems of control and resistance by the colonised. The undertaking of the journey threatens the basis of imperial governance and appropriation of different colonised bodies in the maintenance of the empire through exercise of freewill and choice in occupation, movement and settlement. The just demands of the passengers presage the modern discourse of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that accords everyone the ‘right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’. The treatment of the passengers on its onward and return journey by the British imperial government through the involvement of its colonies, underpinned by the anxieties of a fading empire about its diminishing control over its preferred colonised populations, is an attempt to exercise its sovereignty that violates fundamental human rights. On the other hand, the passengers’ awakening during the course of the journey to their real position in the imperial hierarchy leads to their shift of allegiance to the Indian nationalist resistance. Through its acquisition of a central position in the British Empire’s relationship with its colonised subjects, the journey transforms into a signifier of colonised resistance to the imperial forces of domination and control since its larger aim was to consolidate the ghadarite insurrection fighting for India’s liberation from North America or to expose the harsh truth of equal citizenship in the British Empire affirmed by the British Queen half a century earlier. The centrality of the Komagata Maru to the ghadarite movement accords the passengers a key role in India’s struggle for freedom.

Citizenship, mobilities, diasporas

Komagata Maru’s journey foregrounds the definition of citizenship in countries touched by international migration then and now. If citizenship is defined as membership in a political and geographical community and involves a tension between inclusion and exclusion, the exclusion of Komagata Maru and its passengers from Canada can serve as a site for debating the meaning of citizenship and belonging. As a nation of migrants that received a large number of European migrants between 1867 and 1914, the arrival of Komagata Maru challenged ideas of national identity, sovereignty and state control and the basis of citizenship and belonging in Canada. While its professing of civic citizenship based on rights and a universalist, voluntary political membership would in principle have technically offered immigrants a greater chance of inclusion, the implicit exclusion of Asians without overt reference to race confirms the reality of a White Canada and ethnic citizenship as well as the coexistence of inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies. The notion of belonging predicated on the idea of a white Canadian core and the expression of explicitly racist sentiments had wide-ranging implications for Komagata Maru passengers’ legal status and rights on arrival. The apology in Canada fits into the politics of recognition that is part of the Canadian state’s official multiculturalism, but multiculturalism continues to place minority groups in a position of cultural inequality vis-à-vis the majority despite its celebration of racial, cultural and religious diversity (Kymlicka 1995). In the context of the Indian nation, the recognition of the sacrifice of the predominantly Sikh passengers that provided a fillip to a militant form of nationalism hitherto marginalised to the narrative of non-violent resistance is an attempt to deflect criticism of the increasingly Hindu core of the secular nation state. The resignification of the Ghadr revolutionaries and of the Komagata Maru passengers from terrorists and seditionists to martyrs is an indication of the Indian state’s attempt to integrate the displaced Sikh subject. Even though the charterer and the passengers viewed themselves as subjects rather than citizens, their struggle to claim their rights as loyal subjects of the British Empire has important implications for the definition of citizenship, since the denial of the right to move, land or seek employment focuses the rights and obligations discourse underpinning the idea of liberal democracy. The rationale of the journey, as stated by the charterer, was to test the professed liberal sentiments advocated by the British Empire and affirmation of the equality of all its subjects. Gurdit Singh’s entire defence of the ship’s violation of the Continuous Journey regulation made by the dominion of Canada is propped on the rights of the subjects of the empire to move and settle anywhere in the empire. In fact, in claiming their rights as subjects of the empire, the passengers underwrite themselves as citizens of the empire or imperial citizens (Banerjee 2010). It is through the Immigration Act of 1910 that British subjects were differentially defined and that colonial subjects were placed below British-born subjects. The journey reveals the gap between civic and ethnic citizenship and brings to the fore an essential contradiction between the definition of the subject in the imperial regime and an implicit white citizenship through the regulation the imperial government persuaded Ottawa to adopt in order to prevent pro-independence militants from fleeing to Canada. The notion of subjecthood and citizenship within the discourse of liberal humanism concealed its ethnic core through resorting to the cultural assimilation argument and denied full participation to its Sikh and Indian subjects in the empire or in the nation through denial of social citizenship.

The Komagata Maru journey problematises citizenship in relation to mobilities and diasporas in view of the passengers’ claim to be admitted to Canada predicated on their right to move as subjects of the British Empire. In this respect, it extends the understanding of nation, belonging, sovereignty, citizenship to mobile, floating populations who have largely been absent in debates on these issues and the peripatetic niche occupied by nomads, travellers, refugees and asylum seekers. Although Sikh mobility was an effect of the empire, the itineraries of the Sikh soldiers, policemen and free workers chart the route of traditional circular migrants who would periodically move to engage in seasonal work but return home at the end of their peregrinations. The passengers explicitly affirm their economic motivations and intentions to return having earned enough to recover their passage and support their families. The itinerary of the circular migrants displays a triangulation in the Sikh circulation through several territories of the empire that produced webs of empire. The voyage confounds and challenges the sovereignty of nation states since the discourse of citizenship in liberal humanism is formulated within the purview of state borders and guaranteed rights of citizenship. The scope of the journey that transcends the borders of India, Canada and Britain to enfold Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and other imperial territories raises the important question whether rights ought to transcend national boundaries or that individual rights are best guaranteed within the context of the nation state. The limitations of the scope of the legislations pertaining to individual states as being applicable to mobile people and objects called for the hasty addition of new clauses pertaining to the interception of seditious literature, meetings and protests foregrounding the challenges posed by mobilities to both the empire and the nation s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: The journey of the Komagata Maru: national, transnational, diasporic
• 2 Dissident mobilities: the Komagata Maru and Indian travellers in the Empire
• 3 The journey of Komagata Maru: conjuncture, memory and history
• 4 Incorporating regional events into the nationalist narrative: the life of Gurdit Singh and the Komagata Maru episode in postcolonial India
• 5 Komagata Maru episode and the veteran Sikh British soldier’s revolt in the history of Indian nationalism
• 6 Komagata Maru sails from the Far East: cartography of the Sikh diaspora within the British Empire
• 7 A century of miri piri: securing Sikh belonging in Canada
• 8 Remembering Komagata Maru: its many journeys, 1914–2014
• 9 Closely observed ships
• 10 Immobile mobilities and free-flowing Sikh movements from Punjab
• Index