Imperialism and Sikh Migration

The Komagata Maru Incident

Anjali Roy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138632516
• eBook ISBN: 9781351802970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi regionali

In the Punjab, Pakistan, a culture of migration and mobility already emerged in the nineteenth century. Imperial policies produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs, who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in South East Asia, Australia, America and Canada. The practices of the British Indian government and the Canada government offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty.

This book focuses on the Komagata Maru episode of 1914: This Japanese ship was chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Sikh businessman from Malaya. It carried 376 passengers from Punjab and 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 Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance. The author isolates juridical procedures, tactics and apparatus of security through which the British Empire exercised power on imperial subjects by investigating the significance of this incident to colonial and postcolonial migration. Juxtaposing public archives including newspapers, official documents and reports against private archives and interviews of descendants the book analyses the legalities and machineries of surveillance that regulate the movements of people in the old and new Empire.

Addressing contemporary discourse on neo-imperialism and resistance, migration, diaspora, multiculturalism and citizenship, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of diaspora studies, post colonialism, minority studies, migration studies, multiculturalism and Sikh /Punjab and South Asian studies.

1
Free-flowing cartographies

I’m a wanderer whose name is Qalandar, I’ve neither home, nor goods, nor kitchen. When day comes, I wander round the world; when night falls, I lay my head on a brick.

(Baba Tahir Uryan, quoted in Srivastava 2013: 22)

Introduction

Movement and mobilities have been conventionally regarded as modern, western, male and middle-class phenomena propelled by political, economic and technological transformations. Contemporary narratives of mobility have been dominated by elite movements of highly skilled cosmocrats, professionals and well-heeled tourists shuttling between multiple geographical locations for work or pleasure and throw light on the centrality of issues of movement – of people, objects, capital and information – in the global era. However, these mobilities discourses, while making a perfunctory reference to earlier mobilities, have tended to marginalize movements of premodern travellers and mobile groups, particularly those from the east. Even though improved communication and transportation technologies have infinitely accelerated and expanded multiple mobilities, neither mobilities nor the mobility niche were invented by the modern or postmodern west. New mobilities literature has, therefore, attempted “to free the related term ‘travel’ from a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational, meanings and practices” (Clifford 1997: 33) through documenting the movements of non-elite western and non-western travellers, explorers and migrants including women.

According to the eighteenth-century legend of Sohni Mahiwal, one of the four tragic romances of Punjab, Shehzada Izzat Baig, a rich trader from Bokhara, halted in Gujrat, a village in Punjab on the caravanserai route. Here he spotted Sohni, the beautiful daughter of potter Tullah belonging to the kumhar [potter] caste, and was so smitten by her that he would initially buy all the pots made by her father and subsequently stayed on in the village by taking up employment in Tulla’s household as mahiwal [a buffalo herder]. This founding narrative maps the geography of Punjab on a history of flows, crossings, travels and mobilities rather than on moorings, fixity or closure. As India’s historic borderland, the rivers and passes of Punjab, a region divided between present-day India and Pakistan, has witnessed multiple, multi-directional, ancient and medieval mobilities of travellers, invaders, traders, entertainers and proselytizers that account for the coexistence of sedentarism and mobility in Punjab’s traditional socio-economic, cultural and religious structures. Periodic visits of wandering minstrels, entertainers, workers, nomadic tribes and pastoral tribes integrated “customary strangers” in the Punjabi rural economy and made mobility a way of life (Berland and Rao 2004: 2).

This chapter provides an overview of precolonial and colonial mobilities of multi-resource nomads, traders and seers who had frequently crossed Punjab’s porous, permeable boundaries in the past. Using free-flowing cartographies as a metaphor to describe the free movements of nomadic, trading or mendicant communities across Punjab’s shifting and intersecting boundaries as well as the oscillations of pastoral tribes inhabiting the bar regions between its rivers, it argues that the valorization of mobility by these communities accounts for the prolonged co-presence of mobility with sedentarism in Punjab. It demonstrates that British imperial policies signalled the closure of the mobile niche even as they forced new mobilities and proposes that nineteenth century Punjabi imperial mobilities be situated within this longer history of Punjabi mobilities that included Hindus and Muslims in addition to Sikhs.

Precolonial mobilities

In contrast to mobilities forced through statist formations and driven by imperial capitalist or military agendas, Punjab’s free-flowing cartographies carry the trace of multiple ancient, medieval and modern mobilities across its rivers and passes. Unlike the oceanic movements of Sikhs accelerated by imperial policies, precolonial movements of diverse groups from Punjab across the land routes date back to several centuries, beginning with those of the nomadic khanabadosh¹ communities between Punjab and Central Asia who carried both goods and cultures across its porous boundaries. While the khanabadosh were driven further to Eastern Europe in the eleventh century AD due to their persecution by Muslim invaders, they continued to travel to Punjab until the closure of the peripatetic niche following the formation of the borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition to those of multi-resource nomadic communities, itinerant pedlars and lobana and Pushtun powindah transporters, carriers and loaders who functioned along the silk route,² the movements of Multani, Shikarpuri, Amritsari and Hoshiarpuri Hindu Lala and Khatri merchants who followed the Kabul-Balkh-Khotan, Multan-Qandhar or the Bokhara-Afghanistan-Punjab route, which were preceded, accompanied and followed by the peregrinations of Sufi and Sikh saints, mendicants and minstrels, predate and expand Punjabi narratives of mobility by several centuries.³

Nomadic mobilities

New evidence has resulted in scholarly consensus on the origins of the Roma people, or gypsies as they were popularly known, which lie in northwest India or present-day Pakistan.⁴ These claims have been made on the basis of linguistic evidence, the similarity of the Romany language, spoken by approximately 3.5 million Roma people, to Punjabi and lahndi (Hancock 2006; Owens 2007: 92), which has been corroborated by genomic research (Nelson 2012). The Roma migration appears to have been continuous and has been broadly classified into three waves: the first wave beginning around the fifth century from Punjab to Persia, the second from southwest Asia to Europe in the ninth century and the third in the eleventh century. Notwithstanding the lack of consensus with respect to the century in which the migrations began, scholars concur that the movement of the Roma might have begun as early as the sixth century to southwest Asia and from the ninth century to parts of Europe. The Roma, who are believed to have fled Punjab to escape Islamic persecution and earned their living as entertainers, metalworkers and soldiers in Europe, are descendants of the “multi-resource nomads” or khanabadosh people that Joseph Berland views as occupying the indigenous peripatetic niche of paryatan that he views as different from that of conventional nomadism (1983: 26). Berland points out that mobility is regarded as an essential feature of individual and group identity and its loss a major source of shame, dishonour, respect and well-being among the qalandar in Pakistan (2003: 110–11).⁵

The history of the earliest khanabadosh mobility has been derived from Arab and Persian sources, the texts of Hamza al-Isfahani, Ferdowsi and Al-Talibi Roma composed around 1000 AD, which suggest that Punjabi migration might have begun as early as the fifth century AD. According to Arab historian Hamza al-Isfahani (961 AD), Shah Bahram V. Gur (420–438 AD), bemoaning the absence of singers in his land, is believed to have requested the Emperor of India to send him musicians, who responded by sending 12,000 singers to Persia from India:

The King let work his people for half a day, and ordered them for the remaining half day to rest, to eat varied types of food, to drink and to relax. He encouraged his subjects to be accompanied by music and songs when drinking. … One day the King passed a group of people who were drinking without any singer. So he said strictly, “Haven’t I ordered that during drinking orgies song performances must not be neglected?” The people bowed to the sovereign and answered, “We have looked for any singers all around here but we were disposed to pay them more than 100 Dirham, so we could not find anyone.” Immediately, the King asked for a quill and some paper and wrote to the King of India in view of a singer. The latter sent him 12,000 singers who Varhan Gor, (Bahram Gur), spread all over his empire. There they married and had descendants, of whom – even if of a small number – there still remains. They are of the tribe of the Zott.

(Gilsenbach 1997: 23)

This is corroborated by Ferdowsi in Shah Nameh, the Persian national epic completed in 1011 AD, even though he puts the number at 10,000 musicians:

All governors of the province of the Shah reported to him that the poor people were lamenting about the fact that the rich people were drinking their wine accompanied by music, and that they were looking down on the poor ones who had to drink without any music. Consequently the Shah sent a messenger on a dromedary to Sheng il, and had him bring a letter containing the following: “Choose ten thousand Luris, men and women, who know how to play the lute.”

(Kenrick 1998: 18–19)

A third version of this incident was recorded by Arab historian Al-Talibi in his “History of Persian Kings” in which the number of musicians is further reduced to 4,000 (1020 AD):

One evening, when he (Bahram Gur) came back from hunting, he passed a group of subjects who were sitting in the grass and were eating and drinking. He asked, why they did not have any music since music makes the spirit happy. They answered: “Oh King, we looked for musicians for 100 Dirham, but we could not find one.” So Bahram said, “We will procure you one!”, and he ordered a writer to write a letter to the Indian Shankalat and to ask him to send four thousand of the best musicians and best singers to his court. Shankalat did so and Bahram distributed them throughout the whole kingdom and requested from the people to take up their service, to enjoy their art and to pay them appropriate reward. And it is from them that the dark Luri derive who know to play the flute and the lute so well.

(Kenrick 1998: 18)

Although the historical accuracy of these sources may be unreliable, they confirm that the movements of certain groups from Punjab had been in place for several centuries before the composition of these texts. In the fashion of legend, these accounts attribute the banishment of the migrants to a curse following their failure to settle down as cultivators:

When the Luris arrived, the Shah welcomed them and gave each of them an ox and a donkey because he wanted them to become farmers. He gave them as much corn as a thousand donkeys were able to carry because they would til the land with their ox and donkeys, sow the corn and gather in the harvest and play for the poor for free. The Luris moved away and ate the ox and the corn. At the end of the year they returned, their cheeks being pale. The Shah told them, “You should not have wasted the seeds. Now you have only your donkeys. Load them with your properties, take your instruments and string them with strings of silk.” Even today, these Luris are migrating around the world in order to earn their living, they are sleeping side by side with the dog and the wolf; permanently moving they are stealing by day and by night.

(Kenrick 1998: 18–19)

Although there is some reference to the presence of the Roma in the eleventh century, it is only in the twelfth century that reliable Hungarian and Slovak records confirm the settlement of the Roma and their movement in the following few decades.

Since the movement of Roma people began centuries ago and the Roma have been assimilated into the nations to which they moved, their migrations have remained ignored until recently. But Ferdowsi’s use of the term luri to describe immigrants and the claim that they belong to a caste called Zotts [Jat] strongly suggests a Punjabi origin for the luri and an indigenous category though which mobilities may be theorized. Irrespective of their historical veracity, the movement of the Roma people that originated in the indigenous niche of the khanabadosh [house on shoulder], ramanta [roaming] or ghumantu [itinerant] can provide key categories for conceptualizing mobility as well as historicizing Punjab mobilities.

Mendicant mobilities

Although the travels of Sikh gurus beginning with Guru Nanak have become emblematic of proselytizing movements from Punjab, they must be seen as emerging from Punjab’s wandering mendicant mobilities that might have begun earlier. Known by several na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Free-flowing cartographies
• 2 Oceanic movements of Sikhs in the nineteenth century
• 3 Sikhs in Canada
• 4 Immobile mobilities and free-flowing Sikh movements
• 5 Making and unmaking of strangers
• 6 Resistant subjects
• 7 Pastoral cosmopolitanisms
• Conclusion
• Index