The Komagata Maru

A law with a hole in it

Canada’s continuous journey regulation required immigrants to arrive by an unbroken passage from their country of origin. No shipping line ran such a service from India, which was the point: the rule excluded Indians without ever naming them, at a moment when Indians were, in law, British subjects with the same standing as any other.³

Gurdit Singh, a Sikh businessman in Hong Kong, chartered a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, to sail directly. The voyage was a legal test dressed as a commercial one.

Two months at anchor

She reached Vancouver in late May 1914 with 376 passengers aboard — 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus, all from Punjab.³

They were not allowed to land. The ship was held in the harbour through the summer while a legal challenge went forward, supported and provisioned by the local Sikh community — the same community that had built the gurdwara at Abbotsford three years earlier, and the Khalsa Diwan Society gurdwara in Vancouver in 1908. Conditions aboard deteriorated badly: food and water ran short, and passengers were kept from shore for weeks in a harbour in a city whose newspapers were campaigning against them.^3,4

The court ruled against the passengers in early July. On 23 July 1914 the ship was escorted out of Canadian waters under naval guard. Twenty-odd passengers who could establish prior residence were landed; the rest sailed.³

Budge Budge

She reached Budge Budge, near Calcutta, at the end of September. The British Indian authorities had by then decided the returning passengers were political — the voyage had been widely reported and the Ghadar movement was active among Punjabis abroad — and moved to arrest Gurdit Singh and put the others on a train to Punjab under guard.

There was a confrontation on the riverbank, and police and troops fired into the crowd. Around twenty passengers were killed. Some two hundred were imprisoned without charge; others went into hiding.^1,3

What the numbers do

Accounts differ on the details, and the differences are worth stating rather than smoothing over. Canadian sources give the arrival as 22 or 23 May and the Budge Budge deaths as sixteen to twenty-two; Indian accounts generally give 29 September and around twenty killed.^3,4

The disagreement is a symptom of how the event was recorded — by an immigration bureaucracy on one side and a colonial police action on the other, neither with much interest in a careful count of the people involved.

Afterwards

The Komagata Maru did more to radicalise Punjabis abroad than any pamphlet. It demonstrated, in a way that was hard to argue with, that imperial subjecthood carried rights that evaporated on contact with a white settler colony — and a good number of the men who had waited in that harbour, or read about it, went into the Ghadar movement afterwards.

Canada apologised for it twice: in the British Columbia legislature and by the prime minister in 2008, and again in a formal apology in Parliament in 2016.³