Making A Difference

The Silence Of The Waves

The startlingly tragic fate of the Komagata Maru, buried so long, is being recognised by the premier of a formerly racist nation

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The Silence Of The Waves
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A Wrong Remembered

  • In Budge Budge, there is a Komagata Maru memorial about the Indians killed on their return
  • One of two memorials in Vancouver is at Coal Harbour, where the ship had docked
  • A 2008 apology by Canada PM Stephen Harper in England triggered apologies in Br. Col. legislature

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Bhagwan Singh Gyanee was a wandering sort. Around a 100 years back, the village boy from Amr­itsar was exploring Southeast Asia and Latin America, finally landing up in the US. A Ghadar Party member, he wanted to spread ideas of revolution and armed struggle to overthrow the British Raj. On the Komagata Maru, he found a captive audience.

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The Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship chartered in Hong Kong in January 1914 by Gurdit Singh Sandhu, a Ghadarite, set sail for Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada, by way of Shanghai and Yokohama. Meant to ferry passengers who wanted to emigrate to Canada, Gurdit planned to circumvent one of Canada’s racist exclusion laws aimed at Asian immigrants—the continuous journey regulation. The rule prohibited immigration of persons who “did not come from their country of birth/citizenship by a continuous journey”. Due to the huge distance between India and Canada, the law made it impossible for any ship originating from India to reach Canada ‘continuously’, without a stop. Of the 376 passengers on the Komagata Maru, 340 were Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus, mos­­tly from Punjab. Gyanee had been dep­orted from Canada and had advice for them.

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A recent play, Komagata Maru: Forgotten Heroes by S.N. Sevak, narrates the scene that unfolded when the ship reached Vancouver in May 1914: “Have you heard of a ship that safely sailed but never reached the shore? She weathered all storms on the sea but failed to face the rough weather on the land. Her passengers shouted and shouted but all in vain.

They shouted for their right to land!
They shouted for food and water!!
They shouted for justice and honour!!!

But they got the reply:

Chorus: Go back! Go back!! Go back!!!”

Too dramatic? But that’s exactly what happened. The Can­­adian authorities did not allow the Kom­agata Maru to dock or the passengers to go ashore. This cruellest of acts has barely been acknowledged. That is, till now. This month, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau will publicly apologise for Canada’s institutional heartlessness.

Finally, Gyanee’s fascinating story will be heard. His 79-year-old grandson, Surinder Pal Singh, has made it his life’s project to chronicle the firebrand’s life. From foreign archives and his grandfather’s papers, Surinder has put together enough material. He explains that the feisty Gyanee was bristling from the insult of deportation. On board the Komagata Maru, he proceeded to lecture the passengers about what they might be in for. Gyanee was in hiding in Yokohama, Japan, staying with the Ghadar party leader Barkatullah. Gyanee himself was president of the Ghadar—set up by Punjabi settlers in the US and Canada, and one of the earliest to demand total independence—from 1914 to 1920.

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The Inheritor

Surinder Pal Singh in the US

When Gyanee and Barkatullah heard the ship was docking in the city to pick up pas­sengers, they decided to go on board and give them something to chew on while they crossed the fathomless Pacific. “I know from records that Gyanee gave two speeches on board. He told them to go ahead with the journey unafraid, and said  it was their right to go as they were all British subjects, and so could travel to other parts of the Empire as well. He told them they might die but should die like men,” says Surinder.

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There was much for the passengers to be scared about, and not much they could prepare for. By attempting to defy the ‘continuous journey’ regulation, they were flying in the face of Canada’s Immigration Act of 1910. The act also prescribed that every ‘Asiatic immigrant’ was expected to have 200 Canadian dollars—a huge sum a century back—at the time of entry to Canada.

Archival material suggests that revolutionary literature of the Ghadar Party was distributed on board at Yokohama as well. For Gyanee, previously taken to task for ‘seditious’ articles and speeches, this was no new offence. One book, published in 1917, describes Gyanee’s speech on the Kom­­agata Maru as a “spirited address to passengers advising them to rise against the British government in India”. A judgement from the Lahore Conspiracy case del­­ivered in 1917 speaks of “the notorious Bhawgan Singh granthi”, who “delivered a violent oration, urging that the British should be expelled from India, as force was the only means to achieve their ends”.

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Though fortified with Gyanee’s words of revolutionary fervour, the 376 passengers must surely have tempered their optimism of a better life in Canada.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Canadian port authorities and the government virulently opposed (media articles and townhall meetings whipped up racist sentiment among the public) to even let the passengers disembark. After two months of detention, negotiations and fighting a legal case, the passengers realised that they had no choice but to take their weary selves back to India.

However, Gyanee’s contact with the Kom­­­agata Maru did not end with his on-board  declamations in Yokohama. On the day the ship reached Canada, he was in San Francisco. From there, he and other Ghadar members attempted to smuggle arms to the ship. They anticipated violence and intended to be able to respond to it. In later life, the Komagata Maru’s fate remained part of Gyanee’s writing and speeches.

It’s hard to decide if the rabid racism the passengers faced in Canada, or the cir­cumstances of their homecoming, was worse. For even before they rea­ched India, their audacity to take on Canadian law earned British ire—they were seen as seditionists threatening the empire’s security and branded as traitors. Ironically, the Raj fell back on more of the same punitive medicine—they decided to use provisions of the Ingress Into India Ordinance of 1914, which restricted the lib­­erty of persons entering the state.

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Ghadar Party leader Bhagwan Singh Gyanee

Photograph by Jitender Gupta

The Komagata Maru sailed in through the Hooghly from the Bay of Bengal. The British had arranged for a train to Punjab for the passe­ngers. They docked at Budge Budge, off Calcutta, where, aware of their plans, British authorities were lying in wait. The police attempted to storm the ship and arrest Gurdit Singh Sandhu, perceived as the ringleader. The others, tho­­ugh greatly weakened by their long ord­eal, resisted. Violence broke out, and shots were fired from both sides. In the firefight, 26 people were killed, including 19 passengers. Others were imprisoned and kept under surveillance for years.

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The 100-year-old incident gains significance in the world we inhabit. The streams of economic/political refugees from Africa and Syria, striving to reach Italy from north Africa across the choppy Mediterranean, or Greece from Turkey, are in a way linked to the Komagata Maru’s passengers. And, barring the first flush of European hospita­bility, the reception they received is not that different either.

“In India then, these people were undergoing great hardship, with no land or jobs and suffering from disease. So they were desperate to get out,” explains Surinder. But the white community was wary of an influx. “Indians worked hard and for low wages. So the whites opposed them entering and taking away their jobs,” he says.

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Perhaps this is why the fact that the Canadian PM is going to apologise for the incident is not merely an exercise in highlighting a footnote of history. His apology matters. It matters that racist wrongs are acknowledged and called out. It matters to millions in history who have suffered at the hands of colonialism. It matters to present-day governments who use harsh policies against refugees. Lastly, it matters to Canada’s Sikh comm­unity, whose forebears all crossed the seas on ships like Komagata Maru, and who now represent about one per cent—an influen­tial min­ority—of Canadian society. Trudeau recently quipped that he has more Sikhs in his cabinet (four, to be precise) than does Narendra Modi. In addition, 17 Sikh MPs were elected last October.

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However, Trudeau’s apology is not the lone Canadian voice to speak out. Forty years ago, Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock’s The Komagata Maru Incident raised a pitiless lens on Canada’s institutional racism, forcing audiences to confront it in all its ugly specifics. The play has recently been translated into Punjabi by Vancouver-based poet Ajmer Rode.

“The apology is important as what hap­pe­­ned with the passengers was wrong. Canada’s biggest crime was that they made us unwelcome. But why won’t Britain, under whom millions died of plague and starvation, apologise?” asks Surinder, tou­ching on the debate in post-colonial states about reparations and apologies. Surinder, who has migrated to the US and lives in Georgia, says, “This is just symbolic. But as Sikhs we have power in Canada. We have four ministers. Street signs are written in Punjabi. Why were we mistreated before? Because we had no votes. Now, we have numbers, so this is why the Canadian prime minister cares. And this is why there is no room for discrimination anymore.”

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By Anoo Bhuyan in Solan

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