In 1914, Gurdit Singh, a Sikh entrepreneur based in Singapore,
chartered a Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru, to carry
Indian immigrants to Canada. On May 23, 1914, the
ship arrived in Vancouver Harbour with 376 passengers
aboard: 340 Sikhs; 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus. Many
of the men on-board were veterans of the British Indian
Army and believed that it was their right as British
subjects to settle anywhere in the Empire they had
fought to defend and expand. They were wrong...
Continuous Journey is an inquiry into
the largely ignored history of Canada's exclusion
of the South Asians by a little known immigration
policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of
1908. Unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, people
from British India were excluded by a regulation that
appeared fair, but in reality, was an effective way
of keeping people from India out of Canada until 1948.
As a direct result, only a half-mile from Canadian
shores, the Komagata Maru was surrounded by immigration
boats and the passengers were held in communicado
virtual prisoners on the ship. Thus began a
dramatic stand-off which would escalate over the course
of two months, becoming one of the most infamous incidents
in Canadian history.
During their two-month detention in the harbour,
Canadian authorities drove the passengers to the
brink of thirst and starvation. The stand-off was
broken with the intervention of Prime Minister Robert
Borden who also called in a Canadian battleship
to underline his stance. On 21 July, over two-hundred
fully armed local militia lined the shore, while
The Rainbow, prepared for confrontation on the sea.
All of Vancouver was out for the spectacle. Major
confrontation was averted through eleventh-hour
negotiations, and in the end, provisions for the
Komagata Maru's return journey were provided.
The consequences of the incident were dire: informants
within the community were murdered, and a key player
for the Empire was assassinated. Upon its return
to India, the Komagata Maru encountered hostile
British authorities who fired on the passengers,
suspecting them to be seditious. Over forty people
went missing or were killed. Some of the passengers
escaped, including Gurdit Singh, who lived to tell
the "true story" of the Komagata Maru.
Several hundreds of Indians from Canada
returned home to join an armed struggle against the
British, that would later be brutally crushed by the
colonial authorities.
The Komagata Maru's voyage and its aftermath exposed
the Empire's myths of equality, fair-play and British
justice, and became a turning point in the freedom
struggle in India.
By examining the global context and repercussions
of a Canadian event, Continuous Journey challenges
us to reflect on contemporary events, and raises critical
questions about how the past shapes the present.
