The Sikhs Of Vancouver

The result of an exhaustive analysis of the beliefs and attitudes among three generations of the Sikh community - and having conducted over 100 interviews - Nayar highlights differences and tensions with regards to the role of familial relations, child rearing, and religion.

A century has passed since the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver. Its arrival was a direct challenge to Canada’s immigration laws, which barred immigrants from India – yet the nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers on board the ship had been promised equality with all other British subjects, and they arrived to claim that right. The Voyage of the Komagata Maru is an extensive revision, reappraisal, and expansion of Hugh Johnston’s authoritative history of the Komagata Maru incident, first published in 1979. The updated edition draws in new research – exploring legal issues and the motives of the passengers and their leaders and supporters – and revisits the previous edition’s assessments in light of insight gained over the intervening decades. Now expanded by more than 50 percent, this landmark book is still the only comprehensive historical account of the Komagata Maru incident – a story of immigration, empire, and politics, which Canadians increasingly recognize as a critical moment in this country’s history.

A superbly illustrated book that succinctly describes the social history of the Sikh population in Canada, focusing on their struggles, hardships, and perseverance to live in British Columbia. -BC Historical News

A riveting, incisive account of some of the most complex politics in modern Canada, from the founder of the World Sikh Organization of Canada. An Uncommon Road is the celebration of an extraordinarily resilient people and a moving roadmap for how individuals, and a community, can fight for their own social justice and gain justice for all.

In Jewels of the Qila, Hugh Johnston draws on memoirs and interviews, newspaper articles and photographs, to tell the story of three generations of a remarkable Sikh family and the communities they lived in and supported in both Canada and India. The Siddoos are Punjabi. Kapoor Singh, father and grandfather, arrived in British Columbia in 1912 and had to overcome racial prejudice and legal discrimination to transform himself from labourer to lumber baron. As he campaigned for citizenship and immigration rights for his people, he and his wife, Besant Kaur, fostered in their daughters a vision of service and activism that, as adults, they fulfilled by establishing a family-run hospital in Punjab and by introducing a Westernized version of an Indian spiritual tradition to Canada. The Siddoos are the heart of the story, but their history tells a larger tale of an immigrant community’s triumphs and tribulations and the strong connection that Indo-Canadians continue to forge with their homeland.