Voices Of Komagata Maru

Early twentieth-century Calcutta was not just a point of passage within the British Empire, but a key center of colonial power; a crucial laboratory of imperial repressive practices cultivated and applied elsewhere. Histories of the Komagata Maru or the Ghadar Movement offer rewarding perspectives on Punjabi Sikh migrants, but fail to adequately investigate why the ship was brought to Bengal; why overwhelming locally organized imperial vigilance was imposed on ships that arrived soon afterward; and the extent to which the operation of the repressive colonial state apparatus influenced the intersections of anticolonial strands in Calcutta and its surroundings during 1914-15. This monograph traces this early wartime clash of positions and the organized postwar transmission of the memory of the Komagata Maru as a symbol of resistance among the Sikh workers in the industrial centers of southwest Bengal. It acts as a link in a chain of scholarship that has hitherto traced the spread of radical anticolonial currents among the Punjabi Sikh diaspora that connected Punjab with Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Americas.

In 1914, the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver Harbour and was detained for two months. Most of its 376 passengers were then forcibly returned to India. Unmooring the Komagata Maru challenges conventional Canadian historical accounts by drawing from multiple disciplines and fields to consider the international and colonial dimensions of the voyage. By situating South Asian Canadian history within a global-imperial context, the contributors offer a critical reading of Canadian multiculturalism through past events and their commemoration. A hundred years later, the voyage of the Komagata Maru has yet to reach its conclusion.

A play.

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.

"This publication brings together documentation from the art exhibition Ruptures in Arrival: Art in the Wake of the Komagata Maru [April 12 to June 15, 2014] and the symposium Disfiguring Identities: Art, Migration and Exile [May 10 and 11th, 2014]. These two related projects that both took place at the Surrey Art Gallery features mainly Canadian contemporary artists who are engaged in their respective art practices in the subject matter of migration, race, racism, particularly as it pertains to Asian Canadian identity and Canadian identity at large. Many of the artworks in the exhibition and projects discussed at the symposium responded to the history of the Komagata Maru incident in which 376 Indian migrants (primarily Sikhs) attempted to come to Canada in 1914 but were turned away by Canadian and British Columbia officials. Other participants in the exhibition and symposium made artwork responding to the histories of other migrant ships that had come to Canada from Asia in more recent decades: the ship MV Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea that carried over 550 Sri Lankan Tamil passengers collectively in 2009 and 2010, and the four ships that carried 600 Chinese migrants to British Columbia's coast in 1999. Like the exhibition and symposium, the publication features reproductions of painting, drawing, photography, video art, short film, installation art, and music composition and incorporates many voices of participating artists and curators from across Canada."--

Explores how refugees were used as agents of nation-building in India, leading to gendered and caste-ridden policies of rehabilitation.

This new and expanded edition offers the most thoroughly researched account of the notorious Komagata Maru incident. The event centres on the ship's nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers, who sought entry into Canada at Vancouver in the summer of 1914, only to be chased away by a Canadian warship. This story became a symbol of prejudicial immigration policies, which Canadians today reject, and served to fuel the emerging anti-British movement in India. It deserves the careful re-examination it gets in this thoroughly updated edition that provides a contemporary perspective on a defining moment in Canadian, British Empire, and Indian history.