The journey of the Komagata Maru: national, transnational, diasporic

ABSTRACT

More than a hundred years ago, a Japanese ship called Komagata Maru chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous entrepreneur based in Singapore, carrying 376 Punjabi passengers - largely Sikhs but also some Hindus and Muslims - from Hong Kong was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure and forced to return to Budge Budge near Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, detained or kept under surveillance for years. The Komagata Maru has become the site for the contestation over discriminatory policies regulating South Asian migrations to Canada. While the passengers perceived it as a violent instance of the suppression of the freedom and rights of the loyal subjects of the British Empire, the colonial administration justified its action alleging that seditious activities were being carried out on the chartered ship. The resurrection of the Komagata Maru's tragic journey in Canadian and Indian national memories foregrounds a number of key contemporary debates related to memory and history; imperialism and resistance; racism, exclusion and inclusion; nation and citizenship; mobilities and immobilities; and emigration and diasporas.

KEYWORDS:

• Komagata Maru
• mobilities
• diaspora
• citizenship
• imperialism

Multiple memories

Memorialisation of the Komagata Maru's tragic voyage must undoubtedly be attributed to the emergence of memory cultures in the last three decades following the discursive contestation between history and memory and the privileging of memory as offering a corrective to official histories through its personal, local and affective focus. The thrust of the Komagata Maru memorialisation, visible in the spate of conferences, special issues and books emerging in the last two years, appears to be on recovering an alternative archive based on the personal memories (Tatla 2007), published sources such as policy documents (Waraich and Sidhu 2014), material artefacts such as photographs (Kazimi 2012), fictional representations (Bhatia 2015; Murphy 2015) or reinterpretations of official sources (Sohi 2014; Mawani 2015). However, these archival and heuristic projects, while recovering the journey and throwing new light on the events, collectively problematise the dichotomy between the construction of history as impersonal, objective and general and memory as personal, particular, local and subjective as they reveal memory to be equally translocal, mediated, contingent and processual. Central to its memorialisation in several national memories, British, Canadian and Indian, is the politics of memorialisation through public apologies made by the Canadian Prime Ministers Stephen Harper on 3 August 2008 and Justin Trudeau on 18 May 2016 and a number of memorialisations in India that raise important questions about the erasures of official histories and national memories and recoveries, about forgetting and remembering that have an important bearing on both history and memory as well as on imperialism, neo-imperialism, domination, resistance, imaginings of nation, community, race, ethnicity, belonging and citizenship.

While the journey is imbricated in the politics of apology in the case of the Canadian nation coming to terms with its racist past, whose lines of assemblage intersect with its other reconciliations such as those with First Nations owners and with Japanese and Chinese migrants, it is in line with the recovery of other narratives of resistance such as the Ghadr and the Indian National Army put under erasure by the dominant Gandhian narrative of non-violence. Connecting the two memory cultures is a single ethno-religious minority whose privileged mobility originating in imperial histories and displacement in two nations interrogates the idea of nationhood, minorities, diasporas, citizenship and national memory itself. The multiplicity of national, regional, sectarian and resistant memories that have come to bear upon the event is visible to the tug of war between Canadian, Indian and Sikh memories to stake their claims to an event that had remained alive only in Sikh or Ghadri memory. The emphasis on the presence of Sikhs on the ship, directing the apology mainly to the Sikh community, and ending speeches with Sikh religious greetings, which are generally exchanged during a religious event by both Canadian and Sikh leadership, pander to a sectarian minoritarianism. This sharply accentuates the mediated nature of memory that elides the dissolution of sectarian, linguistic and class boundaries on the voyage as well as in the militant movement. Despite its originating in a narrative of Sikh mobility and a regional memory, the Komagata Maru voyage assumed a national, even transnational, dimension, whose implications encompassed Indian, Asian, colonised and non-white people under imperialism and neo-imperialism. Komagata Maru’s appropriation in multiple memories foregrounds the processual, contingent and mediated nature of memory making it as unreliable in making truth claims as history.

Komagata Maru’s national and imperial itineraries

Memories of the Komagata Maru simultaneously speak to both official British imperial and Canadian and Indian nationalist histories. The apology made by Justin Trudeau to the Sikh community appears to contain an event implicated in multiple histories within the framework of Canadian racism and multiculturalism in a revised understanding of the nation state in relation to a particular ethno-religious minority, ignoring the fact that the passengers aboard the ship belonged to different faiths. This is mirrored in the Indian nation state’s capitulation to the Sikh demand for recognition of the ship’s significance in the consolidation of the nationalist movement, which appears to have been motivated by a similar desire to appease an alienated vocal minority within the nation. Finally, the commemoration of the journey in the Sikh memory appropriates it in a Sikh narrative of martyrdom. But the spatial and temporal coordinates of the journey transcend the specific agendas and politics of both Canadian and Indian nation states to suggest a wider imperial network of domination and resistance. New scholarship in history (Sohi 2014), legal studies (Macklin 2011) and sociology (Mongia 1999) has incisively engaged with these imperial networks of control and resistance to throw light on the wider repercussions of the event that transcend limited national, regional or sectarian concerns.

Others have engaged with its specific repercussions on the formation of Canadian or Indian nation states. The focus of this scholarship has largely been on the Canadian nation and its relationship with ethnic and religious minorities foregrounding issues of race and migration through returning to a Canadian history characterised by xenophobia, racism and exclusionary immigration policies. The journey has far-reaching significance for the self-constitution of Canada as a nation of migrants in relation to the differential status of its Anglo-Saxon with respect to other migrants as well as the First Nations in view of its explicit racism in the first 100 years of its existence through being ‘a white man’s country’. Canada’s transition from a racist to a multicultural nation is constantly challenged by such instances of ‘White Canada policy’ to test the limits of its official multiculturalism. Revisiting the Canadian dominion’s denial to admit the Punjabi passengers on grounds of an arbitrary legislation that was specifically formulated to exclude Asians from the space of Canada is a timely stocktaking by the Canadian nation of the way it has defined itself over a century. Its self-image as a migrant nation that has welcomed migrants since its inception is severely tarnished through this telling evidence of policies of selective migration that imposed strong deterrents to Asian migrations while admitting North American and European migrants during the same period. Similarly, its celebrated multiculturalism and the promise of inclusive citizenship are revealed to be a myth in view of the history of exclusion as well as other oceanic movements of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, struggling against and fleeing state violence in search of a better life. As opposed to its early migration acts that were designed to protect the rights of new migrants, the Immigrant Act of 1910 that was modified to specifically debar Asians highlights the selective migration through which Canada defined itself as a nation and continues to do so. The journey continues into the ongoing systemic issues of whiteness or racism in the Canadian government’s recent treatment of brown, migrant bodies. The significance of the journey to the Indian nation has been articulated to repressed narratives of resistance such as Ghadr, with the exclusions encountered during the journey viewed as serving as catalysts for the Ghadr awakening. The Indian state’s memorialisation of the journey not only dovetails into its larger political agenda of recovering counternarratives of nationalist resistance that have been buried under the dominant narrative of Gandhian non-violence, but also calls attention to anti-terrorism laws, in which certain ethnic groups such as Muslims, Sikhs and others continue to be arrested and imprisoned, often without charge. The recovery of people’s stories that supplement, modify or contradict official histories of the nation signals the nation state’s attempt to distance itself from the Nehruvian and Gandhian paradigm that has dominated the imaginings of the Indian nation.

Instead of framing it through the lens of the nation state, the journey of the Komagata Maru may be used to chart imperial itineraries since it was set in motion through the routes opened by the British Empire. The ship’s passengers largely comprised those who had earlier moved out of Punjab in the service of the British army or the police force following their production as ‘a martial race’ under the British Empire. The sense of entitlement expressed by them in demanding the right to move was an effect of imperial relations and the hierarchical arrangement of colonised subjects by the British. The journey cannot be read outside the complex network of rights and obligations accorded by the British to the Sikhs as favoured subjects of the empire. In return for defending the British Empire, a system of rewards through preferential recruitment and grant of lands had been naturalised for nearly half a century that Sikhs had begun to expect as their due. The actions of the British and British Indian government throughout the journey appear to have been governed by this special relationship with their colonised subjects, particularly in view of the need for continuing Sikh support in the First World War. Despite the involvement of several nations, the British imperial state’s scale of operation and concerns exhibit an awareness of its implications for the British Empire in general and British Empire in India in particular. Similarly, the charterer’s acute consciousness of the coloniser’s relationship with different colonised groups and the urge to test the vaunted imperial fair play and the continuous journey regulation underline the journey’s imperial impulse. The composition of the passengers who board the ship from different colonial outposts to seek opportunities in the furthest posits the entire British Empire as their playing field. The symbolic import of the journey lies in its foregrounding of imperial systems of control and resistance by the colonised. The undertaking of the journey threatens the basis of imperial governance and appropriation of different colonised bodies in the maintenance of the empire through exercise of freewill and choice in occupation, movement and settlement. The just demands of the passengers presage the modern discourse of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that accords everyone the ‘right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’. The treatment of the passengers on its onward and return journey by the British imperial government through the involvement of its colonies, underpinned by the anxieties of a fading empire about its diminishing control over its preferred colonised populations, is an attempt to exercise its sovereignty that violates fundamental human rights. On the other hand, the passengers’ awakening during the course of the journey to their real position in the imperial hierarchy leads to their shift of allegiance to the Indian nationalist resistance. Through its acquisition of a central position in the British Empire’s relationship with its colonised subjects, the journey transforms into a signifier of colonised resistance to the imperial forces of domination and control since its larger aim was to consolidate the ghadarite insurrection fighting for India’s liberation from North America or to expose the harsh truth of equal citizenship in the British Empire affirmed by the British Queen half a century earlier. The centrality of the Komagata Maru to the ghadarite movement accords the passengers a key role in India’s struggle for freedom.

Citizenship, mobilities, diasporas

Komagata Maru’s journey foregrounds the definition of citizenship in countries touched by international migration then and now. If citizenship is defined as membership in a political and geographical community and involves a tension between inclusion and exclusion, the exclusion of Komagata Maru and its passengers from Canada can serve as a site for debating the meaning of citizenship and belonging. As a nation of migrants that received a large number of European migrants between 1867 and 1914, the arrival of Komagata Maru challenged ideas of national identity, sovereignty and state control and the basis of citizenship and belonging in Canada. While its professing of civic citizenship based on rights and a universalist, voluntary political membership would in principle have technically offered immigrants a greater chance of inclusion, the implicit exclusion of Asians without overt reference to race confirms the reality of a White Canada and ethnic citizenship as well as the coexistence of inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies. The notion of belonging predicated on the idea of a white Canadian core and the expression of explicitly racist sentiments had wide-ranging implications for Komagata Maru passengers’ legal status and rights on arrival. The apology in Canada fits into the politics of recognition that is part of the Canadian state’s official multiculturalism, but multiculturalism continues to place minority groups in a position of cultural inequality vis-à-vis the majority despite its celebration of racial, cultural and religious diversity (Kymlicka 1995). In the context of the Indian nation, the recognition of the sacrifice of the predominantly Sikh passengers that provided a fillip to a militant form of nationalism hitherto marginalised to the narrative of non-violent resistance is an attempt to deflect criticism of the increasingly Hindu core of the secular nation state. The resignification of the Ghadr revolutionaries and of the Komagata Maru passengers from terrorists and seditionists to martyrs is an indication of the Indian state’s attempt to integrate the displaced Sikh subject. Even though the charterer and the passengers viewed themselves as subjects rather than citizens, their struggle to claim their rights as loyal subjects of the British Empire has important implications for the definition of citizenship, since the denial of the right to move, land or seek employment focuses the rights and obligations discourse underpinning the idea of liberal democracy. The rationale of the journey, as stated by the charterer, was to test the professed liberal sentiments advocated by the British Empire and affirmation of the equality of all its subjects. Gurdit Singh's entire defence of the ship’s violation of the Continuous Journey regulation made by the dominion of Canada is propped on the rights of the subjects of the empire to move and settle anywhere in the empire. In fact, in claiming their rights as subjects of the empire, the passengers underwrite themselves as citizens of the empire or imperial citizens (Banerjee 2010). It is through the Immigration Act of 1910 that British subjects were differentially defined and that colonial subjects were placed below British-born subjects. The journey reveals the gap between civic and ethnic citizenship and brings to the fore an essential contradiction between the definition of the subject in the imperial regime and an implicit white citizenship through the regulation the imperial government persuaded Ottawa to adopt in order to prevent pro-independence militants from fleeing to Canada. The notion of subjecthood and citizenship within the discourse of liberal humanism concealed its ethnic core through resorting to the cultural assimilation argument and denied full participation to its Sikh and Indian subjects in the empire or in the nation through denial of social citizenship.

The Komagata Maru journey problematises citizenship in relation to mobilities and diasporas in view of the passengers’ claim to be admitted to Canada predicated on their right to move as subjects of the British Empire. In this respect, it extends the understanding of nation, belonging, sovereignty, citizenship to mobile, floating populations who have largely been absent in debates on these issues and the peripatetic niche occupied by nomads, travellers, refugees and asylum seekers. Although Sikh mobility was an effect of the empire, the itineraries of the Sikh soldiers, policemen and free workers chart the route of traditional circular migrants who would periodically move to engage in seasonal work but return home at the end of their peregrinations. The passengers explicitly affirm their economic motivations and intentions to return having earned enough to recover their passage and support their families. The itinerary of the circular migrants displays a triangulation in the Sikh circulation through several territories of the empire that produced webs of empire. The voyage confounds and challenges the sovereignty of nation states since the discourse of citizenship in liberal humanism is formulated within the purview of state borders and guaranteed rights of citizenship. The scope of the journey that transcends the borders of India, Canada and Britain to enfold Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and other imperial territories raises the important question whether rights ought to transcend national boundaries or that individual rights are best guaranteed within the context of the nation state. The limitations of the scope of the legislations pertaining to individual states as being applicable to mobile people and objects called for the hasty addition of new clauses pertaining to the interception of seditious literature, meetings and protests foregrounding the challenges posed by mobilities to both the empire and the nation state. The sovereignty of the empire was exercised by the constraints placed on Sikh mobility through exclusion, seclusion, containment and detention at every leg of the journey or forced movement at the end of the journey. The passengers’ challenge to the sovereignty is articulated through their demand for the right to move and refusal to return to Punjab. The relationship of mobility to the formation of diasporas is reflected in the Sikhs on the move in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada as an imperial diaspora whose participation in the affairs of two nation states suggests a transition to citizenship. The impulse to test the limits of the liberal sentiments of the empire first emerged in the decision of a diasporic Sikh Gurdit Singh to charter the ship and the support extended to the Indian diaspora to the ship before and after its arrival in Vancouver. The ship and the passengers became the site for the Indian diaspora in Canada and America for negotiating its rights with the host Canadian and American nations by throwing light on the anomalies in the empire’s professed sentiments and its discrimination against its colonised subjects through denial of rights accorded to its other subjects. The most important role played by the diaspora Sikhs was their active participation in the politics of the Indian nation state through answering the Ghadr leaders’ exhortation to Sikhs to heed the ghadarite call and return to India to take up the fight. Roughly 2000 of these Sikhs returned from Canada within two years.

Komagata Maru journey demonstrates that notions of citizenship, belonging and rights that have been formed from within the borders of nation states need to be reviewed from those that have put these borders in question. The presence of migrants and mobile populations call into question the relevance of a state-centric notion of citizenship and belonging and the need to reconceptualise citizenship beyond and across borders. While globalisation is believed to challenge state-centric and state-controlled understandings of citizenship as simplistic, the transnational movements of Sikhs in the British Empire equally defied these simplistic understandings. The journey reopens the debate on cosmopolitanism versus liberal nationalism as to whether individual rights can be better protected within the borders of the nation state or across the borders. In view of supranational institutions undermining national sovereignty and flows across national borders, a post-national or transnational notion of citizenship and belonging can guarantee rights of migrants and diasporas. In the Sikh case, the social fields that cross national boundaries through everyday activities and social, economic and political relations point to a transnational rather than a post-national formation. The Sikh model of having created and retained these social fields for more than a century offers an option for multiple belonging to other Indian and other diasporas. The composition of the passengers as well as the networks testify to the transnational origins of the journey. The ship was chartered by a Singapore-based entrepreneur whose father was among the first to have arrived as part of Captain Speedy’s force but had frequently moved between Punjab and the British Malaya. The idea of the journey came to him during one of his visits to Hong Kong where he had strong contacts with the local British authorities and he mobilised resources in all parts of the empire to sell tickets through advertisements, posters, word of mouth and filial networks. As a consequence, Sikhs from Punjab as well as those overseas responding to this call comprised the passengers, who included former soldiers and policemen in Shanghai, Philippines, Hong Kong and Malaya with transnational experience. The Sikh webs of empire intersected with those of Indian students and Ghadr revolutionaries in America, Canada, Japan and Europe and Indian leaders at home. Despite the regional, class and caste divisions visible in the factionalism during the journey, the origins and effects of the journey were not confined to the borders of Punjab or India. The Sikh attempt to appropriate Komagata Maru in the Sikh narrative of sacrifice erases the cross-ethnic, cross-religious, cross-linguistic and cross-class and caste solidarities that came into play before, during and at the end of the journey. Both the surveillance of the ship and resistance involved the complicity of a number of nations within and outside the territorial limits of the British Empire and the three governments, the British, the Canadian and the British Indian, in curtailing the movement of the ship. Similarly, the networks mobilised by the charterer in Hong Kong, India, Canada, Japan and America for seeking support for the passengers display a transnationalism in the making.

The Komagata Maru through multidisciplinary frameworks

The essays in this special issue speak to and weave in many of these strands in engaging with the journey of the Komagata Maru from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The essays by Darshan Singh Tatla and Himadri Banerjee specifically address the complexities of memory work, given its fallibility as well as the politics of memory and memorialisation. Tatla is apprehensive and critical of the politics of memorialisation through which an event with deep resonances in Sikh memory is ingeniously incorporated in Indian national history. Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty, Banerjee, Suchetana Chattopadhyay and Paromita Deb detect traces of the memory in the subsequent surveillance of ships that sailed to Kolkata between 1914 and 1915, the trade union movement in Bengal and the role of gurdwaras in Kolkata.

The essays strongly diverge in their framing of the journey as they locate it within the regional, national, transnational and global. On one extreme is Chakraborty’s essay that dwells on the transnational nature of both the imperial machineries of control and the strategies of resistance through focusing on the solidarities forged between different resistance movements across the world. This view is strongly opposed by Tatla who situates the journey in a Sikh narrative of mobility and resistance, while stressing its regional provenance. Tatla’s Sikh-centric reading provided an ontological framework through Doris Jakobsh and Margaret Walton-Roberts’s invoking the Sikh notions of miri piri in analysing Sikh resistance at different points in Canadian history. Remaining within the framework of Sikh studies, Banerjee elicits new meanings of the journey in tracing the history of the other Sikhs of Kolkata. Pramod K Nayar, Chattopadhyay, Arunajeet Kaur and Deb deploy the imperial lens to explore the meanings of surveillance and mobility, while Anjali Gera Roy extends the notion of the empire to the new empire of the present.

Mobilities are the focus of the essays by Nayar and Gera Roy who selectively draw on Urry’s notion of mobility to propose the notions of dissident mobilities and immobile mobilities. While Nayar argues that movements in the empire engendered a new form of subjectivities that he labels dissident, Gera Roy brings out the contradiction between mobilities and immobilities through the regulation of Sikh mobility by the empire. Kaur positions the journey within the Sikh movement to Southeast Asia, particularly to British Malaya, where Gurdit Singh was based at the time of chartering the journey while connecting it to other locations of Sikh migration in Southeast Asia such as Hong Kong and Shanghai. Banerjee is largely concerned with the movement of Sikhs within the subcontinent, particularly to Kolkata, the first port from where they sailed further.

Resistance is the leitmotif of a number of essays. Chakraborty uncovers the history of anti-colonial resistance, emphasising the links between different resistance movements in Europe, Asia and Africa as well as that between the Ghadr movement and the passengers that was more visible in the returnees on other ships. Deb introduces a subaltern angle to the resistance through calling attention to the cultivator origins of the soldiers aboard the Komagata Maru. Nayar, Jakobsh and Walton-Roberts grapple with the more conceptual aspects of dissidence, with Nayar situating it within the imperial paradigm of domination and Jakobsh and Walton-Roberts in the Sikh discourse of miri piri, which is supported by Tatla’s invocation of the notion of Sikh martyrdom. Banerjee provides a glimpse into the internal dissensions within the Sikhs with respect to their participation in Bengal politics. Gera Roy extends the idea of dissidence to include the subversion of imperial juridical practices and machineries of surveillance through tactics adopted by the passengers.

Migration and diasporas and their problematisation of belonging conceived in terms of nation-state borders underpin the majority of the essays. The diaspora space and the diasporic imaginary are perceived as the catalyst for the awakening of national consciousness. Chakraborty throws light on the role of diasporic networks comprising students and revolutionaries in consolidating anti-colonial networks. Tatla and Kaur focus on the Southeast Asian diaspora and the transformation of Gurdit Singh’s subjectivity through its contact with other oppressed groups. Gera Roy shows how migration and mobility interrogate machineries of the empire predicated on nation-state borders. Nayar sees the diasporic imaginary as emancipating. Banerjee examines the difference of the internal diaspora from the diaspora overseas.

A few of the essay engage with the notion of citizenship and the impact of migration on the idea of nation, belonging and participation. Nayar and Tatla examine the idea of the subject and the citizen with reference to the transformation of the subjectivity of the charterer Gurdit Singh from an entrepreneur and Sikh subject to a dissident and a cosmopolitan, respectively. Tatla builds on his earlier thesis about the narrative of migration and movement that emerged in Punjab in the nineteenth century to explore the transformation in the subjectivity of Sikhs such as Gurdit Singh who were on the move. He meticulously traces the evolution of Gurdit Singh’s subjectivity from regional and ethno-religious to cosmopolitan during the course of his travels.

Viewing the journey as a travelogue, embodying what he terms ‘dissident mobility’, the opening essay by Pramod K. Nayar is largely concerned with conceptual frameworks. Drawing on Urry’s notion of mobilities and motilities, he borrows Peter Hulme’s (1997) writing about ‘footsteps travel’, which looks at travelogues as essentially ‘re-enactments’, to classify the Komagata Maru as a classic illustration of footsteps travel that becomes an iteration of the earlier moment of Panama Maru’s journey and the Hunter judgement, but one that adds an ‘ambulant gloss’ on the preceding one by explicitly referencing it as a national project. Through his close reading of part of Gurdit Singh’s diary, Nayar elucidates his idea of dissident mobility he has developed in relation to other travelogues to argue that travellers during the imperial era transcended imperial citizenship to form new forms of subjectivity that contest their inscription as imperial subjects. His idea of dissident mobility engages with the debates on citizenship and demonstrates that the diaspora Sikhs’ cultural citizenship facilitates their transition to political citizenship. Nayar’s articulation of citizenship to mobility and motility fills a lacuna in the understandings of citizenship that have been largely shaped within the borders of nation states.

Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty, in ‘The Journey of Komagata Maru: Conjuncture, Memory and History’, views the Komagata Maru as representing a significant moment in Indian history and a conjuncture in the contemporary colonial world and identifies a connection between the political situation in India and migration to North America. Borrowing Benedict Anderson’s notion of early globalisation defined by ‘infinitely complex inter-continental networks’, Chakraborty views a distinct link between migration and anti-colonial revolutionary movement. He makes a strong case for locating the Komagata Maru in the transnational networks of Sikhs, Indian students and Ghadr leaders in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Darshan Singh Tatla examines the politics of commemoration to capture the tension between local or regional accounts and the new nationalist narrative in postcolonial India. Viewing the Komagata Maru as a Punjabi event, Tatla shows how it was rewritten as part of Indian nationalist narrative and hailed as a diasporic contribution to the freedom struggle. Through his close reading of Gurdit Singh’s autobiography Zulmi Katha or Indian Slavery Abroad and tracing the transformation of Gurdit Singh embedded in a religious, regional, linguistic identity who represented himself as national for specific reasons, Tatla warns that the description of a complex life such as that of Gurdit Singh and of the Ghadar personalities from Punjab through the prism of ‘Indian nationalism’ alone carries the risk of overlooking their religious or regional roots. Through this, he takes up the larger issue of problematising nationalist historiography that views regional events in the colonial era as part of the national struggle. More specifically, he is concerned with how the narration of a regional event at a national level rewrites that event. Viewing the idea of the nation as an elite Hindu construction proposed by the congress, he juxtaposes it against regionalisms of which Punjab offers the prime example. He argues that the disciplinary lens of nationalism controls regions to conform to the national version of the nationalist struggle and sounds a note of warning against stripping the Komagata Maru of its regional setting to make it conform to a patriotic account of anti-imperial struggle.

Doris Jakobsh and Margaret Walton-Roberts engage with the significance of the incident to Sikh negotiation with belonging to the Canadian nation state. Unlike Tatla, they unambiguously perceive the charterer Gurdit Singh’s impulse as emblematic of miri piri, the idea that the spiritual and political cannot be separated in the fight for justice, and use miri piri as a lens through which to examine a century of Sikh struggle in Canada since the Komagata Maru. They proceed to examine four cases of social activism, namely, the demand for refugee rights, recognition and inclusion of minority veterans, the protection of minority groups in the wake of 9/11 and the fight to protect religious expression in Quebec that illustrate the spirit of miri piri, the integration of the spiritual and the political in the struggle against injustice. They also call attention to the importance of the missing variables of gender and caste in any discussion of Sikh rights. Unlike Ujjal Dosanjh, a former B.C. NDP, and others who have warned against the mixing of the religious and the political, they conclude that Sikh spirituality has greatly enhanced the social fabric of Canada, while acknowledging the ongoing nature of the struggle both within and outside the communities.

Arunajeet Kaur expands the scholarship on Komagata Maru through throwing light on an unexplored part of the journey namely to the Far East, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Malaya through calling attention to the connections of the Sikhs in the Far East with the Ghadr revolutionaries, Gurdit Singh’s own location in Singapore and the key role played by gurdwaras in Hong Kong and Malaya in community formation. Connecting the Komagata Maru and Ghadr that she views as a Sikh diaspora and as a diaspora story, respectively, she looks at the Komagata Maru episode from the perspective of the Sikh migrant during the empire, in this case from the Far East. Complicating the motivators of Sikh migration as economic, political or social through the identification of an entrepreneurial spirit that intimidates the whites, she argues that it was service in the British imperial army that enabled the interest in and migration to Canada. Kaur makes the important point that Sikhs created the cartography of their own diaspora through travel and migration via the imperial circuits and networks and the establishment of gurdwaras to dot the Imperial map that was utilised by the Ghadrites. Through viewing the journey as revelatory of the Sikh migrant’s experience in attempting to construct space within the imagination of Imperial geographical travel and dominance, she throws new light on the journey as an instance of resistant mobility.

Adopting a subaltern studies approach that has thrown light on non-elite histories such as the peasants’ revolt, Paromita Deb, in the ‘Komagata Maru Episode and the Veteran Sikh British soldier’s Revolt’, offers a critique of the official history of the nationalist movement through recovering the marginalised non-elite, provincial narratives of nationalist struggle that disrupt the monolithic paradigm of nationalism. Like Chakraborty, she locates the journey in anti-imperial resistance privileging the subaltern consciousness of the Punjabi military peasantry in igniting national movements through linking the passengers’ disaffection to the Ghadr insurrection. Asserting that the journey accelerated the transformation of the loyal Sikh soldier into a nationalist, she cites several instances of the Sikh subversion of colonial authority such as the First World War, the Singapore Mutiny and others to argue that these fed into the burgeoning Ghadr movement to challenge colonial notions of masculinity. Her essay contends that revisiting provincial movements and the common man’s role in the Indian nationalist movement recovers people’s histories of resistance and adds to the understanding of the larger, synthetic mosaic of narratives in the historiography of Indian nationalism as well as world history.

Suchetana Chattopadhya’s rich archival essay, based on Intelligence Records, examines unknown facets of repression in the wake of Komagata Maru’s journey. In contextualising the journey within the climate prevailing before and after its return, she perceives it as part of an ongoing machinery of imperial repression rather than a one-time event. She traces these machineries of surveillance that were brought to bear on all ships returning in the wake of Komagata Maru from all directions. Arguing that the Punjabi Sikh emigrants became formal targets of the colonial repressive state apparatus as an ethno-linguistic-religious segment, and representing a distinct class fraction, she foregrounds the class aspect through the targeting of a migrant body of officially recognised ‘semi-destitute’ workers whose racialised subjecthood was identified as a challenge to the colonial order. Chattopadhya identifies an inter-imperial geography of surveillance that framed the convergence of private interests of European monopolistic business firms, synchronised functions of different departments and hierarchies, and the pervasive ideology of colonial governance in the suppression of ‘lesser races’. In this inter-imperial geography, regional surveillance was supported by the transcontinental intelligence gathered from North America, Eastern Asia and Britain to treat all returning passengers as potential rebels. Concluding that while this micro-surveillance prevented the Ghadr network from becoming effective within India through diasporic reinforcements, she points out that the migrants often responded to imperial authority through everyday acts of fleeting and organised resistance in the closely observed ships and upon embarkation.

Supplementing Jakobsh and Walton-Roberts’s examination of the Canadian Sikh and Kaur’s of the Far Eastern Sikh diasporas, Himadri Banerjee examines the appropriations of memories of the Komagata Maru by different groups of Indians at different points of time. Locating Kolkata as an important node in Sikh migration overseas, Banerjee provides a broad overview of the Punjabi Sikh movement to and settlement in Kolkata and traces the fractious politics of the Sikh gurdwaras in Kolkata Bengal. Demonstrating the importance of the gurdwaras in Kolkata in the formation of Sikh subjectivity in Kolkata, he throws important light on interethnic, interreligious and cross-regional links between the Sikh diaspora in Kolkata and the local Bengali community. He demonstrates that Kolkata’s Sikh diaspora’s active engagement in the city’s nationalist politics as well as their ties with the Left ideologies made them partners in the anti-colonial struggle and created new opportunities for dialogue with many front-ranking political leaders in the host society. Most significant of these is Gurdit Singh’s own equation with Bengali leaders including Subhash Chandra Bose and Kolkata events and his support to the nationalist movement through placing Kolkata’s transport dominated by him at the service of the protest against the Simon Commission and the Civil Disobedience Movement. Critical of the appropriation of the century-long circulation of the Komagata Maru’s memories that continued to interface with many linguistic groups, dissimilar religious traditions and different political platforms scattered across India’s ‘heterogeneous time’ in the monolithic statist politics of memorialisation, Banerjee imbricates Kolkata and Bengali resistance in these memories.

The volume closes with Anjali Gera Roy’s essay in which she proposes the idea of immobile mobilities to foreground the discrepancy between the assisted movements of Sikhs to what Kaur calls exploitation colonies and the immobilisation of their free-flowing movements to settler colonies such as Canada, America, New Zealand and Australia. Drawing on Bryan Turner’s notion of enclave societies, by which he means the parallel emergence of immobility regime that exercises surveillance over migrants, refugees and other aliens along with mobility regimes in the present, she examines the British Empire as an enclave society in which government and other agencies see to regulate spaces, and, where necessary, to immobilise flows of people, goods and services (2007). She examines the way the British, British Indian and Canadian governments colluded to exercise governmentality over Sikh populations by enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and regulations and looks at ‘enclavement’ or ‘a set of strategies and tactics for both domestic and international regulation’ (Turner, 2007, 290) invented by them to focus on the exclusion of Sikhs in Canada and their seclusion and detention in India.

Acknowledgments

Research on the Komagata Maru project was funded by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, Ministry of Culture, Government of India and the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anjali Gera Roy is a Professor in the Department of Humanities of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, who works on fiction, film and performance traditions of India, diasporas and Punjab. She is the author of Cinema of Enchantment: Perso-Arabic Genealogies of the Hindi Masala Film (Orient Blackswan 2015), Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond (Ashgate 2010) and Three Great African Novelists (Creative Books 2001). She has edited Imagining Punjab, Punjabi and Punjabiat in the Transnational Era (Routledge 2015) and The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad (Sage 2012). She has also co-edited (with Chua Beng Huat) The Travels of Indian Cinema: From Bombay to LA (OUP 2012), (with Nandi Bhatia) Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (Pearson Longman 2008) and (with Nukhbah Taj Langah) a special feature on ‘Siriaki Across India and Pakistan’ in Muse India: the Literary E-journal, July–August 2011. In addition, she has published 100 essays in literary, film and cultural studies.

Ajaya K. Sahoo teaches at the Centre for Study of Indian Diaspora, University of Hyderabad. His research interests include international migration, South Asian diaspora, transnationalism and religion. He has co-edited Diaspora, Development and Distress: Indians in the Persian Gulf (2015), Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora (2014), Indian Diaspora and Transnationalism (2012), Transnational Migrations: The Indian Diaspora (2009) and Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations (2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, Ministry of Culture, Government of India and Indian Council of Social Science Research Delhi.