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ABSTRACT
Recent remembrance and memorialisation of the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 has neglected the global and imperial implications of the incident, as well as the role that direct actions by the Indian passengers and Indians in Vancouver took against Canada’s discriminatory law. While the legal loss the passengers suffered could be regarded as simply tragic, the implications for the British Empire behind the Komagata Maru incident are more complex. More than just a legal battle between would-be Indian migrants and the Vancouver immigration authorities, the incident is a highly visible clash of two different understandings of the British imperial legal system. In contrast to any view that imperial harmony and the rights of all its subjects should supersede local concerns within the empire, Canadian immigration and legal officials instead viewed their rights as a self-governing dominion to make and pass their own laws (particularly around areas of racial desirability) as more important than issues of imperial membership, loyalty or harmony. The British government’s decision, in turn, not to contradict Canada’s eventual ruling against the Komagata Maru passengers and the decision to deport them, exposed the legal hierarchies of supposed imperial belonging, citizenship and ‘British liberty’ in the empire at a critical moment in the early twentieth century. What the incident highlighted, then, was an increasing legal distinction between settler colonies and colonies of exploitation within the empire.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Michael Dodson, Lara Kriegel and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History for their comments and feedback on this article. This work was supported by the Indiana University Department of History.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Superintendent of Provincial Police Letters, GR-0099, Box 1, Royal British Columbia Museum Archives (hereafter RBCM); AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 129, Stevens Papers,City of Vancouver Archives (here after COV).
2 The Canadian Press, ‘Komagata Maru Incident’; Husser, ‘Komagata Maru Apology’.
3 The Canadian Press, ‘Text of the Prime Minister’s Apology’.
4 Singh, Voyage of Komagatamaru, 64, 76. In recounting a conversation with a British official in Hong Kong, Gurdit Singh, charterer of the Komagata Maru, calls the voyage ‘experimental’ and mentions his intention to start a ‘regular service’ between Calcutta and Canada.
5 See Johnston, Voyage of the Komagata Maru (and its updated 2014 edition), which narrated the incident on a more local level, but rarely pulled back to examine imperial policy or what the incident represented for Indians globally. Other accounts of the incident, in Jensen and Chang, likewise focus more on the event’s place in the history of North American immigration restriction, at the expense of an imperial view. Jensen, Passage from India; Chang, Pacific Connections.
6 Ballantyne, Webs of Empire, 7.
7 Ballantyne’s foundational work on this topic is Orientalism and Race.
8 Texts which have pointed out this gap in Canadian historiography include: Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire; Girard, ‘Liberty, Order and Pluralism: The Canadian Experience’, in Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire, 160–91. For an example of the more recent corrective literature, see Ishiguro, ‘Histories of Settler Colonialism,’ 5–14.
9 Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 1–2.
10 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 3–6.
11 Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 205.
12 Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens.
13 Tate, Transpacific Steam, 122.
14 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 671, COV.
15 Ibid.
16 Singh, Voyage of Komagatamaru, 59. The tie of Canadian restriction law to the Natal Act is apparent in the manifestos of the British Columbia Asiatic Exclusion League, which demanded that Canada enact a Natal Act of its own. McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 30, RBCM.
17 Shown most comprehensively in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.
18 Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, 3; see also Raza, Roy and Zachariah, The Internationalist Moment.
19 For a greater exploration of this relationship, and the imperial stake the United States had in such a partnership, see Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny.
20 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 103–115, COV.
21 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 121, COV.
22 For work on other forms of immigration restriction in British Columbia during this time period, see Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown; Perry, On the Edge of Empire; Shah, Stranger Intimacy; Ward, White Canada Forever.
23 Mackenzie King stated at the Imperial Conference of 1923 that ‘Canada has had not merely the sympathy and understanding, but the hearty co-operation of the authorities in Great Britain and India as well’. 1923 Conference Speeches, V/27/820/3, India Office Records (hereafter IOR), British Library (hereafter BL).
24 King, Report of the Royal Commission, 5.
25 Ibid., 7.
26 Immigration Files, RG25, A-2 200, National Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC).
27 See Northup, Indentured Labor; and Tinker, New System of Slavery.
28 Immigration Files, RG25 A-2 200, LAC.
29 Johnston, Voyage of the Komagata Maru, 45.
30 Richard McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 53, RBCM.
31 ‘Victoria Daily Colonist’, 26 Nov. 1913, RBCM.
32 Ibid.
33 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 93, COV; Johnston, Voyage of the Komagata Maru, 48.
34 Singh, Voyage of Komagatamaru, 63.
35 Ibid., 64.
36 See Gilmour, Trouble on Main Street.
37 MP Stevens’s relationship to immigration restriction will be explored in greater depth later in this article.
38 There were, certainly, those that did. One memorable letter, handwritten on hotel stationery, advised McBride that ‘the yellow races is [sic] bad vile and villainous’. While this was surely not a unique attitude held in Canada at the time, given the existence of the Asiatic Exclusion League, it is striking in its bare language, stripped of any attempt at rationalising anti-Asian racism. McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 51, RBCM.
39 McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 57, RBCM, emphasis added.
40 Ibid.
41 See Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj.
42 McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 57, RBCM.
43 Ibid., Box 54, RBCM.
44 Ibid.
45 The letter to McBride does admit that they considered white labour cost-prohibitive. The Society of Civil Engineers also concerned themselves with questions of loyalty, but used the term to argue against hiring American ‘aliens’ instead of ‘loyal members of the empire. McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 52, RBCM. This, again, could be part of a push to hire cheaper, Indian labour using loyalty and British subjecthood to justify their desire for legally prohibited hiring practices.
46 Dr Raghunath Singh was one such passenger: a doctor in the Indian army, he was one of the few passengers who declined to waive his board of inquiry and claimed he was of the non-immigrant class (this claim was eventually successful). Dr Singh was distrusted by the other passengers, however, and telegraphed immigration agent Malcolm Reid often to plea for assistance, as he believed his life to be in danger. Although he was not sent back on the Komagata Maru, he did return to Hong Kong shortly after the incident. Stevens Papers, AM69, file 413, 438, 440, COV.
47 McBride Papers, GR-0441, Box 124, RBCM.
48 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 9, COV.
49 Lytton Strachey’s biographical essay on General Gordon, who died at Khartoum, emphasised the extent to which the siege came to represent, in British popular culture, the savagery of Africans in contrast to the dignity of Britons, with Gordon ‘acclaimed in every newspaper as a national martyr’. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 213.
50 For an in-depth examination of these racialised depictions of southern Africans by Britons in the nineteenth century, and particularly the cultural use of the word ‘Hottentot’ by Britons, see Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman.
51 Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens, 77, 87.
52 Ibid., 27.
53 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 651, COV.
54 Ibid.
55 Isemonger and Slattery, Account of the Ghadr Conspiracy, 21, 24.
56 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, files 149, 231, COV.
57 Singh, Voyage of Komagatamaru, 74.
58 Ibid., 109.
59 Ibid., 112.
60 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 253, COV.
61 Justice Hunter, who had ruled against Canada’s ability to restrict Indian immigrants and allowed the passengers of the Panama Maru to land, was not among them.
62 ‘Victoria Daily Colonist,’ 30 June 1914, RBCM.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Stevens Papers, AM 69, M-03 Roll 1, file 445, COV.
66 Ibid.
67 McBride Papers, GR-0441, box 55, files 25–34, RBCM. Debates on assisted British and European immigration to Canada became more complicated as the twentieth century continued, but a general encouragement of British settlement in Canada continued through the late 1920s. For a more thorough exploration, seeCavell, ‘The Imperial Race’, 345–67.
68 Stevens Papers, AM69, M-03 Roll 1, file 671, COV. This resolution was further confirmed at the Imperial conference of 1923. 1923 Conference Speeches, V/27/820/3, IOR, BL.
69 Sorabji, India Calling, 205.