Komagata Maru episode and the veteran Sikh British soldier’s revolt in the history of Indian nationalism

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the role of the rural Sikh soldier passenger in the Komagata Maru journey in 1914. During the First World War, it generated widespread unrest amongst Sikh soldiers of the British army. The discriminatory racist treatment meted out to the military peasantry instigated radical Ghadar revolutionaries to challenge their colonial essentializing notions of loyalty. The paper critiques traditional historiography by re-evaluating contemporary Punjabi anti-colonial consciousness, and the relevance of such provincial movements. By tracing specific historicities of subaltern nationalist resistances, it intends to enrich our understanding of the larger, synthetic mosaic of narratives in the historiography of Indian nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Komagata Maru episode
• historiography
• Indian nationalism
• veteran British soldier
• politics of remembering and forgetting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Paromita Deb obtained Ph.D. in English literature from Calcutta University, India on body studies. She is presently working as a Research Associate on a project on Komagata Maru in Humanities and Social Sciences department of IIT Kharagpur. She is also a guest lecturer of English in Hijli College, India. She had earlier taught in Gauhati University. She was awarded a Post-doctoral Fellowship from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, for a research project on contemporary diaspora writer, Jhumpa Lahiri. She has published international journal papers and book chapters on early modern drama, Shakespeare, food studies, South Asian Diaspora, Indian national movement and Partition literature.

Notes

1. For more on a critique on nationalist historiography, see Chatterjee (1996, 214–217).

2. For a brief history of India’s Independence struggle, see Chandra et al. (1988, 156).

3. For more on the study of nationalism as a ‘unique construction’, see Aloysius (1997, 1–21).

4. Tatla (1995) points out that after the Komagata Maru episode, ‘The loyalty of proud ex-soldiers and policemen swung violently against the government … ’ (73). Ball (2014) also notes in his article on the Komagata Maru episode that, ‘Many of the passengers were ex-British soldiers’.

5. Significantly, one of the limitations of the Swadeshi Movement was the lesser participation of Muslims in rural Bengali society. The primary reason was that majority of the rural Muslim population in Bengal were poor tenants and labourers who found the Swadeshi goods to be expensive. Thus, the poor Muslim artisans and weavers were caught in the vicious circle of opportunist profiteering landlords and the soaring prices of indigenous goods. For this economic aspect of the movement, I am indebted to Anant Kumar Giri’s article on ‘Rethinking the Politics and Ethics of Consumption: Dialogues with the Swadeshi Movements and Gandhi’, Journal of Human Values, Volume10, No.1, 2004, pp. 41–50, especially, pp. 43–44. Nevertheless, the Swadeshi Movement was as important mass movement in the nationalist history of India. Firstly, as Sumit Sarkar explains in his highly acclaimed book, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1903–1908, (New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1973), the movement played a pioneering role in broadening the base of anti-colonial nationalist struggle, since, prior to that, politics was entirely ‘the preserve of the English educated elite’ (252). Secondly, the Swadeshi Movement gave rise to new forms of mass contact and organizational strategies. The ‘samiti’ or the ‘national volunteer movement’ replaced the ‘ring of lawyers’ monopolizing the rural areas (252). Thus, despite its limitations and eventual failure, the Swadeshi movement which began with the boycott of foreign goods became a larger part of the nationalist struggle in its striving for autonomy.

6. For more on the details of the ‘Shore Committee’, and its subsequent role in raising funds and in carrying legal proceedings for the Komagata Maru passengers, see http://www.self.gutenberg.org/articles/Komagata_Maru_incident#cite_note.

7. According to a report compiled by Dady Burjor, the US Immigration Department’s official translator in San Francisco, 75% of Indian migrants into the USA and Canada were Sikhs, over half were former soldiers or policemen in the British Indian Army and Hong Kong Police and all hailed from five districts in Punjab, the largest proportion being from Jullundur and Hoshiarpur (see Puri 1983).

8. For more on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, see, for instance, Fitchett (2009).

9. Arthur B. Kettlewell to Henry Wheeler, 5341-S.B., 12/10/1914, ‘Fortnightly report on the internal political situation in the Punjab, in special reference to the European War’, Indian Office Records (Lim 2015, 9).