Incorporating regional events into the nationalist narrative: the life of Gurdit Singh and the Komagata Maru episode in postcolonial India

ABSTRACT

This paper tries to capture the tension between the local or regional accounts and the new nationalist narrative in postcolonial India. The paper tries to show how the description of a complex life such as Gurdit Singh through the prism of ‘Indian nationalism’ alone carries the risk of making him one-dimensional skeleton, thereby distorting reality and proper context of a life that had a rich bearing of religious, cultural and regional influences.

KEYWORDS:

• Komagata Maru
• Gurdit Singh
• Sikh history
• Punjab emigration
• British-Canadian relations
• colonial India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Darshan S Tatla's research concerns several aspects of Sikh diaspora communities. He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Warwick and is a former fellow of Birmingham and Coventry Universities. A biography of Gurdit Singh is soon due from Punjabi University Press and a book on the Ghadar movement is near completion.

Notes

1. The minister for Culture and Human Resources Mr Naik invited three granddaughters of Gurdit Singh: Harbhajan Kaur, Satwant Kaur and Balbir Kaur to New Delhi for a brief ceremony, details are available form press release by Ministry of Culture, 29 September 2014.

2. Gurdit Singh's two Punjabi books were published by Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (1999) as part of 300th celebration of the Sikh community in 1999. On the contesting interpretation of the Ghadar legacy see Sandhu (2103), Singh (2013), Rahi (2012) especially its introduction. Puri (2012), by picking up selective writings especially some poetry, terms their enthusiasm for the liberation of India as if they had acquired a new religion of desh bhakti.

3. Some of it can be glanced through the controversy which erupted with the NCERT project and later as a result of Babri Masjid coverage, see Rudolph and Rudolph (1983) and Hoffman (2001).

4. It is interesting observation that the Komagata Maru and the Ghadar movement have no reverberation in Western Punjab – although both were all-Punjab affairs during the colonial era. Again this reinforces the notion that it is part of popular memory of the Sikhs that carries the memory in the postcolonial era.

5. This issue is elaborated more fully in an introduction by Chandra and Majumdar to South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal (SAMAJ), issue no. 7, 2013.

6. This is elaborated in Kaviraj (2010, 85–126).

7. Kaviraj cites the example of Tara Chand’s voluminous historical writing on the Indian National Congress (1961–1972).

8. Wariach, a well-known writer and advocate at Punjab High Court, filed a CWP (PIL) No. 8377 of 2003 to treat the Komagata Maru passengers as freedom fighters. The legal petition, Malwinderjit Singh Waraich Versus Union of India was filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Chandigarh. The case was dismissed by ruling, that ‘Merely because occupants of the Komagata Maru left the country in the year 1914–1915 and spent some amount and suffered some sort of assault [sic] does not establish that they participated in the freedom movement or there is any connection with the freedom struggle’. However, eventually the application was granted, see more details in the preface to Komagata Maru: not just a voyage by Waraich and Sidhu (2013).

9. This is from his English and Punjabi account of the Komagata Maru where he indicates ‘a third part of the narrative’.

10. The official report was published on 3 December 1914 formally released to the public on 16 January 1915.

11. See www.komagatamaru.ca a carefully constructed website with many documents made available online.

12. See Zulmi Katha (1922, 203).

13. Lajpat Rai (1917) refers to Komagata Maru in his Young India reproducing more or less the official version of events at Budge Budge.

14. See Zulmi Katha, (1922, 191).

15. According to the Statesman report on 27 June 2015, a grant of Rs. 2.4 crore was sanctioned for this purpose.