Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty (srchakraborty@gmail.com) is an eminent historian and a retired professor of History of Presidency College, Kolkata.
The Journey
Baba Gurdit Singh, a successful Sikh businessman, decided to help the
poor Sikh and other Indian migrants in East and South East Asia to migrate to
Canada hopefully for a better life. He chartered the ship Komagata Maru at Hong Kong and the ship reached Vancouver in
British Columbia on 23 May, 1914 with 376 passengers on board. The Canadian
immigration authorities allowed only 22 passengers to disembark on the ground
that other passengers did not fulfill the requirements of continuous journey
for landing under Canadian law. The ship with all its passengers was detained
in the Vancouver Harbour for two months till 23 July without adequate food and
water and was ultimately obliged to return literally at gun point when a
Canadian navy cruiser was brought with its guns exposed to the Burrard Inlet.
Gurdit had to negotiate his return and was allowed to store provisions for the
return journey. The ship left Vancouver on 23 July and while it stopped at
Yokohama and Kobe in Japan and in Singapore, the passengers were not allowed to
land. The British authorities eventually decided that the ship should go to
Calcutta. On 26 September the ship was stopped by the authorities at Kulpi
where Donald, the Disrict Magistrate of 24 Paraganas, Slocock of the Criminal
Intelligence Office, Government of India and Humphreys, the Deputy Commissioner
of a Punjab district boarded the ship. They were accompanied by police
constables and officers from the Punjab. They searched the ship and the
passengers for arms and seditious literature. The search did not yield anything
and on 29 September the ship came to the industrial town of Budge Budge about
27 km from Calcutta.
Sir Frederick Halliday, the commissioner of
Police, Calcutta personally led a group of British and Indian officers and
asked the passengers to disembark at once and proceed to the special train
waiting at the nearby Budge Budge railway station to take them to Punjab.
Gurdit, with whom they were negotiating, felt suspicious of the move and
refused. Gurdit tried to reason with the officials saying that they had the
sacred Guru Granth Sahib with them
which they would install at the Gurdwara
in Howrah and then would seek an interview with the Governor. The passengers
refused to leave the ship without Gurdit.
Eventually
they came down with Gurdit carrying the Granth
Sahib on his head. The passengers formed a procession, marched towards the
station and sat down near the level crossing. A formal warning citing a new
ordinance was read out by Donald and everyone was asked to board the special
train. Gurdit reiterated that he and the
passengers needed to go to Calcutta for urgent work. It would be sacrilegious,
he asserted, to take the sacred book in the train. The situation became
increasingly confrontational and the British authorities appealed to Calcutta
for troops. Between 3 and 4 p.m. the passengers stood up, crossed the level
crossing and started marching towards Calcutta with the Granth Sahib being carried in front of them. The police followed
them, while Halliday and Donald made phone calls to Calcutta for
reinforcements. Eastwood, a superintendent of the Reserve police started from
Calcutta around 4 pm with 30 European sergeants and constables. About 150 Royal
Fusiliers were also dispatched to Budge Budge in cars. The procession was
stopped about 6 or 7 km from Budge Budge by Eastwood and his forces till the
Royal Fusiliers arrived. With them came the Chief Secretary of Bengal Cummins
and Duke, claiming to represent the Governor. They asked Gurdit to go back to
Budge Budge and continue their conversation. On their return the passengers, on
being asked to go back to the ship for the night, refused and sat down near the
railway station. The Punjab police stayed on the right side of the passengers
and the Europeans were positioned on the other side. The passengers gathered round the Sacred Book
which was placed on a portable platform. Halliday walked towards the level
crossing and suddenly a few shots were heard. Donald asked Gurdit to come up
and talk to him, but Gurdit remained where he was. Eastwood plunged into the
crowd and was allegedly knocked down to the ground by some Sikhs. At that
moment the firing had begun. Halliday later said that he had seen 30 or 40
Sikhs firing but, as Johnston notes, the impression was not shared by some of
his own officers. ‘Some of the shots came from the four police sergeants ,now
engulfed by the crowd, and discharging their revolvers at such close quarters
that one man, Badal Singh, was hit six times’. As the passengers now surged
forward, the Calcutta and Punjab forces retaliated. The Royal Fusiliers entered
the scene late, but the Commanding Officer, Capt. Moore secured Halliday’s
permission to order fire. Most of the passengers now found shelter in a nearby
ditch, or in the fields and some even jumped into the river. By 8 pm it was
quiet again.[1]
The number of passengers dead was
officially put at 20 of whom 18 died as a result of wounds suffered from
service rifles. (This was recorded by the inquest report submitted to the
Commission of Enquiry later).[2]
The varying estimates of the total number of dead put them between 26 and 40.
Some people probably died later in the hospital. Only about 62 passengers were
sent back to Punjab under police escort. A total of 211 passengers were
arrested and 28 others including Gurdit escaped. After wandering for seven
years, Gurdit, reportedly on the advice of Gandhi, voluntarily surrendered in
November, 1921.[3]
Migration, Racist response and
Radicalization
In
a way the journey of Komagata Maru
represents a moment in history, but a significant moment in Indian history. It exposed
the plight the Indian migrants, usually poor peasants/labourers/artisans/small
traders, experienced in their quest for better wages and a better living in a
new environment. Migration from the Punjab, writes Raza, dates back to 1867
when about a hundred Sikhs went to Hong Kong to join the police force there.
The migration was generally the consequence of the subsistence crisis which is
usually attributed to the broad economic impact of the colonial rule. The vast
majority of these migrants were driven by hopes of improving their economic
conditions.[4].
These migrants to the New World created an anxiety, which became more and more
acute as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, in the minds of the
imperial authorities about foreigners/aliens/immigrants. The harassment and
endless misery to which the Indian immigrants into Canada were subjected was
the result of this new feeling of anxiety within the Empire about the immigrants/
aliens/ foreigners. There was a blatant display of racism as well. On the other
hand, it has been suggested that the records indicate a close relationship
between these factors and the migration, the settlement and radicalization of
Indians in North America.[5]
Militant Nationalism in India
On the other hand, India at the turn of the
century was experiencing the emergence of a revolutionary anti-colonial
movement. Benedict Anderson, in analyzing the anti-colonial and revolutionary
movements in a different context, has suggested that the last two decades of
the nineteenth century witnessed the onset of what he calls ‘early
globalization’. He discerns patterns of network among the nationalists in the
‘remnants of the Spanish global empire’, (the Cuban insurrection of 1895 and
the Philippine Revolution of 1896). The Indian revolutionary movement was also
accompanied by Indian expatriates seeking to coordinate their efforts in
Europe, America, east and south-east Asia with the revolutionaries in India.
Primarily it was this suspected link of the immigrants in Komagata Maru with
the revolutionaries that goaded the Canadian government to deny permission to
land. The recent birth of the Ghadr fuelled the fire of suspicion.
Control by the Empire
The
need to control the bodies of the subjects and their movements- in and out- was
underlined to the powers that be at the metropolitan headquarters. Identity
documents, permission to enter and exit (technically ‘Ingress’ and ‘Egress’)
became a major concern on the part of the colonial government. There is little doubt that a dimension of
racism was associated with such policy, but there was more to it. Was it just
coincidence that in 1914 the British Nationality and the Status of Aliens Act
which stipulated that the aliens had no right in common law or by statute to be
admitted into the United Kingdom was passed. It was in 1914, coincidentally
again, that the Foreigners’ Ordinance ( Ordinance III of 1914) and the Ingress
into India Ordinance( Ordinance V of 1914) were promulgated authorizing the
Government of India to control and regulate the entry of foreigners into India
by sea or land. Search of ships became a routine affair after the tragic
incident of Komagata Maru.
The Global Context
The journey of Komagata Maru started as a simple tale of poor Sikhs seeking new
abode and a better life in British Columbia. It was not supposed to be a unique
journey. But the refusal of the Immigration authorities of Canada to allow
these immigrants to land after a long wait at the harbour, the forced return
journey and its accompanying miseries and the final landing at Budge Budge,
particularly the massacre of many of the Sikh passengers there, transformed the
journey into a historic one. The little narrative of the Komagata Maru and its passengers merged, as it were, into the larger narrative of Indian freedom struggle. The
name of the ship became a symbol of racist and imperial injustice on the one
hand and the resistance to them on the other. The tangled tales of diasporic
discontents, political activism of exiled Indians in Europe, North America,
East and South-East Asia seeking to create an international network, the
revolutionary movement in India and the policy of control and repression adopted by the colonial government
constitute the memories of what became a significant, if also tragic, voyage. A
legend of heroic resistance is also part of that collective memory. The whole
episode may very well be seen as part of what Anderson calls ‘the infinitely
complex inter-continental networks that characterize the age of Early
Globalization’ of a different kind.[6]This
note has simply tried to connect some of these different aspects to try and
understand the conjuncture which the incident represented in its broader historical
perspective. The incident in itself, it may be argued, is the tip of the
iceberg.
[1]Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar(UBC
Press,Vancouver, 2nd Edn., Reprint,1995,96-103) accessed on the
internet http://www.komagatamarujourney.ca on 12.08.2015
[2]Proceedings of the Komagata Maru
Commission of Enquiry, Volume II, exhibit no.13,p15 ( Bengal Secretariat
Press,Calcutta, 1914)
[3]This brief outline is based on
Ganesh Ghosh, An Episode of India’s
Struggle for Freedom: Komagata Maru 1914(Gurdwara Shaheedganj ,Budge
Budge,1998, 1-30); Also see, Johnston, op.cit.
[4]
Ali Raza, Straddling the International and the Regional, in Ali Raza, Franziska
Roy and Benjamin Zachariah( Eds.), The
Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and Worldviews ( New Delhi,
Sage 2015,89)
Also see, Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty, Colonialism, Resource Crisis and Forced
Migration, ( Kolkata, Calcutta Research Group Research Paper
Series-Policies and Practices,2011)
[5]
Ali Raza, Straddling the International and the Regional, in Ali Raza, Franziska
Roy and Benjamin Zachariah( Eds.), The
Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and Worldviews ( New Delhi,
Sage 2015,90). The links had been very elegantly established by Seema Sohi in Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and
Indian Anticolonialism in North America ( New Delhi, Oxford University
Press,1914)
[6]Benedict Anderson,Under Three Flags : Anarchism and The
Anticolonial Imagination, (Verso,
London,2007Edn.,233)
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