In May 1914, 400 Sikhs left for British Columbia by chartered ship, resolved to claim their right to equal treatment with white citizens of the British Empire and force entry into Canada. They were anchored off Vancouver for over two months, enduring extreme physical privation and harrassment by immigration officials, but defying federal deportation orders even when the Canadian government attempted to enforce them with a gunboat. The leaders of the group, who were thought to be closely associated with the nationalist, terrorist movement in India, were finally persuaded to return to India. They were by then full of revolutionary fervour against the Raj. On their disembarkation at Calcutta, troops opened fire while attempting to control the passengers, and a number of them were killed. The event, which had already raised a great deal of interest and concern among the governments of India and Canada, was now invested for Indian nationalists with a tragic significance which can be compared to that of Jallianwallah Bagh, while Gurdit Singh, the leader, was acclaimed as a heroic revolutionary figure by eminent Congressmen.

In the Punjab, Pakistan, a culture of migration and mobility already emerged in the nineteenth century. Imperial policies produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs, who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in South East Asia, Australia, America and Canada. The practices of the British Indian government and the Canada government offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty. This book focuses on the Komagata Maru episode of 1914: This Japanese ship was chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Sikh businessman from Malaya. It carried 376 passengers from Punjab and 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 Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance. The author isolates juridical procedures, tactics and apparatus of security through which the British Empire exercised power on imperial subjects by investigating the significance of this incident to colonial and postcolonial migration. Juxtaposing public archives including newspapers, official documents and reports against private archives and interviews of descendants the book analyses the legalities and machineries of surveillance that regulate the movements of people in the old and new Empire. Addressing contemporary discourse on neo-imperialism and resistance, migration, diaspora, multiculturalism and citizenship, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of diaspora studies, post colonialism, minority studies, migration studies, multiculturalism and Sikh /Punjab and South Asian studies.

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.

Early twentieth-century Calcutta was not just a point of passage within the British Empire, but a key center of colonial power; a crucial laboratory of imperial repressive practices cultivated and applied elsewhere. Histories of the Komagata Maru or the Ghadar Movement offer rewarding perspectives on Punjabi Sikh migrants, but fail to adequately investigate why the ship was brought to Bengal; why overwhelming locally organized imperial vigilance was imposed on ships that arrived soon afterward; and the extent to which the operation of the repressive colonial state apparatus influenced the intersections of anticolonial strands in Calcutta and its surroundings during 1914-15. This monograph traces this early wartime clash of positions and the organized postwar transmission of the memory of the Komagata Maru as a symbol of resistance among the Sikh workers in the industrial centers of southwest Bengal. It acts as a link in a chain of scholarship that has hitherto traced the spread of radical anticolonial currents among the Punjabi Sikh diaspora that connected Punjab with Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Americas.

Ward draws upon a rich record of events and opinion in the provincial press, manuscript collections, and successive federal enquiries and royal commissions on Asian immigration. He locates the origins of west coast racism in the frustrated vision of a white British Columbia and an unshakeable belief in the unassimilability of the Asian immigrant. Canadian attitudes were dominated by a series of interlocking, hostile stereotypes derived from western perceptions of Asia and modified by the encounter between whites and Asians on the north Pacific coast. Public pressure on local, provincial, and federal governments led to discriminatory policies in the field of immigration and employment, and culminated in the forced relocation of west coast Japanese residents during World War II.

Canada’s history, since its birth as a nation one hundred and fifty years ago, is one of immigration, nation-building, and contested racial and ethnic relations. In Immigration, Racial and Ethnic Studies in 150 Years of Canada: Retrospects and Prospects scholars provide a wide-ranging overview of this history with a core theme being one of enduring racial and ethnic conflict and inequality. The volume is organized around four themes where in each theme selected racial and ethnic issues are examined critically. Part 1 focuses on the history of Canadian immigration and nation-building while Part 2 looks at situating contemporary Canada in terms of the debates in the literature on ethnicity and race. Part 3 revisits specific racial and ethnic studies in Canada and finally in Part 4 a state-of-the-art is provided on immigration and racial and ethnic studies while providing prospects for the future. Contributors are: Victor Armony, David Este, Augie Fleras, Peter R. Grant, Shibao Guo, Abdolmohammad Kazemipur, Anne-Marie Livingstone, Adina Madularea, Ayesha Mian Akram, Nilum Panesar, Yolande Pottie-Sherman, Paul Pritchard, Howard Ramos, Daniel W. Robertson, Vic Satzewich, Morton Weinfeld, Rima Wilkes, Lori Wilkinson, Elke Winter, Nelson Wiseman, Lloyd Wong, and Henry Yu.