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 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.

A century has passed since the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver. Its arrival was a direct challenge to Canada’s immigration laws, which barred immigrants from India – yet the nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers on board the ship had been promised equality with all other British subjects, and they arrived to claim that right. The Voyage of the Komagata Maru is an extensive revision, reappraisal, and expansion of Hugh Johnston’s authoritative history of the Komagata Maru incident, first published in 1979. The updated edition draws in new research – exploring legal issues and the motives of the passengers and their leaders and supporters – and revisits the previous edition’s assessments in light of insight gained over the intervening decades. Now expanded by more than 50 percent, this landmark book is still the only comprehensive historical account of the Komagata Maru incident – a story of immigration, empire, and politics, which Canadians increasingly recognize as a critical moment in this country’s history.

This new and expanded edition offers the most thoroughly researched account of the notorious Komagata Maru incident. The event centres on the ship's nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers, who sought entry into Canada at Vancouver in the summer of 1914, only to be chased away by a Canadian warship. This story became a symbol of prejudicial immigration policies, which Canadians today reject, and served to fuel the emerging anti-British movement in India. It deserves the careful re-examination it gets in this thoroughly updated edition that provides a contemporary perspective on a defining moment in Canadian, British Empire, and Indian history.

In Jewels of the Qila, Hugh Johnston draws on memoirs and interviews, newspaper articles and photographs, to tell the story of three generations of a remarkable Sikh family and the communities they lived in and supported in both Canada and India. The Siddoos are Punjabi. Kapoor Singh, father and grandfather, arrived in British Columbia in 1912 and had to overcome racial prejudice and legal discrimination to transform himself from labourer to lumber baron. As he campaigned for citizenship and immigration rights for his people, he and his wife, Besant Kaur, fostered in their daughters a vision of service and activism that, as adults, they fulfilled by establishing a family-run hospital in Punjab and by introducing a Westernized version of an Indian spiritual tradition to Canada. The Siddoos are the heart of the story, but their history tells a larger tale of an immigrant community’s triumphs and tribulations and the strong connection that Indo-Canadians continue to forge with their homeland.

In the early 1900s, panic over the arrival of South Asian immigrants swept up and down the west coast of North America. While racism and fear of labour competition were at the heart of this furor, public leaders – including physicians, union leaders, civil servants, journalists, and politicians – latched on to unsubstantiated public health concerns to justify the exclusion of South Asians from British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. Not Fit to Stay examines how and why South Asians were excluded from immigration through legislation that took effect in Canada and the United States in the early twentieth century. This book is an important study of how white North Americans saw first-wave South Asian immigrants as separate from, and inferior to, other groups in the evolving racial hierarchy on the west coast of North America.

Identifying himself as both an Indian and a Canadian but first and foremost a Sikh, Tara Singh has shuttled back and forth between Canada and India for most of his life, finding personal harmony while incorporating two very different countries and cultures into his life. Tara Singh was raised within an amritdhari, or baptised, Sikh tradition in a small village in Punjab, India; his values and identity are firmly rooted in Punjabi Sikh culture. As a child and adolescent he suffered mercilessly from his father's verbal and physical cruelty, but the support that he drew from his village environment and his religion gave him strength. He married, according to traditional practices, the woman that his family had arranged for him to wed. Sponsored by his sister, Tara Singh emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s and settled in British Columbia. He came alone, without his wife and children, as most Punjabis did. His greatest initial shock in Canada was his experience with racism, and its impact on his relatives who tried to persuade him to shave his beard and abandon his turban - two sacred symbols of the Sikh. Refusing to betray his beliefs, he resisted the relentless pressure of his family just as he later fought against the exploitation of immigrants in the saw mills where he worked. Tara Singh became active in fighting for immigrant rights and protecting the Sikh faith in Canada. The Four Quarters of the Night is more than one man's life story: his single voice reveals much about the collective experience of immigrants. Tara Singh's narrative presents an evocative picture of a newcomer's experiences in a land of foreign customs, culture, and religious beliefs. Hugh Johnston, to whom Tara Singh told his story, has created a unique and invaluable document in immigration and ethnic history.