Immigration history: Why Vancouver should not rewrite the Komagata Maru record

In Vancouver’s Coal Harbour, the city government on Saturday will inaugurate the refurbished memorial to the 376 passengers of the Komagata Maru, the Japanese steamship with South Asian passengers turned away from Canada in 1914.

The memorial had been unveiled in 2012.

The information panel now carries rewritten text that presents the ship primarily as the Guru Nanak Jahaz, with the name Komagata Maru visually and textually subordinated.

This may appear to be an act of historical redress. But it narrows a broader history of racial exclusion and introduces a present-day political claim into the documentary record without fully reckoning with the consequences.

The Komagata Maru voyage turned into a landmark case that shone a spotlight on the structural racial discrimination of the British Empire.

In 1914, a Sikh businessman in Hong Kong named Gurdit Singh chartered the Japanese steamship SS Komagata Maru to challenge Canada’s exclusionary immigration laws. In his promotional material, aimed at potential Sikh emigrants, he dubbed this Japanese ship the Guru Nanak Jahaz –literally, the Guru Nanak ship. He added a religious layer by ceremonially bringing on board the Sikh holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Though Singh drew on his faith to fight injustice, he saw in the voyage an opportunity to challenge the colour bar and...

Read more