Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In 1914, Gurdit Singh, a Singapore-based entrepreneur chartered a Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru, to carry 376 Punjabi passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver. The passengers were not allowed to disembark on grounds of the newly introduced Cotinuous Journey regulation. Even though Gurdit Singh held that he had not violated any law and appealed that Indians had a right to move and live in any part of the British Empire as loyal British subjects, the ship was forced to return to Budge Budge where the passengers were suspected to be members of a revolutionary nationalist movement called Ghadr, detained under the Ingress into India Act, and forced to board a train to Punjab. Whether Gurdit Singh and the passengers were directly involved in the Ghadr conspiracy or not, the appropriation of the journey by Ghadr leadership and the indoctrination of disaffected passengers by alleged speeches made by Ghadr leaders transformed several passengers from law abiding subjects to resistant subjects. This paper uncovers the transnational intelligence networks mobilized by the British imperial state to monitor the movements of Sikhs suspected of links with anti-colonial movements in which the US and Canadian governments actively collaborated and the mobilisation of the Komagata Maru in the militant Ghadr movement. It shows that the equation of aliens with radicals and the racist, repressive, exclusionary policies and mechanisms of control deployed by the British, politicized ordinary workers and engendered a counter-Empire of resistant flows and exchanges in which the Sikh multitudes played a pivotal role.