The Voyage of the Komagata Maru
The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar,
expanded and fully revised edition
hugh j.m. johnston
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
© UBC Press 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Johnston, Hugh J. M., author
The voyage of the Komagata Maru : the Sikh challenge to Canada’s colour bar / Hugh Johnston.
– Expanded and fully revised edition.
Revision of: The voyage of the Komagata Maru : the Sikh challenge to Canada’s colour bar / Hugh
Johnston. – Vancouver : University of British Columbia Press, 1989.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-0-7748-2548-1 (pbk.). – isbn 978-0-7748-2549-8 (pdf). – isbn 978-0-7748-2550-4 (epub)
1. Komagata Maru Incident, 1914. 2. Sikhs – Canada – History. 3. East Indian Canadians –
History. 4. Aliens – Canada – History. I. Title.
FC106.S55J648 2014
325’.2540971
C2014-900983-6
C2014-900984-4
UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the
Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund), the Canada Council for the Arts, and
the British Columbia Arts Council.
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Set in Myriad Condensed and Perpetua by Artegraphica Design Co. Ltd.
Copy editor: Joyce Hildebrand
Proofreader: Dianne Tiefensee
UBC Press
The University of British Columbia
2029 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
www.ubcpress.ca
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
Contents
List of Illustrations | ix
Acknowledgments | xi
Preface | xiii
Introduction: South Asian Emigrants and the Empire | 3
1 Exclusion: A Hidden Policy | 10
2 Education: A Political Awakening | 21
3 Encouragement: Disputing the Law Successfully | 38
4 Departure: A Punjabi Emigrant Ship from Hong Kong | 53
5 Arrival: Stopped at Canada’s Gateway | 68
6 Delay: Stalling by Officials | 82
7 The Court of Appeal: Canada’s Policy Upheld | 94
8 Force: The Police Repulsed | 107
9 Intimidation: Facing a Navy Cruiser | 124
10 Return: A Tragic Homecoming | 142
11 Arrest and Detention: The Aftermath of the Budge Budge Riot | 160
12 Surrender: Gaining National Attention in India | 176
13 Assassination: An Ending and a Beginning | 189
Postscript: After the Komagata Maru | 208
Notes | 217
Index | 244
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
Preface
The approaching centenary of the Komagata Maru has been an incentive for an extensive revision of a book that I first published thirty-five
years ago. Over the decades, fresh material – published and unpublished
– has come my way. The Internet has become a great time saver in tracking down small points that sometimes make a meaningful difference. And
much has happened since I began my research back in 1975. Subtly, and
perhaps not so subtly, the march of events has affected my own understanding of the documentary evidence of this history. Canada has become
very different; Indo-Canadians are much more visible and better known
and appreciated by other Canadians; and I have had wonderful opportunities over the decades to share time, engage with, and become very close
to individual Indo-Canadians, particularly Punjabi Sikhs and their families
both in Canada and in India. All of this has affected this revision. The past
is something we strive to recapture, but it is always a work in progress.
The events surrounding the Komagata Maru were not acknowledged in
mainstream Canadian history until well beyond the 1970s. Even now,
they get surprisingly slight attention outside of British Columbia. Thirty
or forty years ago, most Canadians were unaware that the country’s
Asian-origin population had been kept very small as a matter of policy,
and because Asian numbers were so small, Asians were easily left out of
the national account. It follows that the older histories of Canada by a
generation of well-respected Canadian historians such as Donald
Creighton, A.R.M. Lower, J.B. Brebner, H.A. Innis, and W.L. Morton
devoted not a line or index entry to the Komagata Maru. Yet, with a little
imagination, one can see that the exclusion of people from the entire subcontinent of India was a major defining fact about Canada. The country
would be very different today if the passengers on the Komagata Maru had
made their point successfully and been allowed to land.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
xiii
xiv
PREFACE
It makes a great difference that Canada now advertises itself as a multicultural country instead of as a European and British country, which was
the commonly accepted characterization a century ago. Multiculturalism
gives Canadians an inclusive ideal, along with the challenge of trying to
live up to it. Earlier generations did not have that inviting national ideal.
But the contrasts between now and then are far from absolute. On the
questions of individual freedoms, human values, human rights, national
identity, race, and ethnicity, Canadians of a century ago had the same
range of ideas available to them as do Canadians of today. And like today,
those early Canadians could go to the same sources of inspiration –
religion, political theory, self-interest, or science – and draw contrary
conclusions among themselves. The difference is in the consensus then
and today: now the Canadian consensus is more open to the inclusion of
difference than it was in the past. When it comes to ethnicity, this greater
openness is a positive outcome of a reformed immigration policy that has
allowed people into the country from all parts of the world.
The full history of the Komagata Maru affair, from its origins to its longterm consequences, is an immigrant story writ very large. It has all of the
elements of such a story, with its most admirable and least wanted extremes. It is about the remarkable desire of immigrants to reach Canada
and North America, and their resourcefulness, determination, and persistence in getting here and in staying. It is also about the discouragement
and hostility that they encountered at the hands of many Canadians. And
it is about the respect, friendship, and help they received from a notable
few Canadians. Critically important was the outstanding success of some
of them – those who entered Canada years before the Komagata Maru arrived, who witnessed its coming and who were troubled by its going, and
who, nonetheless, went on to great personal success. These individuals
were adventurous in travelling at their own expense so far across the
globe in search of opportunity. They were resourceful in making the most
of what they found. And, like the vast majority of immigrants from other
nations, they never forgot their homeland even if they stayed away for
years. Their political life in the early years centred on what was happening in their home country. Some definitely wanted to have a place in the
political life of Canada, but they were all denied full citizenship until they
were elderly. They were, however, extraordinarily persistent in winning
a place for themselves in this country, and they were an inspiration and a
help to compatriots who followed in their path. Their rich legacy is the
sizable Indo-Canadian presence that the country now has.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
introduction
South Asian Emigrants and the Empire
Freedom to come and go, to live and work anywhere in the British
Em­pire was a right that Punjabi Sikhs and other immigrants from India
claimed when they first came to Canada. They claimed it as British subjects and continued to claim it – without success – until India achieved her
independence, after which they began to be heard with more respect. For
authority, their champions cited Queen Victoria and her “Proclamation
Con­cerning India” issued in 1858. An Indo-Canadian periodical, The Aryan,
published in Victoria in 1912, ran a single sentence from Victoria’s proclamation in every issue under its masthead: “We hold ourselves bound to
the Natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which
bind us to all our other subjects.”
The Punjabi Sikh editors of The Aryan interpreted this to mean equality
for all British subjects throughout the Empire. In reality, Victoria’s commitment was an empty one. Her Empire was a patchwork of jurisdictions
over which her government in Britain exercised widely varying degrees
of control. There was no unified system of law for all the subjects of the
Queen. As a contemporary historian of the British Empire, Jan Morris,
has written, “Legally there was no such thing as the British Empire. It had
no constitutional meaning.” That unacknowledged reality was a huge obstacle for subject peoples arguing for equal rights within the Empire.
By the time of Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, Canada, although not yet
the confederation that it would become in 1867, was a self-governing
democracy, making its own laws in all domestic matters. India, by contrast, had fallen, over the course of three centuries, under the dictation
of a government directed from London. And beyond Canada and India,
among Britain’s other worldwide possessions – its colonies, protectorates,
and outposts – the style of government varied enormously, including local
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
3
4
INTRODUCTION
1 The editors of
The Aryan, Dr.Sundar
Singh and Kartar Singh
Hundal in a formal
picture taken in 1929,
many years after they
worked on the paper
together. (Kapoor
Singh Siddoo family.)
self-government, direct Crown rule, rule by chartered company, and
even, with the South Atlantic island of Tristan de Cunha, government by
a missionary society. Very different forms of law prevailed in the many
parts of the Empire, and the ideal of a common citizenship had no legal
teeth. Instead, the value of British citizenship depended on blood, language, and culture, the bonds that linked the white citizens of the white
dominions and Great Britain but did not include most of the subject
peoples of the Empire.
This was an underlying reality that official pronouncements sought to
disguise but that nearly everyone understood, and it was an embarrassment for the great beneficiaries and advocates of the Empire. As a young
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
SOUTH ASIAN EMIGRANTS AND THE EMPIRE
5
journalist and traveller, Winston Churchill tried to explain to his British
readers why the issue of Indian immigration was agitating white settlers in
British East Africa. There were two factors, he said – the “Colour question” and the fear of competition from Indians. He mentioned competition
in many roles – not just as labourers but also as professionals, landowners,
merchants, traders, farmers, bankers, foremen, contractors, builders, engineers, accountants, and clerks. In East Africa, as in Canada, one was
hearing the claim “This is a white man’s country” – a claim that put the
interests of the British community ahead of every other group, whether
indigenous or immigrant. Even as an imperialist – or more correctly, especially as an imperialist – Churchill saw a problem in this, particularly as
it affected the place of Indians in the Empire. He put it this way as a young
travel writer in 1908:
Is it possible for any Government with a scrap of respect for honest
dealing between man and man to embark on a policy of deliberately
squeezing out the native of India from regions in which he has established himself under every security of good faith? Most of all we ask
is such a policy possible to the Government which bears sway over
three hundred millions of our Indian Empire?
Indians were a vital part of the global British Empire, and educated
Indians understood that Britain’s status as a major power depended on her
possession of India. Moreover, Indians were already employed in many
capacities throughout the Empire and had been in some colonies for many
decades. They were in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, the Federated
Malay States, Singapore, Hong Kong and other Asian ports, South and
East Africa, and, in small numbers, in Australia, New Zealand, and Can­
ada. Their total population in the Empire beyond India approached one
million. These overseas Indians were from the north and south of the
subcontinent and were generally from regions accessible to the country’s
great ports – Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. Of the many Indian communities that sent emigrants overseas, Punjabi Sikhs were just one. But the
Sikhs were distinctive in going abroad independently – financing their
travel themselves, owing nothing to any labour contractor, and being free
on arrival to move as they chose. They could emigrate on their own because they came from – in Indian terms – comparatively prosperous farming families. By comparison, poorer rural communities were the main
source of cheap coolie labour emigrating under contract for fixed periods,
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
6
INTRODUCTION
and coolie labour typified Indian emigration. It was the competition of
free and independent Indian emigrants like the Sikhs that most worried
white settlers in British colonies.
When Churchill wrote about East Africa, British colonial governments
were already doing exactly what he was arguing against. In 1897, the
British South African colony of Natal passed legislation to stop the entry
of free and independent immigrants from India. This legislation became
famous for its subterfuge: it made the ability to fill out a written form in a
European language a device for screening immigrants; it named no unwanted racial or national groups but made a language test the means of
excluding immigrants from India. Imperial officials in London did not
object, although they would have protested if the intended purpose of the
legislation had been explicit. They liked the approach because it allowed
them to continue to say – with a straight face – that there were no legislated racial barriers to migration within the Empire.
Very quickly, three Australian colonies (Western Australia, New South
Wales, and Tasmania), as well as New Zealand, adopted similar legislation.
When the Australian colonies united in 1901, one of the first pieces of
legislation of the new federal Parliament was the Australian Immigration
Restriction Act, inspired by the Natal Act but made more severe because
it authorized a fifty-word dictation test in any arbitrarily chosen European
language – from Irish to Hungarian. By this means, Australia excluded
Asian – including Indian – immigrants for the next seventy years. The
colonies of South Africa moved in the same way to achieve the same purpose. Cape Colony adopted a Natal Act in 1902, as did Transvaal in 1907,
and in 1913, the new Union of South Africa legislated an end to Indian
and other Asian immigration to any part of the Union with yet another
version of the Natal Act.
Canadians were well aware of what was happening in other parts of the
Empire, and in 1900, the British Columbia legislature passed its own Natal
Act, this one aimed at Chinese and Japanese immigration. (Up to that
point, there was no noticeable immigration from India to Canada, although it was very soon to begin.) The authority that British Columbia
claimed for this legislation was section 95 of the British North America
Act, which shared jurisdiction over immigration between the provinces
and the federal government, although it gave primacy to federal laws.
Within months, the federal government disallowed British Columbia’s
Natal Act as a contravention of federal legislation. The federal government had taken similar action fifteen years earlier, in 1885, when British
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
SOUTH ASIAN EMIGRANTS AND THE EMPIRE
7
Col­umbia tried to enact a bill to prevent Chinese immigration. In both
instances – in 1885 and in 1900 – the provincial government was passing
legislation that it knew would be disallowed, but its aim was to put pressure on the federal government by keeping up a public controversy. It
was making sure that Ottawa understood that Asian immigration was a
hot political issue on the West Coast.
In 1885, these tactics of the provincial government achieved their desired result. They moved the Conservative federal government of John
A. Macdonald to pass a Chinese Immigration Act with a head tax of $50
for Chinese immigrants. And after a decade and a half, when that tax was
proving too low to be effective, the provincial government successfully
agitated to have the Liberal federal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier
raise the head tax to $100 in 1900 and to $500 in 1903. The imperial
Chinese government did not like this legislation, which so openly discriminated against Chinese migrants, and Chinese diplomats said so, but
without getting any satisfaction from Laurier’s government – China then
being very weak in the international arena, in marked contrast to today.
International standing made a huge difference, and Laurier hesitated to
impose explicit restrictions on Japanese and Indians. Japan was a military
power and treaty partner with Britain, and India was a major part of the
British Empire. These considerations, along with the issue of federal primacy in immigration, lay behind the Laurier government’s disallowance
of British Columbia’s Natal Acts. The situation finally changed in 1908,
when the courts struck down the last of a succession of provincial Natal
Acts and the province accepted the decision. By then, the federal government had reassessed its policy as a consequence of an anti-Asian riot in
Vancouver and decided to restrict all Asian immigration – from India as
well as from China and Japan.
This was a striking reversal for Laurier because as recently as Sep­
tember 1906, he had said that Canada was powerless to bar the entry
of British subjects of any race or kind. He was a classic liberal who believed in individual liberties and the free movement of people, at least
as an abstract idea. But the British government itself was not defending
the common rights of British subjects throughout the British Empire. In
theory, colonial subjects and UK residents all possessed the same British
citizenship. In reality, coloured colonials had little protection against
discriminatory treatment. When Asian immigration became an issue in
South Africa, East Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the
British government chose not to get involved.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
8
INTRODUCTION
For Laurier, the voices that mattered most were those of Canadian voters, not the British government. As an elected politician, he listened to
the voters of British Columbia even though their province was small and
peripheral. A key constituency in British Columbia could make a difference in a national election result, and he could appreciate the value of
those votes. In March 1908, after Canada had instituted measures that effectively stopped immigration from India, the British government quietly
accepted the result without objection. And they advised the Government
of India that there was no recourse – that a self-governing colony like
Canada had the legal independence to set its own immigration rules. That
buried the issue at the official level. Behind the scenes, the British government urged Canada and other self-governing colonies to avoid explicit
legislation when adopting measures that discriminated against British subjects. But it was up to these colonies to decide whom they would admit.
These were the prevailing conditions for Punjabi Sikhs and other South
Asians who immigrated to Canada early in the twentieth century. A small
number settled in the country before these problems arose, but their relatives, fellow villagers, and other compatriots could not follow. In analyzing the situation, they reasoned that the colour of their skin was a factor
– and it was, but it was not the whole story. There was a more general
opposition in Canada to immigrant workers, whatever their race or nationality – opposition that came most strongly from white labour and its
representatives. This was in a decade in which Canada experienced the
greatest immigration of its entire history, and this heavy immigration,
despite all of its benefits to the country, still generated a fiercely negative
reaction. However, this common pattern was not the way in which Pun­
jabis saw it. They had their own experience to go on. They came to the
country, found work, and discovered that they were not welcomed by
many. Those were their basic observations.
As a community, Punjabi Sikhs in Canada did not accept the secondclass treatment that they received at home and abroad, and they never
stopped struggling for change. They were advocates and militant activists
for independence in India – for an end to the British Raj, which did so
little to protect them. While some of them saw armed action as the only
answer, others did not, and that created a powerful tension in their midst.
They also agitated for change in Canada, seeking full rights of citizenship
and free right of entry. As they saw it, independence in India and fair
treatment in Canada were two sides of the same coin. This way of thinking was incomprehensible to the vast majority of Anglo-Canadians, who
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
SOUTH ASIAN EMIGRANTS AND THE EMPIRE
9
were still instinctive defenders of the British Empire and of their own
privileged place in Canada.
The voyage of the Komagata Maru was a direct challenge to the immigration barrier – a challenge complicated by the issue of empire. The
leaders on board the ship and their Indian friends on shore, while determined to open Canada to Indian immigrants, were also very public in
their criticism of British rule in India. And time has taken their side. On
both counts, what they considered right and just has come to be. But
Canadians who then believed in the Empire did not take it well that these
immigrants found fault with the British. The immigration issue by itself
ensured a confrontation, but the empire issue added to its intensity. The
outcome of the voyage of the Komagata Maru was a devastating failure and
tragedy for the passengers, but it still stands out as the most dramatic
challenge to Canadian immigration policy ever mounted by any disadvantaged immigrant group. And it was not an isolated gesture. The small
Indian community in Canada maintained its fight through lobbying, petitions, and legal challenges for fifty years, making gains by stages until
there was no question of its place in Canadian society.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
Chapter 1
Exclusion: A Hidden Policy
In the first years of the twentieth century, Punjabi immigrants in
Brit­ish Columbia received far more attention and generated far more public anxiety than their numbers warranted. The local papers ran sensational, patronizing, and frequently derogatory front page stories about them.
Their presence provoked strong objections from local politicians and
labour leaders. And amazingly – judging by many archived memos, reports,
cables, and despatches – they seemed to be a major concern to officials at
the top levels of government. Most other immigrant groups could establish themselves in Canada by degrees, receiving little national notice until
they had achieved a robust presence, but this was not the case with this
group.
They came to British Columbia in boom times as a tiny element of an
unprecedented influx of immigrants from many places – eastern Canada,
the United States, Britain, continental Europe, and Asia. At first, they
enjoyed easy entry, but this lasted only a few years; then, the Canadian
government stopped immigration from India. That was a crucial moment
in the politicization of the Indian immigrants already in the country, who
immediately began to analyze what had happened and ask themselves
what they could do about it.
They were an expatriate community of young men whose parents,
grand­parents, younger siblings, wives, and children had stayed behind in
India. Leaving women, children, and older people at home was a matter
of economics and cultural preference. In everyone’s mind – those who
went and those who stayed – home was the best, most appropriate, most
secure and supportive, and least expensive place for a family to live.
Young men were, with almost no exception, the only candidates to go
abroad because they were the ones best able to find the kind of work available in places like British Columbia. Most of these young men were
10
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
A HIDDEN POLICY
11
Punjabi Sikhs from northern India; a minority were Punjabi Muslims or
Hindus from the same districts as the Sikhs. By religion, they belonged to
three separate groups, although their Punjabi language and Punjabi culture gave them much to share. They were all rural people, and many of
them had mortgaged joint-family lands at 10 and 12 percent interest to
raise the fare to Vancouver: the fare alone cost them fifty to sixty-five
dollars. They could justify the debt because they expected and got wages
ten to fifteen times as high as those for any paid work they could find in
India. Many of them travelled only after getting permission from their
family elders, and only when those elders saw a general benefit for the
whole family. Typically, they had left home with a strong sense of obligation to the people left behind.
In lumberyards and sawmills in the vicinity of Vancouver and Victoria,
they could make $1.25, $1.50, or even $2.00 a day. Living frugally, three
and four to a room, on a sparse but adequate diet, they saved most of what
they earned. What they saved was seldom banked; rather, it was invested
in real estate, and in this way, some accumulated $3,000, $4,000, and
$5,000 within a decade. These were dollars with twenty times the purchasing power of today’s money. The ultimate objective for most was to
go back to their villages in Punjab, where even $200 would be a fortune
in Indian rupees, but a core group put down roots in British Columbia
and left for India only to visit their families. Deciding to stay in Canada
created an emptiness in their lives because, while most were single, a
good number had wives whom they had left behind in Punjab. But that is
how they chose to live.
The first of these Sikhs had come to Canada during the winter of 1903-4,
encouraged by the Hong Kong agents of the Canadian Pacific Railway
(CPR). It was a measure of the times that the manager of the CPR’s transPacific service emphatically denied what his company was doing to promote this immigration. This was when he found himself under public
scrutiny and facing stiff questions. His misleading answer was that the
immigration had begun with a Sikh regiment that crossed Canada by rail
in 1897. What he said was not accepted then, although – because it appeared in print – it has been repeated uncritically many times since. The
truth is that CPR agents were seeking to replace Asian steerage traffic lost
after the Canadian government had raised the head tax on Chinese immigrants. That is how Sikh immigration began.
Some may have come earlier, but five Sikhs – bearded, turbaned, and
wearing light cotton European-style clothing – were such an exceptional
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
12
E XCLUSION
sight that they were newsworthy when they arrived on the CPR liner
Empress of India in March 1904. Ten more came on the Empress of Japan in
May, and each succeeding month brought two or three more. It was a new
country for them; many of these Sikhs could not read, write, or even
speak English. But they had educated men in their midst, and most of the
less educated were equipped for success by past experience in the British
Indian military and by working in other countries abroad. It took these
Sikh immigrants time to find work in British Columbia, but it was there
to be found. Some were taken on by sawmills and a cement factory, others
by contractors who employed them on the roads or in cutting wood and
clearing land, and in a few months, they began sending home postal orders of $15, $20, or $50. That was the beginning of a community with a
nucleus that had come to stay.
This was a community rooted in rural society but with collective experience and knowledge of the wider world. Anyone who dismissed them
as simple peasants made a mistake. Most of them came from a single farming caste group, the Jats, with a proud military history. They were from
the landowning families of their own villages and came from the top strata
of village society. Malaya and Hong Kong had long offered Sikhs employment as policemen, watchmen, and caretakers – in preference to local
Chinese. From these colonies, some had migrated to Thailand, Sumatra,
Shanghai, and Manila, and from Southeast Asia, a few had gone to Aus­
tralia and New Zealand. Sikhs were already in East Africa and Fiji, and by
the time they began landing in North America, many had friends, acquaintances, and family around the globe.
Among the earliest Sikh and Punjabi pioneers in British Columbia were
some who had already been as far from home as Australia. They knew
something of conditions in various countries, and by telegram and letter
and in person, they shared their discoveries with friends and relatives.
Once a few of them had gained employment in British Columbia, others
soon followed. In fact, it took just two and a half years for Sikh immigration to Canada to become substantial. By the autumn of 1906, it had become, in the eyes of British Columbians, an invasion. From August to
December, almost every CPR passenger liner brought Sikhs and other
Punjabis by the hundreds – 696 on the SS Tartar in mid-November, for
instance – and they kept coming in spite of a daunting reception. In anticipation of an expansion of this traffic, the CPR had already moved a
large steamship, the SS Monteagle, from its Alantic to its Pacific service.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
A HIDDEN POLICY
13
In British Columbia, the Sikhs were both wanted and respected and
unwanted and disparaged, depending on one’s point of view. Lumber
companies and railway contractors wanted them, the fruit growers of the
Okanagan wanted them, but local politicians, dancing to the tune of
labour organizations, were hostile, and the press filled its pages with what
could only be described as uninformed, hurtful, and exaggerated stories.
For example, one half-accurate, derisive, and deliberately off-putting
front page headline read: “Hindus Cover Dead Bodies with Butter.” In reviewing British Columbia’s newspapers of the period, one finds a sad
abundance of articles of this type.
Journalism like this expressed a negativity about India and Indians and
an ignorance that was unfortunately characteristic of most Canadians of
the day. In this light, we can explain the behaviour of local politicians. In
the autumn of 1906, Vancouver’s mayor posted police around the federal
government immigration shed on the waterfront. He was playing to his
political base; he wanted to be seen keeping new Sikh arrivals out of the
city until they had jobs to go to in the interior. As soon as it could be arranged, they were taken directly to these jobs, but many came drifting
back to Vancouver. Late in November, the South Vancouver civic authorities, acting on the complaints of a few citizens, descended on a number of
Indians living in old shacks and threw them out into the cold. A few days
later, the mayor of Vancouver began to round up Indians crowded into
condemned buildings throughout the city to move them to Eburne, beyond
the city limits of Vancouver as then defined. There, they were housed at
their own expense – $3.00 per head per month – in an abandoned cannery
with no running water, hastily fixed up with a few stoves and electric
lights. No level of government or, for that matter, no charitable organization would accept responsibility for their welfare. Instead, they were harassed by the police when they wandered the streets of Vancouver or tried
to camp in the parks.
Impressively, these immigrants had the determination, means, resourcefulness, and self-direction to look after themselves. They endured the worst
of their hardships with a determination that most Vancouverites did not
anticipate, and, by organizing themselves and pooling resources, they
stuck it out for the difficult first few months. They did have help from a
couple of high-ranking former British residents of India (living in retirement in Vancouver), who took a concerned interest in their situation. And
they did look for better prospects beyond British Columbia. Two thousand
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
14
E XCLUSION
2 The scene at the CPR pier in Vancouver, 12 September 1907 when 901
Punjabis disembarked from the SS Monteagle. The area had been roped off and the
carts organized to take the immigrants to jobs outside the city. (VPL 9426)
Indians had arrived during the latter half of 1906; by the end of December,
with the exception of some three hundred who had taken steamers for
Seattle and San Francisco, all but fifty or sixty had found employment in
British Columbia, most of them in sawmills. The authorities would gladly have deported any of them convicted of vagrancy, but there were few
such cases. Those who were out of work were looked after by their companions, and, despite dire predictions by the Vancouver City Council, none
became a public charge. In their own way, they had adapted to conditions
in British Columbia, although they did not get much credit for that. The
press and the public were prepared to believe the worst of what was said
against them.
Even though the Sikhs were a small group and very new to British Col­
umbia, their presence added intensity to a long-standing conflict within
the province between major employers and working people over Asian
immigration. It had been an issue ever since CPR contractors had imported Chinese coolies in the 1870s and 1880s. Ottawa’s answer had been a
head tax on Chinese immigrants, but that did not stop the Chinese who
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
A HIDDEN POLICY
15
could pay it or who had it paid for them through advance wages, which
they then worked off. In the meantime, the Japanese had started to come,
and then the Sikhs. Anti-Asian politicians and labour leaders in the province were primed to react when the very first Sikhs arrived. Speaking for
much of the white public on the West Coast, they expressed great frustration when the national government in distant Ottawa refused to do anything. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a prime minister with deep roots in Quebec
and French Canada, made few friends in British Columbia when he suggested that Canada, as a British country, could not exclude British subjects of any kind or race. That was his position as late as 2 September
1906, but he found himself making a quick reversal when the situation in
Vancouver seemed to be getting out of hand.
What changed his mind was four hours of mob violence in Vancouver
sparked by objections to Asian immigration. This happened in the late
summer of 1907, when Asian immigration was increasing while the economy was in a temporary decline. The Vancouver Trades and Labour
Council had fostered an Asiatic Exclusion League, which was linked to
similar leagues in California. The president was a member of the Bar­
tenders Union, but the league drew support from prominent professional
men and politicians as well as unionists. It had the sympathy of a broad
social spectrum of the white majority. In September, a parade organized
by the league degenerated into a riot, with white participants attacking
and destroying property in the Chinese and Japanese quarters. There
was then no identifiable Sikh quarter, but the rioters had been angered by
the imminent arrival of yet another ship full of Asians – the SS Monteagle,
with nine hundred Indians on board. Laurier now worried about British
Columbia’s reputation as a safe and civil place for investment, and to protect the peace and welfare of the province – as he understood it – he
moved to check immigration from Asia.
The result was more absolutely prohibitive for immigrants from India
than for the Japanese or Chinese. It could have been otherwise: they
could have all been placed on the same footing. Initially, Laurier asked
the same thing of the Japanese, Indian, and Chinese governments: he
wanted each of them to limit emigration to Canada to a few hundred
labourers a year. The Canadian proposal to those governments was this:
if they limited emigration at its source, then Canada would not need to
use openly discriminatory and offensive regulations like the Chinese head
tax. It took time, but the Japanese government came around to the idea
and made an informal agreement like one it already had with the United
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
16
E XCLUSION
States, promising to limit Japanese emigration to Canada to four hundred
labourers a year – with no limit on other classes of migrants like merchants, students, or wives. But Laurier’s government could not get the
same undertaking from India or China. For Chinese immigrants, this failure meant that nothing changed: the existing Chinese immigrant head tax
stayed in place, and those Chinese immigrants who could pay it could enter. For immigrants from India, however, the direct consequence was
total exclusion from Canada.
For the Sikhs and other Indians already in the country, the new policy
was a severe blow, even though they were the fortunate ones who had entered Canada ahead of the change. But now their relatives and fellow villagers could not join them, and they could not expect the compatriot
business or community development that new arrivals would bring. At
this point, they began openly asking what kind of an empire refused to
guarantee the free movement of all of its subject people. This was a question that the British Viceroy and his largely British council in India feared
but refused to face openly. They feared it because a straightforward and
honest answer was certain to stir up anti-British feeling in India. And they
did not face it openly because they hoped to keep the issue out of sight.
In their negotiation with Canada – relayed through London – the
Viceroy of India and his council made no defence or claim for the right of
Indians to go to British countries like Canada. In truth, these officers of
the British Empire saw Indian settlements abroad as trouble, as safe havens for anti-British activities and anti-British propaganda. But they were
most unwilling to restrict the migration themselves because they would
then have to explain what they were doing to the Indian public. They
wanted the Canadian government to take care of the matter, but to do so
in a covert way so as to disguise discrimination against Indians. In this,
they were counting on the Laurier government to consider British interests in India, and Laurier was willing to comply. Otherwise, he and his
officials would have had no inhibitions about writing regulations that
openly targeted Indian, or Hindu, immigrants – Hindu being the common Canadian term for Indians from India, whatever their religious
background.
In the late spring of 1908, Laurier’s government stopped Indian immigration with two executive orders (technically known as orders-incouncil). One order allowed immigration officials to turn back Indian
immigrants who had less than $200 in their possession on arrival. The
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
A HIDDEN POLICY
17
other order allowed immigration officers to exclude Indian immigrants
who did not come straight from India on a continuous journey. A routing
from Kolkata to Hong Kong and then Hong Kong to Vancouver was per­
mis­sible under this order, but it had to be on a single ticket, and that was
the catch. To make the continuous journey order an effective barrier, the
Canadian government put strong pressure on steamship companies to
with­draw their Canada-India services and not to sell through-tickets to
Indians from Indian ports. Europeans resident in India, however, could
still go to agents like Thomas Cook and Sons and get passages from
Kolkata to Vancouver, and they continued to do so.
The $200 order was a very substantial obstacle. On average, at the end
of a voyage to Canada, Sikh immigrants had $30 or $35 in coin or paper
money – more than enough to meet the $25 minimum applied to all
other immigrants. Only one in several hundred Indians might have as
much as $200.
None of this took effect in a tidy way. The Canadian government first
applied, in ill-considered haste, a continuous journey regulation against
Indian immigrants in March 1908. This wrong-footed start launched
what proved to be a half-century civil struggle with Canada’s own Sikh
and South Asian community. This was after negotiations with the Gov­
ernment of India had reached a dead end and Canada was left with the
responsibility of regulating Indian immigration itself.
What impelled the Canadian government to act in haste was the return
of the CPR liner SS Monteagle, this time with 183 Indian immigrants. The
ship arrived at the end of February 1908, more than five months after the
Vancouver riot. Up to that point, Laurier and his government had been
looking for an arrangement with the Government of India and, as a consequence, had instituted no special measures of their own. The Immigration
Agent in Vancouver, Dr. A.S. Munro, following normal standing procedures, was ready to let three-quarters of the Indians from the Monteagle
into the country.
There was already in existence a recently issued continuous passage
order (PC 27 – 1908), but Munro did not think of using it because it
had been designed solely to prevent Japanese immigrants from coming
via Hawaii. At the last moment, when Munro was about to admit the
Monteagle passengers as legal immigrants, Ottawa told him to cite this
anti-Japanese continuous passage order and send them home. The instruction came so abruptly and unpredictably that the deputy minister of
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
18
E XCLUSION
labour, Mackenzie King, was caught by surprise in the midst of talks with
the British in London about Indian immigration. No one – passengers,
shipping company, Immigration Agents, or even Mackenzie King – had
been warned that Ottawa might use PC 27 against Indians as well as
Japanese. In response, the CPR, fighting the expense of taking the passengers back to Asia, went to court against the order and won. The
Monteagle passengers were landed, and the Sikh community learned a lasting lesson about what looked like a positive aspect of law in a British country: that the Canadian government could be overruled in Canada’s courts.
The Canadian government answered with parliamentary amend­
ments to the Immigration Act that met the objections of the court. The
SS Monteagle passengers were safe from deportation, but by early June
1908, the government had an amended Immigration Act and a revised
continuous passage order (PC 932 – 1908). As a backup measure, it had
issued the $200 requirement order (PC 1255 – 1908). The CPR told its
agents to stop booking passages to Canada, and immigration from India
stopped. The steamship company had finally realized that it was not good
business to fight the Canadian government on this matter.
By the time the immigration had stopped, the official count was over
five thousand Indians landed in Canada. Half of them had simply passed
through to the United States; half were staying. Those who arrived in
1907, in the midst of an economic slump, had great difficulty finding work
or shelter. Seven hundred or more were still unemployed the following
summer. Some were living in rundown houses and shacks in the city and
in the woods beyond the city limits. City residents complained that some
were coming daily into the downtown area, knocking on back doors, asking for work, and begging for money.
Many of the companions of these immigrants had moved across the border into Washington and Oregon. By the summer and autumn of 1908, a
number had found their way to the agricultural valleys of California,
where they could get outdoor work picking grapes and oranges, hoeing
beans and asparagus, or thinning and topping beets. By 1913, there were
three times as many Sikhs in the United States as in Canada, most of them
on the fruit ranches and in the small towns of the Sacramento Valley. This
development had not gone unnoticed, and beginning in 1908, the Amer­
ican Bureau of Immigration was under pressure to keep the Sikhs out.
Large numbers were turned back on the grounds that they were likely to
become public charges “because of the unfavourable attitude of the people
of the Pacific Coast States,” an extraordinary application of American law.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
A HIDDEN POLICY
19
3 Sikh work crew clearing Vancouver’s Shaughnessy subdivision, circa 1910.
(VCA 312-21)
For those who stayed in Canada, circumstances improved after 1907-8.
In Vancouver in 1908 and in Victoria in 1912, the Sikhs raised large sums
of money to build beautifully furnished temples with multiple purposes
as sanctuaries, meeting places, dining halls, and hostels. As hostels, the
temples were welcoming refuges for needy members of an immigrant
population. In the Sikh tradition, these temples were open to anyone,
whether Hindu, Christian, Muslim, or Sikh. Yet, with some notable individual exceptions, the Sikhs and their fellow Indians were isolated from
the larger white community and faced gratuitous hostility on the streets.
A core group in the community had served in the British Indian army or
in the police forces of Singapore, Hong Kong, or Shanghai and had been
trained and taught English by British officers. These men were self-assured
in the company of Europeans and generally created a very positive impression. That was in contrast to many of their countrymen who had
come to North America directly from rural areas, where they had not
learned to read or write their own languages, let alone speak English.
These less experienced men could be aloof and blank-faced with an outsider, even a person who might be their employer.
As a rule, those who spoke only Punjabi were lost outside their own
community. They worked for Europeans, or alongside them at the same
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press
20
E XCLUSION
mill sites, without possessing the words to offer a simple hello or establish
any personal contact. In dealing with the outside world, they depended
on their compatriots who could speak English. With nowhere to go for
entertainment, they would gather downtown to socialize. Standing around
in groups on Powell Street or Main Street and speaking loudly in their
own language, they were conspicuous, and that unfortunately contributed
to public prejudice against them.
These immigrants were largely focused on their personal goals, intent
on making money, not just for themselves but to send to their families at
home. Typically, they avoided trouble with Canadians. In the early days,
when they had no choice but to live in substandard housing, they were
much more likely to have encounters with a health inspector than with
the police. Yet, they were well aware of Canadian hostility. They heard it
openly and rudely on the streets, and they saw it in the immigration law
that prevented their friends and relatives from entering the country and in
the action of the BC government in 1907, when it took away their right to
vote despite their qualification as British subjects. They also felt persecuted in their daily encounters with the authorities: they understood that
the Canadian government would happily remove the whole community if
it could find the means.
Sample Material © 2014 UBC Press