Canada’s Ship of Horrors

November 29th, 2006 by admin

This country’s treatment of the Komagata Maru is the subject of two storytellers and federal MPs

Paul Gessell
The Ottawa Citizen

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

The ship carrying your husband reached Canada. But the people there would not allow the passengers to get off even for food or fresh water. They threatened to shoot them. It is said that they sent a warship and drove them away as if they were criminals.

From Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami

- - -

Two of Canada’s greatest storytellers, filmmaker Deepa Mehta and novelist Anita Rau Badami, have turned their talents to reminding this country about the horrendous treatment accorded a shipload of would-be Punjabi immigrants in 1914.

The Toronto-based Mehta is expected to start shooting a feature film next year called Exclusion about the ill-fated passage of the ship, Komagata Maru, which was prevented from unloading its 376 mainly Sikh passengers in Vancouver. Exclusion will star two Bollywood actors from Mehta’s film Water, John Abraham and Seema Biswas, and Britain’s Terence Stamp.

The Montreal-based Badami has already written her version of the ship’s story in a novel published this fall, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? The novel opens with an attempt by the fictional Harjot Singh to leave the Punjab and seek his fortune in Canada. The Sikh man’s dream is shattered.

But many years later, his daughter, Sharanjeet Kaur, moves with her husband to Canada. They prosper and eventually become entangled in the infamous Air India bombing in 1985.

The voyage of the Komagata Maru has also been the subject of recent documentary films and a highly publicized new mural unveiled last week in Surrey, B.C. A storyline with an uncertain ending is also being written by the federal government.

Conservative MP James Abbott, parliamentary secretary to Heritage Minister Bev Oda, has been holding meetings with the Indo-Canadian community in the Vancouver and Toronto areas to try to reach a consensus on the best way to recognize the injustice suffered by passengers on the Japanese ship chartered in Hong Kong.

These passengers were not just denied entry to Canada. They were denied food and water for the two months they sat off the West Coast, fruitlessly trying to negotiate their way into the country. Many of the sick, starving passengers eventually returned to India, where some were killed and others jailed by the British, supposedly for plotting independence from the colonial master.

The Komagata Maru has become an important symbol for many Indo-Canadians, especially Sikhs, about their treatment in Canada.

From the early 20th century until 1947, Indo-Canadians were not allowed to vote and faced other discriminatory measures put in place by the federal and B.C. governments. The importance of those events is illustrated by the fact that two of the most powerful voices in the Indo-Canadian community, Mehta and Badami, have resurrected this story.

Plans for some government-sponsored recognition of the events surrounding the Komagata Maru follow action earlier this year by the Conservative government to compensate victims of the Chinese head tax in the early part of the 20th century.

Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, back in the 1980s, offered compensation to Japanese-Canadians for their Second World War internment.

Now the government is deciding what to do about a variety of other injustices, including the Komagata Maru and the First World War internment of thousands of Ukrainian-Canadians.

“The prime minister is very serious about resolving issues that have been outstanding, in many cases for more than a century, when we, as Canadians, didn’t live up to the standard we know today to be a proper standard of civility,” Abbott said in an interview this week.

The Historic Recognition Program, as the government is tentatively calling the initiative, is expected to be announced, possibly in January, setting out general guidelines for government involvement in educating the public about past injustices.

Abbott is only involved in the Komagata Maru case. He said he expects to deliver a report to Oda by Christmas. The report will eventually be made public. He hopes concrete action on the recognition will be announced by March and definitely come before the next federal election, which is widely expected for next spring.

In the case of the Komagata Maru, neither the government nor the overwhelming majority of the Indo-Canadian community appear to be aiming for compensation. Discussions about a formal apology seem more complicated.

At the least, there will likely be federal funds available for some form of commemoration.

Abbott said the options could include, among other things, a monument, an ongoing educational program and/or distribution of a documentary film about the ship.

Kesar Bhatti, a spokesman for the Vancouver-area Sikh organization Khalsa Diwan Society, met with Abbott and praised the British Columbia MP for being “open-minded” about finding the best way to deal with the issue.

“Nobody is asking for money, just educational materials for the government to admit it did wrong,” Bhatti said.

Whatever the government does decide to do, its actions could be overshadowed by stiff competition from the pros — Mehta and Badami. Mehta’s film has yet to surface but Badami’s storyline is in print, being translated into several languages and sold around the world as a reminder of a racist chapter in Canadian history.

“It had taken him two years and all the money he possessed to get on board the Komagata Maru in Hong Kong,” Badami writes of her character Harjot.

“And yet here he was, denied entry into Canada, denied a chance to make a better life and finally accused of treason. Since when, he asked Gurpreet (his wife) bitterly, since when had it been treasonous to wish for a better life?”

© The Ottawa Citizen 2006

Posted by admin in archive |
Print This Article or leave a response or trackback