THE story of the journey of Komagata Maru and its doomed passengers is an oft-glossed over chapter of India’s colonial history. In her book Voices of Komagata Maru, the historian Suchetana Chattopadhyay places this historical event in its proper perspective and brings to light key aspects on the matter that have remained unexplored, even unconsidered, by historians over the last century.

In May 1914, the Komagata Maru, a Japanese vessel, reached Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from Hong Kong, chartered by Gurdit Singh, a labour contractor with Ghadar sympathies, with more than 300 passengers on board.

The ship remained stranded as the authorities at the harbour refused to allow any of the passengers to go ashore. A court case was fought by a Shore Committee constituted of Indians living in the region.

But in July, the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled in favour of the Canadian authorities and against the passengers, and the ship was expelled from Canadian waters.

On the way the passengers found no respite from their ordeal as the British authorities refused to allow them to disembark in any of the ports in Asia that were controlled by the British. Finally, the passengers, exhausted and at the end of their tether after five months of hardship, reached Budge Budge, near Calcutta (now Kolkata), on September 27, where they disembarked, .

By then the First World War had already broken out, and the British authorities, fearful that the passengers would find sympathy and support in their anti-racist campaign in Calcutta, a city already volatile with nationalist fervour, adopted a blatantly coercive stand against them.

War and colonial paranoia

The authorities did not allow the ship to sail up the Hooghly to Calcutta. They arrested Gurdit Singh and his followers, and at every point kept up a coercive pressure on the already harassed and humiliated passengers. The escalation of tension found vent in a violent confrontation between the passengers waiting at Budge Budge station to board a train to Punjab and the colonial troops present there. The troops opened fire on the migrant passengers, killing 21 one of them. The official position on the incident as projected through press and police accounts was that the massacre was an “unavoidable” confrontation between the colonial state and “ungrateful” migrants bent on insurrection. However, the author points out that historical evidence “strongly suggests that coercive tactics by the British officials led to a gunfight, which then took on the form of a full-scale massacre”.

Through the pages of this book, the voices of the passengers that have for so long been suppressed and eventually forgotten, finally get to be heard. The accounts left by passengers who survived the massacre and were subsequently put in prison tells of the privation and hardship faced on board the ship; of local help received by those attempting to escape after the firing; of their treatment inside the prison; and of their state of desperation. Their letters to officials and their family members speak of their state of mind. “In their letters, the jail emerged as a state of being and a physical condition, a continuation of prolonged confinement that had started when the ship had been kept in the harbour and turned away from Canada,” the author writes.

It is important to note that even before the ship reached Bengal, the authorities were making preparations to prevent the passengers from entering Calcutta. The Ghadar Party, which was set up in 1913, was already attracting Punjabi Sikh migrant labourers who were situated in regions stretching from South-East Asia to the western shores of America, and the colonial authorities were more than just wary of the prospect of the already angry passengers inciting the anti-colonial passions of the people of Calcutta by their presence. News of the racist harassment of the passengers had already reached Calcutta, and a crowd gathering to welcome the ship into the city was not exactly a remote probability. Moreover, Suchetana Chattopadhyay points out, the treatment of Indian labourers working overseas “had attracted mounting criticism against the British authority, one of the factors prompting the wartime colonial administration to prevent the ship from reaching Calcutta”.

Adding fuel to the panic was the rumour of the sudden and silent arrival of the German cruiser Emden on the mouth of the Hooghly, and the story that it had destroyed five English vessels. What makes Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s book a fascinating read is that she gives a thorough account of the socio-economic conditions prevalent in Calcutta against the backdrop of the tragedy of the Komagata Maru passengers. Her eye for historical and sociopolitical detail completes the bigger picture and sets things in logical perspective.

The colonial authorities, it appeared, were fully prepared for the eventuality of a massacre and precipitated it with excessive coercion. But at the same time, the book reveals, the passengers’ challenge to their authority “jolted the colonial perception of Sikhs as a loyal ethno-racial subject population who could be exploited at will from the top as a cheap reserve of military and manual labour in the service of British and other empires”. The Komagata Maru’s journey was also seen as a campaign against racism and brought to the fore issues such as the rights of immigrants from India. To this was added the demand for self-government and freedom from the colonial yoke. In fact, the author points out, with the reporting of the Komagata Maru’s journey in local newspapers, comparisons were made between the campaigns launched by Gandhi and the one by Gurdit Singh.

Voices of Komagata Maru brings to the fore facets of colonial surveillance along with the suppressed voices of the surviving passengers after the massacre. Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s work is the first of its kind in that it not only examines the radical responses to the extreme subjecthood based on racial identity imposed on Sikh migrant workers in Calcutta, but also the enormous and multipronged impact the incident surrounding Komagata Maru had on the political and social spheres both in Calcutta with its highly charged revolutionary atmosphere and abroad.

In the course of this exploration, she has dealt with the subject of the entry of the Sikh working-class diaspora into local revolutionary activities as well as the Left and labour movements.

One aspect of the study deals with how the British authorities reacted with even more paranoid surveillance following the resistance and the massacre. “The return of the repressed as a rebel underlined the official imagination, strategy and action,” the author writes. This threat, both real and imaginary, prompted a policy of even more blatant coercion. Besides intensifying surveillance on ships coming into Calcutta, British consular officials were instructed by the Central Intelligence to send information about “objectionable individuals” sailing to India.

Intensifying defiance

If the Komagata Maru incident led to the intensification of surveillance and repression on ships coming to India, it also served to intensify defiance among passengers against the colonial master. Interestingly, passengers even tried to evade harassment by changing their travel route, which, however, did not go unnoticed by the authorities. If the micro-surveillance succeeded in preventing the Ghadar network from becoming effective in India through “diasporic reinforcement”, it nevertheless served to create a long-term, anti-imperialistic current among Sikh workers and provoke local actions inspired by Ghadar tendencies.

Another interesting aspect is the way the book weaves the broader impact of the massacre against the backdrop of the revolutionary sentiments raging in Calcutta into the immediate reactions and repercussions that followed. A month after the massacre, a columnist wrote in the newspaper Capital: “At the time of the Komagata Maru trouble there was so much agitation that we were afraid that we would have no servants left.” Outrage was expressed in Indian newspapers at the inhuman sufferings of the Komagata Maru passengers, The nationalist press honoured the passengers of the Komagata Maru and Gurdit Singh as warriors against racism: the episode made many journalists of Calcutta question the foundation of the British Empire and call for the need to transcend religious identities to resist oppressive colonial practices. The European press, on the other hand, defended the British authorities’ actions aggressively and downplayed their racist attitude. These papers typecast Sikhs either as loyal labour providers for the military or as violent troublemakers causing mayhem.

Around the same time (1914-15), a small section of Sikhs in Calcutta began to interact with the “bhadralok” (Hindu upper caste) revolutionaries and began to take part in underground anti-colonial activities. One of the main tasks of the Sikh members was to try and foment rebellion among Indian troops in the Army. The revolutionaries also took advantage of the fact that there were quite a number of Sikhs in the service sector working as, for instance, drivers and organised audacious taxi-cab robberies with their help. In fact, the author points out, the legendary M.N. Roy (who at that time was still known as Narendranath Bhattacharya) was among the first to orchestrate a “motor dacoity”.

Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s book is also a detailed study of the social background against which the Komagata Maru episode played itself out. She notes the demographic changes in contemporary Calcutta with the swelling of the Sikh population following the First Word War and discusses the shift in the revolutionary and political movements of the Sikh community, particularly from the second half of the 1920s when a perceptible Left tendency emerged among the Sikhs living in and around Calcutta.

To the Sikh workers who joined the post-war strikes and formed unions in the 1920s and 1930s, “an unofficial commemoration of the Komagata Maru’s voyage became inseparable from contemporary resistance to domination by colonial capital”.

These Sikh workers moved beyond the boundaries of ethnolinguistic and religious identities and the social content of nationalism by “focussing on a self-aware position based on organised class-structure”.

Voices of Komagata Maru lucidly illumines an important segment of India’s colonial history that has for long remained overlooked by historians. As the author points out at the end: “The voyage of Komagata Maru as an ‘event’ within the flow of historical time had found multiple echoes in the experiential, political and social spheres, acting as a motivating force, a conduit of militant consolidations, a field of not just fleeting combinations but organised bonding, capable of merging with various streams of activism.”