Komagata Maru Incident: a new digital perspective

January 13, 2011
A new publicly accessible website will engage the community to learn how Canada has matured in 100 years of race relations.

SFU India Advisory Council steering committee members (from L) Mario Pinto, Andrew Petter, Arvinder Bubber, Joe Dhaliwal, Joanne Curry, Brian Owen, and Chuck Eckman.

One of the Vancouver Canucks' best prospects is recently signed rookie speedster Prab Rai, a Sikh native of Surrey, BC. But he would have had quite a different experience a century earlier if he had been one of the 356 would-be immigrants aboard the "Komagata Maru". The infamous 1914 incident, which was seen as a direct challenge to Canada’s exclusion laws, resulted in most of the passengers being turned away after a prolonged legal battle. Upon their return to India after six months of confinement on the ship, many of the passengers were shot or sent to prison. While the Komagata Maru incident is frequently used in schools as an example of the history of Canada’s race relations, the Indo-Canadian perspective of this story has not been widely explored.

SFU librarian Brian Owen is heading a new project that will create a comprehensive digital resource about the Komagata Maru incident and how it has affected later Indo-Canadian culture and experience. Work has begun on a vibrant new website providing interviews, videos, a scrapbook feature, interactive tools, and learning modules, and one session has already been held with Indo-Canadian scholars who are helping to develop project themes. Supported by a $350,000 grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada through the Community Historical Recognition Program, the project will enable educators, students, researchers and all Canadians to learn about and contextualize this unseemly episode in our history.

The project is national in scope, bringing together documents from national archives in Ottawa as well as local archives in Victoria and Vancouver. A key feature of the website will be the interactive digital integration of SFU History professor Hugh Johnston's book, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru, with significant primary source material such as papers, legal documents, photos, etc. In addition, supplementary materials from that period will be digitized: books, photos, interviews, poetry, novels, artwork, etc., from both public and private collections. All materials must be copyright cleared, digitized and linked through the text to provide a living study of the incident. An online index to related personal papers, photos, links to other online resources and reminiscences of the Indo-Canadian community will also be included.

The SFU Library through its Multicultural Canada project (http://multiculturalcanada.ca) and the SFU Archaeology and Ethnology Museum already have extensive experience working with multicultural groups in creating meaningful high-quality digital resources. SFU has a strong focus on multiculturalism and internationalism in terms of its students and research. Particularly through the President's India Advisory Council, SFU has close ties to the Indo-Canadian community.

"There's a healthy and dynamic debate about what the incident was all about. It's a topic that has some very sensitive aspects," says Owen. Society was more racist in general 100 years ago and that context needs to be considered. Owen hopes the Library can add credibility to the project, which must be objective and balanced and provide all the facts and implications of the story. Educational resources will tie into other things, such as the alleged Tamil Tiger ship that was escorted to CFB Esquimalt only a year ago. "We still have contentious situations that arise, even though we've come a long way," says Owen. For him, that's one of the themes: a historical event that seems to repeat itself, capturing ideas of inclusion versus exclusion, and the basic human rights of the freedom of movement. Owen was a history major before he became a librarian and he points out that at the time of the Komagata Maru incident there were riots in Japan town and Chinatown, as well as the Chinese head tax.

In addition to Hugh Johnston's work, the project will include a great deal of writing from the Indo-Canadian scholarly community. "Rather than just scanning and putting up text and images, we are going to have links from footnotes to source materials. Users will really be able to take advantage of the new medium of the Internet," says Owen. Where possible, texts will be available in both English and Punjabi.

"We're not making assumptions about what was right or wrong. The idea is to engage with the community as much as we can and there are quite a range of perspectives in that community," says Owen. Many Komagata Maru websites exist but the new one will include many different viewpoints. Hugh Johnston says, "The intention is to provide a depth of information on the subject to allow anyone interested to make a serious investigation for themselves." SFU Vice-President, Research Mario Pinto says, “This project is of significance because it is critical that one learn from the mistakes of the past. Black marks in Canadian history must be recorded accurately and transparently so that one can appreciate the determination of our ancestors that led to a multicultural Canada.”

The project must be completed by the end of March 2012. The SFU Teaching and Learning Centre will design the look and feel of the site, while Roland Case and The Critical Thinking Consortium will prepare teaching plans and learning modules. Barbara Winter, head of the SFU Museum of Anthropology, will help select material to create a narrative that teaches, rather than a mass of content accessed by search tools.

Considering that SFU Surrey is located in the fastest growing Indo-Canadian community in the country, the Komagata Maru project was a logical next step after the Library's Multicultural Canada initiative. SFU's past head librarian Lynn Copeland initiated the project and she chairs the Project Steering Committee. She says, "I am delighted with the progress on the Komagata Maru website project. It will fulfill our original vision to build on Hugh Johnston's seminal book to deepen our understanding of the Komagata Maru incident and its historical and cultural context. It will show how Canada has changed in embracing multiculturalism. Perhaps most importantly it will deepen SFU's ties with the Indo-Canadian community."

As a final irony, Hugh Johnston points out that Vancouver hockey legend Cyclone Taylor was one of the immigration inspectors who had to board the Komagata Maru and tell the passengers they could not come ashore. How times have changed.