30 THE CARAVANmodel minority · reportageDiamond Jubilee. They returned home
impressed—particularly by the prov-
ince of British Columbia, on Canada’s
Pacific coast, with its fertile lands and
generally mild climate. Word spread
quickly. Around 5,000 East Indians, al-
most all Sikh men, moved to Canada be-
tween 1904 and 1908. There, they found
ready work as unskilled and (from their
employers’ perspective) cheap labour-
ers in the railway, forestry and lumber
industries.
But life was difficult. White Cana-
dians depicted Sikhs in alarmist and
derisive terms, which was reflected in
unflattering coverage from the local
press. One newspaper ran a front-page
headline declaring that Sikhs “cover
dead bodies with butter.” Authori-
ties tried to funnel new arrivals out of
Vancouver, the largest city in British
Columbia, and into jobs in the prov-
ince’s interior. Isolated from their fami-
lies, communities and culture, most of
the immigrants planned to eventually
return home with their savings.
For the Canadian government, this
was preferable. Canada was already
denigrating its other Asian commu-
nities—particularly Chinese im-migrants—and it soon extended its
unwelcoming attitude towards South
Asians. As British subjects, Sikhs had
the right to vote in Canadian elections.
But, in 1907, British Columbia passed
a law disenfranchising all Indians not
born to Anglo-Saxon parents.
Disenfranchisement was only one of
multiple techniques employed to make
it clear that Sikhs were considered
transient workers—not part of Canada’s
nascent national fabric. The govern-
ment made it nearly impossible for
people pejoratively called “Hindoos”
to bring their families into the country,
and immigration officers were known
to harass Sikh-Canadian residents who
had temporarily left Canada and were
trying to return. The Canadian federal
government even paid for a delega-
tion to travel to British Honduras and
explore the possibility of relocating
all British Columbian Sikhs to Central
America. Local Sikhs unanimously
rejected this plan.
Canada was also searching for ways
to stop Sikhs from entering what the
early-twentieth-century British Colum-
bia Premier Richard McBride called “a
white man’s country.” Sikhs were sub-jects of the British empire and Canada
was part of the Commonwealth, mean-
ing that the government could not sim-
ply ban Sikhs from entry. On 8 January
1908, the federal government passed a
series of ordinances requiring that In-
dian immigrants entering the country
each have 200 Canadian dollars in their
possession (as opposed to 25 dollars
for immigrants from Europe) and that
they arrive in Canada by continuous
journey—in other words, with through-
tickets from the state of their birth or
their nationality. Between India and
Canada, no direct route existed.
The legislation led to perhaps the
most infamous incident in Canada’s
Sikh history. In 1914, a Sikh business-
man chartered a Japanese ship called
the Komagata Maru to sail from Hong
Kong to Vancouver, with occasional
stops along the way. But the Maru—
with 376 passengers on board, of whom
340 were Sikhs—was not allowed to
dock when it reached its final port of
call. Instead, it spent over two months
parked offshore, during which time
only around 20 passengers were al-
lowed to disembark, all of them former
Canadian residents.courtesy vancouver public library vpl
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