Ship of dreams gets rude reception
Toronto filmmaker, NRI Ali Kazimi (Some Kind of Arrangement, Passage From India)

Toronto, Jan. 21, 2005
Toronto Star

Continuous Journey

(Out of 4)

Written and directed by Ali Kazimi. 87 minutes. At the Camera Media Gallery, 1028 Queen St. W. PG

They didn't call it British Columbia for nothing. From the Chinese head tax, to the internment of Japanese Canadians, to the Potlatch raids on the Kwakwaka'wakw in Alert Bay in 1921, the history of Victoria, Vancouver and the lower mainland is studded with recurrent cases of none-is-too-many, whites-only, acts of shameless discrimination against un-Brits.

No single government-sponsored action was so blatantly and purely racist as the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, when a ship bearing 376 immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka was refused permission to dock in Vancouver. Agents of the Canadian immigration department and local authorities kept the passengers, 340 of them Sikhs, from disembarking. Detained without food and water, they remained on board their Japanese-owned ship for more than two months as it sat at anchor in Vancouver's harbour.

Toronto filmmaker Ali Kazimi (Some Kind of Arrangement, Passage From India) tells their story in Continuous Journey. A man named Gurdit Singh, a businessman and semi-political leader, had chartered the Komagata Maru out of Hong Kong and sold tickets to the South Asian men, many of them veterans of the British Indian Army.

They had ambitions to work in Canada so they could send money back to their families in India and the area that became Pakistan. In British Columbia, a destination for South Asians from 1904 on, they were all known, regardless of nationality and religion, as Hindus, from the British designation of their Indian colonies, Hindustan.

A commanding figure with a white beard and a white turban, Gurdit Singh travelled with his 9-year-old son, one of a handful of children (but only two mothers) on board. Singh had anticipated resistance from the newly passed "continuous journey" regulation, an anti-Asian immigration provision. The regulation stipulated that immigrants were not allowed to enter Canada unless arriving directly from their country (most came through Hong Kong and Shanghai).

The federal government then leaned on Canadian Pacific to cancel the sole passenger ship from India to Canada. The white supremacists of the day, whose numbers included the judiciary, most of the press, the legal profession and of course agents of the immigration department, felt they'd truly barred the door.

Kazimi has gone at the incident from every angle, showing how the zealously racist bureaucrats in Canada, foremost among them a young immigration policy maker named William Lyon Mackenzie King, created a problem for Whitehall. The British government was not anxious to have any trouble stirred up after the "Indian mutiny" or Sepoy War of 1857 and the formation of the rebel Gadhr Party.

Kazimi's interviews with historians both in Canada and India provide a rich context for the fate of the 375 rejected immigrants. In July 1914, the ship departed for Calcutta, only to be prevented for three days from docking there. (Gurdit Singh lived until 1954, no doubt outliving all his adult passengers.)

The filmmaker is an Indian immigrant himself who says he was told by a immigration officer that he was getting admitted on his student visa "because you speak such good English." He begins and ends his film at the site of a hidden plaque about the size of a pie plate, marking the memory of the notorious incident. The symbolism is pretty obvious: British Columbians have no wish to remember.

It's worse than that: Kazimi takes his camera to the peace garden near the Vancouver harbour's edge, where protesters are waving signs against the 2002 Safe Third Country Agreement. After 90 years, the Canadian government is no less determined to restrict third world immigration, having fashioned a treaty with the U.S. that prevents refugee claimants from entering our country via theirs. Continuous Journey indeed.

Read more from our sources: Komagata Maru

Any comments on this article or you have any news: Click here