Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru
By Ali Kazimi
Toronto, ON: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012
176 pp. $40
Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru, a beautifully illustrated hardcover text, reminds one that good history is radicalizing. By documenting past injustice, we can be more alert to our current failures to uphold fair treatment.
Indian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Ali Kazimi has garnered awards on three continents for his 2004 feature documentary about the Government of Canada’s refusal to allow less than 400 South Asian prospective immigrants, arriving on the Japanese vessel the Komagata Maru, to make landfall at Vancouver, B.C., in May 1914.
In turning from the film medium to print, Kazimi, a York University film professor, has created illuminated pages that delineate, not only a crucial episode in Canadian support for white supremacy, but also the complex dynamics—machinations—of British imperialism.
In fact, the arrival of the Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu voyagers tested the principle that, as British Indians—as British subjects—they had as much right to enter the Dominion of Canada as any ‘white’ Briton—or Australian or New Zealander or South African.
The eventually court-backed refusal to allow them entry to what was termed “a white man’s country,” had international consequences, for it proved that British Indians were not equal subjects within the British Empire.
The spurning of the Komagata Maru spurred on Indian nationalism—and the independence movement that ended the British Raj in 1948. (Thus, Elizabeth II is Queen of Canada, but not Empress of India, and few in India rue the absence of the British Crown.)
Kazimi demonstrates convincingly “the global ramifications of local racism.” Indeed, the British used diplomacy and espionage to try to establish a delicate balance, permitting Canada to impose a head-tax on Chinese, restrict Japanese—quietly, and bar Indians—but not explicitly.
Japanese settlers had to be admitted because Japan was an ally of the British Empire—and, by extension, of Canada. (Kazimi notes that during World War I, “the Japanese Navy patrolled and protected the west coast of Canada.”) However, Japan agreed, secretly, to Canada’s request that it issue only 4oo emigration passports per year.
Because China was considered weak, racism was openly practiced against its migrants. (That Canada once boasted a bureaucrat whose title was “Chief Controller of Chinese Immigration” underlines the then-prevalence of anti-Asian sentiments.)
But Indians—British Indians—were a challenge for white supremacist Canucks: How to bar them from Canada without inflaming anti-British sentiments in India, the “jewel” of the Empire?
William Lyon Mackenzie King, then deputy minister of labour in Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s cabinet, proposed the solution: a regulation insisting that immigrants to Canada had to undertake a “continuous journey” from their homelands.
Any voyage from India could not be “continuous”; thus the regulation had the effect, without naming India, of reducing Indian immigration to almost nil. (This same provision was used to bar entry to Jews seeking refuge from Hitler’s Germany.)
Yet, while Canada was trying desperately to prevent South Asian and East Asian immigration (or citizenship), it was doing all that it could to attract Britons, Americans, Scandinavians, and Western Europeans, and, to a lesser extent, Eastern and Southern Europeans, who were also, as an incentive, given “free” land.
The policy was clear: northern North America, wrested from the First Nations, was to be wide-open for Caucasian Christian European expansion and exploitation, but closed to any substantial immigration from Asia and Africa.
Kazimi’s rich and fascinating study clarifies just how the Komagata Maru voyagers challenged this racism, becoming the first “boat people” to be turned away from Canada, to have their ship turned into a marine “Gitmo,” and to even have the still-new Royal Canadian Navy summoned to escort them back to international waters.
Really, they must be celebrated as exemplars of the ongoing struggle for racial and socio-economic equality for “migrants,” not only in Canada, but everywhere in this so-called globalized world, where capital “flows,” but labour “pools,” even being, at times, locked up in prisons—or drowned at sea.
