The Ship That Was Turned Back

Gurdit Singh, the ship he chartered, and the road at Budge Budge

In May 1914 a Sikh contractor from Singapore anchored a chartered steamer in Vancouver harbour with 376 passengers on board, to test a Canadian law that excluded Indians without ever naming them. The ship sat at anchor for two months and was turned back under the guns of a cruiser. Four months later, on a road at Budge Budge near Calcutta, the police fired on the passengers who had come home.

Two Hundred Yards From Shore

It is Saturday, 23 May 1914. A Japanese steamer named the Komagata Maru drops anchor in Vancouver harbour, in sight of the docks. The city is close enough that the passengers on deck can read the signs on the wharf buildings. Gulls sit on the rail. The water smells of coal smoke and creosote from the pier.

On board are 376 passengers. All but a handful are subjects of the British Empire, sailing from one part of that Empire to another. Most are Sikhs from the villages of Punjab. About two dozen are Muslims, and a dozen are Hindus. Many of them have served in the British Indian Army. They have paid their passage in full.

The man who chartered the ship is standing on deck with the charter papers in his coat. His name is Gurdit Singh Sandhu. He is a building contractor from Sarhali in Amritsar district who has spent most of his working life in Malaya and Singapore, and he is about sixty years old. He did not charter a steamer to make money. He chartered it to obey a law exactly, believing it could not survive being obeyed in the open.

The ship will sit at that anchorage for two months. Almost nobody on board will be allowed to walk down the gangway. And the thing this story is actually about does not happen in Vancouver at all. It happens four months later, on a railway siding at a place called Budge Budge, twenty kilometres down the Hooghly from Calcutta.

The Law That Could Not Be Named

By 1914 Canada wanted no more Indian immigrants, and it had a problem. The Indians arriving on its coast were British subjects, and the Empire could not comfortably say out loud that some of its subjects were less British than others. So the exclusion was written sideways.