Daily Times

Tariq Malik is a Canadian of Pakistani-Punjabi descent who lives in Vancouver. He made his debut with a collection of short stories, Rainsongs of Kotli, in 2004. I had the occasion to read them and was impressed by his talent for storytelling. In 2010 his first novel, Chanting Denied Shores (Calgary: Bayeux Arts), was published. The title vividly captures a great wrong done at the beginning of the 20th century to a shipload of Punjabis who tried to enter Canada. They sailed into the Vancouver Harbour on a charted Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru in the summer of 1914. The author has done yeoman service by researching and unearthing forgotten material to tell that story, which few know about. The result is an amazingly detailed portrayal of the atmosphere that must have prevailed when for weeks they pleaded that as subjects of the King-Emperor George V — to whom the Canadians also owed allegiance — they too were entitled to settle anywhere in the British Empire. At that time, the Canadian authorities were campaigning for greater immigration and publicity material had reached even the Punjab countryside. Thus, for example, one publicity item mentioned ‘Free Farms for the Million’. Free farm land of 160 acres was to be given to every male adult of 18 years and over.

Some Indians, especially Punjabis, had been settled in Canada for some time but the passengers of the Komagata Maru arrived when, on the one hand revolutionary fervour had begun to reverberate throughout India, including Punjab, and with Lahore as the hub of such activities and, on the other, racism was openly practised in Canadian society. This becomes amply manifest in the hostile and discriminatory attitude and policy of some officials. Officialdom is in turn backed by street protests and angry slogan-mongering against the arrivals of the Komagata Maru. The Vancouver Sun of July 11, 1914 writes in its editorial:

“Few emigrants in history have come so far to be sent back. They are rejected not because they are an outland people, but because they come from a strange part of the world where men’s skins are not only pigmented, but their hearts also. It is not the brown skins, but the brown mind that makes them unwelcome” (quoted on page 166).

Given such a rabidly prejudiced standpoint of those times upheld by the Canadian media, the new arrivals really stood no chance of getting a sympathetic hearing from the authorities. Consequently, weeks of negotiations and interrogation that ensued did not lead anywhere and the majority were turned back. The formal justification given for turning them back was that the Komagata had not sailed from India as the law stipulated for legal emigration to begin but from Hong Kong, which was not the native land of those on board the Komagata.

Although most of them were Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were also among them. However, in Canadian descriptions all are referred to as Hindus — people of India — as compared to the term Indian used for the pre-Columbian natives of the Americas. The main protagonist in the novel is a Muslim, Bashir Ali Lopoke, a school teacher who had been involved in anti-colonial activities and been in contact with the centre of such a network in Lahore. I checked on the internet for information on Lopoke and was pleasantly surprised that a village of that name is to be found in both the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs. So, Bashir Ali Lopoke could in principle belong to either of them or perhaps he symbolises the revolutionary identity as transcending political borders.

The Vancouver of those days is an upstart coastal town, where social hierarchy is strictly regulated by race and religion. Thus, for example, in the social register on the posh locality of southern Vancouver, Jews and Orientals had been excluded by a decree of the city council. That the influx of Punjabis was viewed with dismay and horror should not be surprising. The villain of the piece is William Charles Hopkinson, British Columbia’s Head Inspector of Immigration. We learnt that earlier he had served in Punjab and was familiar with the anti-colonial unrest that had surfaced in Punjab. In fact, he had received intelligence that many revolutionaries were on board the Komagata Maru. The spy networks that he had at his disposal included Punjabi informers in Vancouver — Bela, Baboo and Ganga Ram.

When the investigation begins, Robinson specifically starts searching for Bashir Ali Lopoke. The question and answer session between them reveals how thorough, well-connected and networked is the colonial system of intelligence and surveillance. Thus Robinson tells him that the authorities had been looking for him for a long time. He presses Bashir real hard to find out how an educated man could come to Canada to make a living as a farmer. He suggests that Bashir is part of a rebel network and his mission in Canada is to foment trouble, which the latter denies. It turns out that intelligence on Bashir and his connection with revolutionaries in Punjab referred not only to his visits to Lahore but also the people he had met in Japan during the journey that started from Hong Kong.

We learn that Bashir’s involvement in the anti-colonial movement had been only of a passing nature and the real reason for him seeking entry to Canada was to escape poverty and unemployment, but in the official records he was already described as a dangerous troublemaker. That was probably true of most of the men who were trying to enter Canada. The importance of the Komagata Maru episode is that it set in motion processes that led to the formation of the Ghadr Party (also spelt Gadar Party). The Ghadarites were able to stir up the Punjab countryside but were betrayed by spies amongst them as well as by the competence and efficacy of the intelligence agencies that were watching them.

Tariq Malik’s novel is an excellent peep into that past and furnishes an elaborate background to events that transpired. The painstaking research it must have required to produce a historical novel on that period is obvious. It is a most worthy contribution to the creative fusion of fact and fiction.

The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com