VANCOUVER – An interactive website that documents the 1914 Komagata Maru incident – and links the story with the development of multiculturalism and human rights in Canada – will be unveiled at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre campus on Friday, Mar. 23 (7 p.m.).
The documentary film Komagata Maru: Continuing the Journey, will also be the subject of a day-long symposium at SFU Surrey on Saturday, Mar. 24.
The exhaustive project chronicles the ship’s journey to Vancouver where immigrant passengers hoped to settle. Canada’s Continuous Passage regulation at the time resulted in the ship being turned away and all but 20 of its 376 passengers returned to India, where some were shot and many were imprisoned by the British.
The Komagata Maru incident serves as the website’s starting point for exploring the struggles and contributions of the Indo-Canadian community and placing them in the context of multicultural Canada.
Led by SFU librarian Brian Owen, the project team uncovered and digitized a wealth of material – documents, reports, books, poetry and photographs – and produced numerous video interviews with scholars, community members, including pioneer immigrants and their descendants, and even youth.
Designed by SFU’s Teaching and Learning Centre, visitors can follow a timeline, watch video interviews, pore over a detailed passenger list, or page through the diary of an Indo-Canadian pioneer. School lesson plans are also included.
There is a full hyperlinked text of SFU historian Hugh Johnston’s book, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: the Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar and other publications in English and Punjabi.
“Over the past decade Canadians have become much more aware of this incident, and with a growing sense of the impact it had,” says Johnston. “This website is going to make it possible for anyone with access to the internet to dig deeply into the many dimensions of the story and in an exciting way.“
Funded by the federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, under the auspices of the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP), the website will be launched at an official reception on Friday, March 23 at 7 p.m. at SFU Harbour Centre. Community representatives along with government and university officials will attend.
The event will feature a website demonstration and talks by three leading Komagata Maru scholars – Johnston, community historian Nadeem Parmar, and retired University of Saskatchewan professor Gurcharn Basran, co-author of Sikhs in Canada. SFU President Andrew Petter will also speak and the university’s award-winning NSM Bhangra dance team will perform.
On Saturday, March 24 a full-day public symposium at SFU Surrey (beginning at 10 a.m.; registration at 9:30) will feature panel presentations on the website. Ali Kazimi’s film Continuous Journey will be screened, followed by a question and answer session with Kazimi via Skype.
Among the Project’s features are:
• Digitized government reports from Canada and India, Indo-Canadian community newspapers, plays, poetry, articles and books in English and Punjabi.
• An interactive timeline that chronicles the major moments in the story and those of South Asian Canadian history;
• Video interviews with scholars and community members, including pioneer immigrants and their descendants, media personalities and community historians, as well as youth, to help interpret the content and meaning of the Komagata Maru journey and the impact on present day life as second generation South Asians;
• The historic diary of Bhai Arjan Singh Chand of the Khalsa Diwan Society at Vancouver’s first Sikh Temple, documenting the daily activities of the temple committee, including first-hand accounts of the Komagata Maru Shore Committee;
• A rare speech delivered by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru in Vancouver’s Sikh Temple in 1949. Nehru talks about India’s recent partition, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and advocates for Indians living in Canada to take an active role in Canadian life;
• A “master” passenger list that brings together information from a variety of lists and provides links to material related to specific passengers;
• More than 100 biographies of key figures related to the incident;
• Lesson plans designed for elementary and secondary school levels by retired SFU education professor Roland Case, of The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2). Barbara Winter, head of the SFU Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology, helped select material to create a teaching narrative.
