A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo, page 14
Excerpts from the newspaper read:
7 July: Gurdit Singh Decides to Quit. Gurdit Singh and his committee on the Komagata Maru have agreed to drop their fight for entry into Canada and the end of this week is expected to see the Japanese steamer with her 352 East Indian passengers steam out of Burrard Inlet, never to return. Gurdit Singh and his followers are in dire straits. The local Hindu committee has refused to give them any more provisions or water, [and] they have not even enough money to clean off the Komagata Maru… The decks of the steamer are littered with an amount of rubbish that is almost pestilential in its possibilities.
8 July: Komagata Maru passengers will ask Government for $20,000 for outfitting…the Komagata Maru for her return to Hong Kong…It seems as if the Dominion Government will have to contribute $15,000 to $20,000 for this purpose. The government will probably be only too glad to get rid of an embarrassing number of guests at this juncture. [The owners of the ship refused to pay for provisioning the ship as per the charter contract.]
10 July: Hindus Threaten to take to Boats and Escape—Komagata Maru passengers practically hold Immigration men prisoners…Immigration Superintendent Malcolm Reid was holding a conference with the Committee of the passengers on board the Komagata Maru, [when] they threatened to hold him hostage until food and water was sent out to the vessel. The situation became tense and the Hindus gave an ultimatum to Mr Reid that food and water would have to be on the ship by 9 o’clock that night, otherwise they would make for the shore. The promise was kept, and the supply was put on the Komagata Maru before 9 o’clock.
13 July: Maru to Leave by End of Week—Deportation Papers are now being made out by the department.
18 July: Hindus Demand their Fares Paid—The latest demand of the Komagata Maru Hindus is that the passages of all on board the ship shall be paid back to Calcutta and that sufficient provisions for the whole voyage shall be put on the ship free of charge. Otherwise, say the Hindus, they will not let the ship leave the harbour. Captain Yamamoto [the ship’s captain] said that he was willing to obey his [sailing] orders but the Hindus refused to allow him to get up steam [in the main boilers].
[The Daily Province was an evening paper. As there was no issue on 19th (being a Sunday), the events of 18th afternoon and 19th were reported on the 20th].
18 July: Captain Yamamoto attempted to move the ship out of the harbour but was stopped in doing so by Gurdit Singh’s men who threatened his life with clubs. The captain came ashore and asked for police help. It was decided to send an armed police force to board the ship and protect the captain while his men got the steam up, after which the Sea Lion [a powerful tug belonging to the police] with a posse of armed immigration officers would escort the ship out to sea.
19 July: At 1:15 A.M., the Sea Lion, carrying armed police and immigration officers approached the Komagata Maru, silent and silhouetted in the dim light of a quarter-moon. Armed with swords, daggers and crude weapons of their own manufacture, as well as a few revolvers, and fighting like demons with all the fanaticism of their Oriental natures, the 352 Hindus on board the Komagata Maru, repulsed 120 policemen and 40 special immigration officers, who attempted to board the vessel from the Sea Lion . Forty officers were seriously injured with eight of them having to be removed to the General Hospital. The injured included Chief of Police Mac Lennan and four police inspectors. Unable to return the fusillade of rocks, sticks, coal and scrap iron that rained down upon the policemen as they huddled together on the over-crowded deck of the tug, the advantage was all on the side of the Hindus, who had made every preparation to repel boarders. Nearly every man on board the Komagata Maru had seen service under the British flag in India, and they brought their knowledge of warfare into good use in repelling the attack. [With orders not to use firearms, as that would have led to a bloodbath, the officers withdrew to the wharf within an hour. The Sea Lion ’s interior was an awful mess of broken glass, damaged carpet, and pools of blood.]
20 July: Militia Called for Tuesday Morning—The Sixth Regiment and the Irish Fusiliers have been called out for duty tomorrow morning in connection with the proposed descent on the Komagata Maru . There is to be a full muster of nearly 1,000 men of the regiments and they are ordered to be ready for action.
20 July: Bring Rainbow To Suppress Unruly Hindus—It is learned that the proposal is to bring the government cruiser Rainbow from Victoria, and with regular troops and other men of the permanent forces, assisted by the local police to provide such an overwhelming force that the Hindus will be overpowered. The cruiser Rainbow will leave tonight for Vancouver after taking aboard her new crew. [The 3600-ton Rainbow was one of the two cruisers of the Canadian Navy and had to be hurriedly refitted to see action against the Indians.]
21 July: Hindus Finally Reply That They Are Ready to Surrender Rather Than Chance a Fight—The Rainbow arrived at Vancouver harbour in the morning at about 8 A.M…ready to face action against the renegade Indians. After a day of hectic parleys between the passengers on the ship, the Sikh leaders of Vancouver, and the officials of the immigration department, a settlement was finally reached at 6.00 P.M. between the parties. [The final negotiations with the Indians were conducted by a high-powered party of the government headed by Martin Burrell, Minister of Agriculture in the Dominion Cabinet and consisting among others H.H. Stevens, Member of Parliament, Malcolm Reid, Superintendent of Immigration, and William Hopkinson, Immigration Inspector.]*
22 July: Smoke is rising from the funnel of the Komagata Maru, … and it is expected to leave Canadian shores tomorrow morning at five a.m. With the…Rainbow… not 200 yards away and with scores of trim militia men mustered on the wharves…ready for any emergency, the contingent of Hindus on the Japanese steamer last night gave up the fight for admittance to the Dominion, agreeing to accept the terms offered by the Dominion officials and said they would make a peaceable departure. The tug Sea Lion was alongside the pier at noon today loading the stock [consisting of flour, canned goods, vegetables, fruit and other supplies] for the Komagata Maru .
23 July: Maru Slips out of Harbor at the Hour Set—Without any fuss or confusion the Komagata Maru sailed at 5.10 A.M. this morning for Hong Kong with her 352 Hindu passengers who arrived here on the morning of May 23. Since her arrival, the whole country has been kept on the jump and the history of the Hindus’ struggle to enter British Columbia has been published all over the world. After defis and threats**, demands, evasion, the Hindus sailed this morning for the simple reason that the matter was to be taken over by the navy at 5 A.M. and the Hindus recognised that their day of procrastination was over. Gurdit Singh’s late demand the previous evening for live sheep and chicken was not acceded to by the authorities.
Unquote
Thus, after exactly two months the vessel turned back, unsuccessful in its mission. Seldom in history has a group of three-hundred minimally educated, impecunious, and unarmed men kept an entire country on tenterhooks for two months, defying its officials, battling in its courts, fighting its police, and staring down its navy. The Sikhs may have been defeated in this battle, but as the victims of a white supremacist, racist regime, the analogy of Gurdit Singh and his followers to the biblical allegory of a Colonial David battling an Imperialist Goliath is hardly misplaced.
But the woes of the Komagata Maru did not end there. The Great War of 1914 had been ignited with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb on 28 June 1914. War was formally declared on 28 July when Austria-Hungary shelled Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Britain entered the war on 4 August on the side of the Allied Powers. Fearing that the rebels on the Komagata Maru may incite the Sikh soldiers in Hong Kong to revolt, the ship’s captain was told at Yokohama that permission had been refused to dock the ship at Hong Kong. The ship, now dangerously low on provisions, sailed to Kobe where after Gurdit Singh’s appeals, and threats to the British Consul there, the ship was supplied but was asked to sail directly to Calcutta without discharging any passengers at Singapore.
The vessel finally docked at Budge Budge, about fifteen kilometres downstream of Calcutta on the Hooghly River on 27 September 1914, six months after beginning its journey from Hong Kong. It was greeted by a police detachment backed by a contingent of the Royal Fusiliers. The police searched all the passengers for any weapons or incriminating material, and then ordered all the Sikhs to board a train for the Punjab. The Sikhs protested against the order; Gurdit Singh argued that he had to settle his arbitration dispute with the steamship company at Calcutta, and a few passengers said that they had to meet their relatives in the city to borrow money to settle accounts amongst themselves. The Sikhs also wanted to deposit the copy of their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, at the Calcutta Gurdwara. The police brushed aside their requests. The Sikhs, nonetheless, left for the Gurdwara in a procession carrying the holy book. The police stopped them, and in the ensuing altercation the police opened fire, killing eighteen of the processionists and wounding another twenty-five.6 Three policemen and two spectators were also killed. In the resulting confusion, many of the passengers ran away and it took the police almost a month to round them up and send them away to the Punjab, where they were interned under the newly passed Ingress of India Ordinance that the Government of India had armed itself with as a war-time measure to summarily arrest and hold without trial suspected extremists. Gurdit Singh went underground and it was only in 1921, acceding to Gandhi’s advice, that he gave himself up to the government. As Jensen says, “The sailing of the Komagata Maru was both the last peacetime resistance to exclusion and the first wartime resistance to British rule in India. It also marked the beginning of the final drive in the United States for legislative exclusion of Indians.”7
It would however be many years before the Komagata Maru incident was recognised as a legitimate struggle targeted against the British Empire and given its historical due. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated a memorial built at Budge Budge in 1952. In Vancouver, a federally funded memorial was unveiled in July 2012 in Coal Harbor with a plaque listing the names of all passengers on that unfortunate vessel. In a penitent act aimed at bringing closure to this episode, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologised on behalf of the Government of Canada in the House of Commons in May 2016, expressing regret that none of those on the ship were alive today to hear the apology.
16
Taraknath Das, Har Dayal and the Gadar Party
THE RACIALLY CHARGED, imperialist-tainted, white-dominated discourse of the previous few years, both in Canada and the United States, created an environment that was propitious for Indians to form organisations that recognised the need for a global fight against colonialism and concomitant white racism. The intellectual foundation to these organisations was provided by educated activists who had come to these countries greatly influenced by overseas anti-imperialists such as Shyamji Krishna Varma, Vinayak Savarkar and Madam Cama, and Indian extremists such as Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose and Lajpat Rai. Lajpat Rai himself had come to the United States in 1914 and stayed in the country till the end of 1920, as the British government had prevented his return to India during the war years. These activists, who had personally experienced heavy-handed colonialism at home, now found an immigrant population in North America that was receptive to fight for its own civil rights as well as support the larger cause of Indian independence. Thus was born the Gadar Movement in 1913, principally founded by Har Dayal and Sohan Singh Bhakna, and with the active assistance of Taraknath Das. ‘Gadar’ (also written as Ghadar or Ghadr) is a Hindi word translated as ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolution’, and sought to resurrect the actions of the Indian sepoys of the 1857 Mutiny.
Taraknath Das was born on 15 June 1884 into a lower-middle class family as a third child to his parents (Kalimohan Das and Birajmohini) in Majhipara village north of Calcutta. An academically precocious child, Das caught the eye of Barrister Mitra of the Calcutta High Court who enlisted Das into the Anusilam Samiti, an organisation whose aim was to train Bengali youth in physical fitness, weaponry, and wrestling to fight the British for India’s freedom. Das quickly rose up the ranks and was soon in the crosshairs of the police. Tipped off by a friendly policeman of his impending arrest, and with monetary help from his friends, he travelled to Japan in 1905 enduring a voyage of extreme privation. There, he established an India House on the lines of Shyamji Krishna Varma’s eponymous organisation in London, but got little assistance from the Japanese in any activity that was considered hostile to the British. Disillusioned with Japan, he sailed for the United States and arrived in Seattle on 12 July 1906 aboard the Tango Maru.1 After working as a labourer in the railroad company in Seattle for a few weeks he went to San Francisco and enrolled in January 1907 at the College of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. Despite a heavy academic workload, he found time to establish the California Hindu Students Association as well as the Indian Independence League, the latter to assist ‘Hindu’ labourers around San Francisco. In May 1907, he passed the civil service exam for the position of an interpreter with the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization Services and was posted to Vancouver, a hotbed of friction between the Indian migrants and the local white population.
When the Vancouver riots began in September 1907, Das organised the Indian community by forming the Hindustani Association, whose aim was to fight for the rights of Indian immigrants and to look after their welfare once they landed. A secret police report prepared by Thomas McInnes declared that Taraknath Das was the principal ringleader behind the Hindu agitation in Vancouver, and then recommended to the Dominion government that all ‘Hindu’ (i.e. Indian) immigration should altogether cease.2 In subsequent months, Das also discreetly coached arriving passengers to answer the questions the immigration officers put to them, and secured legal help for those who were declined entry into Canada or the U.S.A. In April 1908, he published the inaugural issue of The Free Hindusthan, as ‘An Organ of Freedom, and of Political, Social and Religious Reform’.3 Two thousand copies of the newspaper were printed and distributed worldwide. The publication of The Free Hindusthan brought Das into conflict with his employers resulting in his resigning from the government position. The journal itself ceased publication in 1910 after a two-year run.
Das moved to Seattle in May 1908 and then joined the Military College in Norwich University in Vermont as a freshman in engineering. However, his anti-British activities were frowned upon and he left the college after a year, picking up some knowledge on the way of weaponry and battle tactics that would come of use later. Das returned to Seattle in June 1909 and obtained his B.A. degree in political science in 1910 from the University of Washington. While there, he was awarded a graduate fellowship to conduct research on ‘Employers Liability Law in the United States’. He spent a few months working on the farms at California as part of his research and used the time to visit Berkeley to persuade the Indian students to fight for the immigration rights of their countrymen. In 1911, Das received his M.A. degree and the Teachers Certificate from the university at Berkeley and continued to remain there to complete his doctoral thesis. In 1912, he established the Hindustan Association of America (HAA) in Berkeley, which counted as its first members the Bengali students who stayed at the Nalanda Club (a fraternity consisting of predominantly Bengali students at the university), and aimed to be ‘a non-political organization to promote the educational and cultural activities of Indian students and interpret India to the Americans’.4 In January 1914, he applied for his United States citizenship for the second time, after having been rejected in 1912. Despite the attempts of a U.S. Congressman and a senior Canadian immigration official (William Hopkinson of Komagata Maru fame) to thwart the process, Das’ petition was accepted and he became a naturalised citizen on 6 June 1914. It was at Berkeley that Taraknath Das and Har Dayal met each other, an association that would in time lead to the establishment of the first, and the longest enduring, major political movement of Indians in North America.
Sohan Singh Bhakna was born in 1870 to a reasonably well off but rustic Sikh peasant family in the Khutrae Khurd village of Amritsar district. The only son to his parents, Bhakna lost his father, Karam Singh, when he was just a year old and was thereafter brought up by his religiously inclined mother and other family members. He did not study beyond fifth grade, and sometime during his early adulthood he underwent a spiritual transformation that took him on the path of a social reformer. In 1909, at the age of forty, driven more by a desire to earn money to pay off his large debts rather than any longing for overseas political activism, Bhakna migrated to the United States, landing in Seattle on 4 April 1909 and found employment in the Monarch Lumber Mill near Portland. The exploitation of his fellowmen in the mills aroused his dormant political activism; he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) and spoke out frequently against the miserable conditions that the migrant labour had to endure. He saw an inseparable link between labour exploitation, racial discrimination and colonial subjugation, an idea that would resonate with the members of the future Gadar Party.5
Har Dayal was born in Delhi into a high caste Punjabi Kayastha family in 1884, the youngest of four sons to Lala Gauri Dayal, a government employee at the Delhi court. He was an exceptional student, a polyglot with mastery in English, Persian, Sanskrit and Urdu, and possessed of a phenomenal memory. After matriculating from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, he went to Lahore to pursue his M.A. While there, he was influenced by the socio-religious reform movements of the time that made him conscious of the inequities in society such as the caste system. His political thoughts were deeply influenced by Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhai Parmanand (an Arya Samaj missionary) and Hans Raj (the principal of D.A.V. College), and the philosophies of the Arya Samaj and Bramho Samaj. Har Dayal’s remarkable academic achievements brought him a state scholarship (the first such recipient from Northern India) that would enable him to study at a university of his choice in England and with an unstated promise of a job in the higher echelons of India’s bureaucracy on successful completion of his academic requirements.6
