Abstract
This essay revisits the ‘Komagata Maru’ incident of 1914 to investigate the legalities that have complicated migration from some parts of the world to others since the era of apparently porous colonial borders to the highly bordered contemporary world that is differentially porous. It shows that the promise of free movement in the global village is undercut by the reality of legislation and juridical issues that continue to regulate the movements of people from one part of the world to the other. It focuses on legal borders that restrict the movement of people in the contemporary world by returning to an earlier moment when several of these issues were foregrounded. The essay draws on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to identify the juridical procedures, tactics, apparatuses of security and machineries of surveillance that the British government employed against imperial subjects during the Komagata Maru episode of 1914. It argues that the national and supranational organisms united under the single logic of the sovereignty of the British Empire, through which state-centric imperialism obstructed the mobility of the passengers on the Komagata Maru, make it resemble the new Empire.
Introduction
In their bestselling book, Empire, Hardt and Negri use the term ‘Empire’ to define the new political order of globalization. Distinguishing this new imperial global order from state-centred imperialism, they view it as a ‘decentered’ and ‘deterritorialized’ universal order composed of ‘a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xii) that is expressed as a constitutional system or ‘a juridical formation’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 3). While calling attention to the new regimes of exploitation and control that define this new global form of sovereignty, they discern in the Empire an alternative political paradigm that can serve as the basis for a truly democratic global society and proceed to examine the traditional concept of ‘just war’ at the ‘borders against barbarians and internally against the rebellious’ in order to achieve these ends (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 10).
Hardt and Negri’s constitution of the Empire in juridical terms is heavily indebted to Foucauldian notions of biopower and governmentality. 1 Distinguishing the new form of governmentality from early forms of sovereignty in which law and sovereignty were absolutely inseparable, Foucault (1991: 95) asserts that the question in the new form of governmentality is ‘not of imposing laws on men, but of disposing things’. He demonstrates that it does not employ laws but tactics and even uses laws themselves as tactics and arranges things in such a way that particular ends may be achieved through a certain number of means (Foucault, 1991: 95). Although law is marginalized to norms and tactics in Foucault’s elucidation of governmentality, 2 it does not necessarily entail the expulsion of, but the use of law as one among ‘a range of multiform tactics’ for governing (Foucault, 1991: 95) and its assimilation to ‘governmental or administrative imperatives’(Golder and Fitzpatrick, 2009: 34). Yet governmentality, as Urry (2000: 49) points out, involves ‘not just a territory with fixed populations but mobile populations moving in across and beyond territory’ and that ‘the apparatus of security’ involves dealing with the population that is ‘at a distance, on the move’ from the 19th century onwards. For example, historians have noted the emergence of a culture of migration and mobility in Punjab (Tatla, 1995).
Since the 19th century, imperial policies have produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in Cheen (South East Asia), Telia (Australia), Mirkin (America) and Kanada (Canada). British imperial policies exhibit effective management of labour through meeting imperial military, policing and other requirements through assisting selective and temporary migration of different colonized groups. Walton-Roberts (2017: 234) views Sikh migration as an earlier form of skilled migration and points out that since Sikh’s valour and loyalty to the British Empire were selected as desirable skills after 1857, they were drawn into international migration networks in service of the needs of the Empire. Sikhs were assisted in their mobility as soldiers in the service of the British imperial army, as policemen in maintaining law and order in British colonies in Southeast Asia (Kaur, 2009) and as artisans in the construction of the East African Railways (Kalsi, 2005: 119). This mobility triggered free movements of others to different parts of the Empire. From 1807 to 1907, approximately 5000 Sikhs had migrated to Canada and were largely employed in plantations, railways and timber mills. This invited the hostility of White labour and the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League and the formulation of a number of regulations to prevent Indians from entering Canada. A large number of Sikhs from India, however, continued to be conscripted in the First World War and travelled to different parts of the Empire. A revolutionary movement called ‘Ghadr’ in 1913, led by Indian students in America, found a large following among Sikhs overseas, many of whom were former soldiers that responded to the Ghadr call to return home and begin a revolution. This was the climate in which Gurdit Singh, a Singapore-based businessman, chartered a ship called ‘Komagata Maru’ to carry 376 Punjabi passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, but was turned back with tragic consequences (Tatla, 2007).
Hardt and Negri’s distinction between old imperialism and Empire has been questioned by their critics who point to the continuity of old imperialism in the economic, political and military subjugation of peripheries through the tight control exercised by the United States and its subaltern allies over the world system (Amin, 2014; Balakrishnan, 2000; Munck, 2001). ‘Transnational practices of white supremacists based on Asian exclusion, imperial expansion, and antiradicalism’ (Sohi, 2011: 424) in North America, which gesture towards transnational White supremacist formations as well as anticolonial resistances (Sohi, 2011: 425), anticipate the decentred and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that Hardt and Negri define as Empire. This essay draws on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire to identify the juridical procedures, tactics, apparatuses of security and machineries of surveillance that the British government employed against imperial subjects during the Komagata Maru episode of 1914. It argues that the national and supranational organisms united under the single logic of the sovereignty of the British Empire through which the British, British Indian and Canadian governments, in collusion with other imperial and non-imperial colonies, obstructed the mobility of the passengers on the Komagata Maru and anticipated the mechanisms of the new Empire rather than of state-centric imperialism. After summarizing the tragic incident, the essay briefly explains the notion of just war and biopower before proceeding to examine the use of laws as tactics by the Canadian and British governments to prevent the passengers from entering Canada and to detain them on their return to India. In addition to the Continuous Journey of 1908 that was introduced by the Dominion of Canada, the essay examines legal measures such as the Immigrant Act of 1910, Indian Press Act of 1910, the Ingress into India Ordinance of 1913 and the machineries of surveillance through which the British government exercised control over the bodies of Sikh populations both in Canada and India, as well as on those mobile Sikhs. It demonstrates that these legal and administrative apparatuses functioned as a ‘systemic totality’ that incorporated both imperial and non-imperial territories and as a ‘machine’ that created ‘a continuous call for authority’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 14).
The Komagata Maru Episode
More than a century ago, Gurdit Singh, a Singapore-based entrepreneur, chartered a Japanese ship called the ‘Komagata Maru’, which set sail from Hong Kong on 4 April 1914 carrying 376 passengers, largely Sikh but also some Hindus and Muslims, to Vancouver. After arriving in Vancouver, the ship was detained and all except 22 passengers were not allowed to disembark, citing the Continuous Journey regulation of 1908. After a prolonged legal battle with the Canadian authorities, the passengers were forced to return to India in July 1914. On its arrival in Budge Budge near Kolkata, a party led by the Police Commissioner of Bengal, the Deputy Police Commissioner of Punjab and the District Magistrate of 24 Parganas searched the passengers and their leader Gurdit Singh. The passengers were ordered to board a special train to Punjab, which was waiting at the Budge Budge station, made possible through the hastily formulated Ingress into India Act, or Ordinance V of 1914. When all but 62 passengers refused to board the train, they were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance for years.
Just War and State of Exception
Traditionally, the concept of bellum justum (just war) rested on the idea that when ‘a state finds itself confronted with a threat of aggression that can endanger its territorial integrity or political independence it has a jus ad bellum (right to make war)’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 12). The discrepancy between the Empire’s professed commitment to protect the rights of its subjects and its violation of such rights has been justified by the notion and invocation of just war against those it viewed as the enemy of the state, the absolutized enemy imagined as the South Asian radical or terrorist who posed an absolute threat to the ethical order. Like Muslims after the events of 9/11, Sikhs, at the turn of the century, began to occupy this unenviable position in the perception of the Empire on the basis of its suspicions about their alleged involvement in seditious activities. Despite the absence of any substantiated evidence of Sikh involvement in burgeoning militant movements at a level that could endanger its security, the British government justified the war as an activity in itself. Hardt and Negri (2000) point out that the notion of just war is intimately linked with that of the right of intervention and the state of exception. They explain that in order to take control of such a situation, the intervening authority must be granted ‘the capacity to define the demands of intervention’ as well as ‘the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and the plurality of the arrangements in crisis’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 16). According to them, this engenders a form of right that is really ‘a right of the police’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 17). The British Empire used the impending threat to its security from emerging nationalist movements and the impending First World War as a state of exception to justify the need for intervention; and for setting in motion the forces and instruments that could protect the British Empire as well as preserve a ‘white Canada’ in a fashion similar to the United States by declaring a global war on ‘terrorism’ to protect the new Empire against those opposed to the maintenance of global peace.
Hardt and Negri (2000: 17) view ‘the juridical power to rule over exception and the capacity to deploy police action as defining the imperial model of authority’. The new notion of right, according to them, is inscribed in the ‘deployment of prevention, repression and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of social equilibrium’ through a string of measures (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 17). Although their critics discern in it an impulse towards the imposition of global capitalism and US supremacy (Amin, 2005; Balakrishnan, 2000; Munck, 2001), intervention is justified in the Empire by ‘an appeal to essential values of justice’ and ‘the right of the police is legitimated by universal values’ in each case (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 18). Their claim that the concept of Empire or ‘superimperialism’ is ‘dedicated to peace’ is challenged by their critics who note the emergence of a ‘collective’ imperialism that works through supranational machineries of control (Lewis, 2002).
Governmentality and the Use of Laws as Tactics
The practices of the British, the British Indian government and the Canadian government, supported by imperial and non-imperial colonies, in the case of the Komagata Maru offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality, through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty (Foucault, 1991). Although the juridical procedures initiated by these governments repeatedly invoked the idea of the common good and cited ‘the ethico-political dynamic lying at the heart of the juridical concept’ of the Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 11), the laws appear to be tactics employed with the objective of achieving certain ends convenient to each of the states in this new form of governmentality. Couched in objective legalese, the legislative procedures, regulations and acts, which were introduced by the three states and rigorously enforced by them through a transnational network stretching from North America to Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, strongly suggest the use of laws as tactics to meet their objective of excluding Indian populations from White dominated nations without jeopardizing the British Empire’s control over Sikh bodies conscripted in the imperial army.
Canada
Canadian immigration patterns appear to be closely linked to the demands of capitalist economic development (Creese, 1988–89: 28). Canadian immigration history demonstrates the state’s simultaneous selective and limited migration of different ethnic groups dictated by the demand for cheap wage labour and appeasement of White labour through its framing of exclusionary laws. The activities of steamship companies such as Canadian Pacific Railway and their agents to recruit Chinese workers and entice Punjabi rural workers were pushed by the demand for cheap labour and Asian migration filled Canada’s economic development needs (Millis, 1911: 72). However, Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, founded in 1889 by White workers who felt threatened by economic competition by cheap wageworkers, brought pressure on the Canadian government to frame stricter immigration laws and prohibit Asian migration for resolving the ‘oriental problem’ (Creese, 1988–89: 31).
Likewise The Asiatic Exclusion League (known as Vancouver Trades and Labour Council earlier in history), formed in 1907, called for the expulsion of Asians compelling the Canadian government to introduce a set of regulations and amendments such as the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908, the Order-in-Council of 1908, the Immigration Act of 1910 and the Order-in-Council of 1913 that would effectively prevent Asians from entering Canada.
Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908
The Continuous Journey Regulation was an amendment to the Immigration Act of 1908 prohibiting the landing of any immigrants who did not arrive in Canada by continuous journey from the country of which they were natives that followed a report submitted by William Lyon Mackenzie King, Deputy Minister of Labour, about the influx of Asian labourers in Canada. Apprehensions about large-scale Japanese, and possibly Hindu [Sikh], arrivals intensified anti-Asian sentiment in North America and a rally organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League in Vancouver escalated into a riot in which largely Chinese and Japanese businesses were targeted. To discourage the entry of certain categories of migrants, the Canadian government passed an Order-in-Council that stipulated that immigrants of Asian origin should have 200 dollars on their person when they landed in Canada, which was a large sum at that time. While the category Asian largely denoted Chinese, Japanese as well as Indian people, the law appeared to have been primarily directed against the latter, the majority of whom were Sikhs, since it was possible to sail directly to Canada from both China and Japan, and because the Chinese and Japanese governments had negotiated a gentlemen’s agreement with Canada on restricted migration.
Calling attention to the connection between colonialism, disease and hygiene, Hardt and Negri (2000: 136) note that, ‘European colonialism was continually plagued by contradictions between virtuous exchange and the danger of contagion, and hence it was characterized by a complex play of flows and hygienic boundaries between metropole and colony and among colonial territories’. In retrospect, it becomes evident that the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908 was a tactic employed by the Canadian Government to curtail the threat posed by Asian migrant labour to local White Canadians and to serve the larger objective of preserving a White Canada. However, instead of directly imposing its sovereignty by excluding Asians on the basis of race, it resorted to the impersonal and objective language of law to achieve its ends; law was used as a tactic.
Apprehensions about the risk of both physical contamination and moral corruption posed to White Canadians through the mere presence of the dark Sikh stranger, voiced by members of the Asian Exclusion League and others, epitomize the ‘horror of unlimited contact, flow and exchange – or really the horror of contagion, miscegenation, and bounded life’ that Hardt and Negri (2000: 135) discern in colonial sovereignty. But White Canadians’ anxieties related to contagion were compounded by competition through cheap labour. The Senate Debates on Hindu immigration in Ottawa on 26 May 1914, in which Thomas Casgrain openly admitted that he was not in favour of bringing any more labourers in Canada than it had employment for, foregrounded the imbrication of the economic with the social in the framing of the Continuous Journey Act. A special Order-in-Council in 1913 targeted a particular group of Asians, namely artisans and labourers, who had arrived in British Columbia between 1897 and 1907 and offered stiff competition to local White workers in the Canadian plantations and lumber mills through working harder for lower wages. This Order-in-Council passed on 8 December 1913 stated that ‘in view of the present overcrowded condition of the labour market in British Columbia’, the landing at designated ports of entry in British Columbia of ‘any immigrant…artisans [or] labourers…is hereby prohibited’ (Committee on Immigration, House of Representatives, 1914: 128). Although it was a general exclusion order that did not make exceptions for labourers and artisans of any country, Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner General of Immigration, admitted before the Committee on Immigration in the House of Representatives that the aim was to reach Hindu labourers (Committee on Immigration, House of Representatives, 1914).
The Komagata Maru became a test case of the application of ‘various regulations to the letter, including the direct passage proviso’, as stated by the Immigration Superintendent who began the examination of the Komagata Maru passengers on 26 May 1914 ( Victoria Times, 1914: 1). Statements of Canadian Ministers in the Parliament on 1 June 1914 leave no doubt that the law was used by the state to meet its own agendas and that it disposed things in a manner that was convenient to White labour. In his reply to a question in the Dominion House of Commons, William Roche, the Minister of Interior, reassured the house that ‘the present law was sufficient to prevent the entry of undesirables’ and ‘if it was not it would be amended’ ( Ottawa Citizen, 1914: 1). Although Sikh migration into British Columbia had been actively encouraged by contract agents of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (Millis, 1911: 73) and supported by individuals like Lieutenant-Governor Dunsmuir with the avowed purpose of reducing wages (Yoell, 1908), they were labelled as undesirables as opposed to desirable White labour migrants.
Earlier, Casgrain had brought out the anomaly in the state’s action of letting men from every nationality not living under the British flag enter Canada even as it refused admittance to the Sikhs and Sepoys, who he described as ‘a fine race of men, a law abiding people’ (Waraich and Sidhu, 2005: 22). The Canadian Prime Minister, Robert Borden, ‘regretted that the Hindus had made this attempt in view of the fact that the order prohibiting the entry of artisans into British Columbia did not discriminate against Hindus in particular’ ( Ottawa Citizen, 1914: 1). He added that the government would, if necessary, ‘submit the section of the Immigration Act, which prevents the interference of courts with the order of the Minister of Interior’ ( Ottawa Citizen, 1914: 1).
Colonized populations invariably manipulated the loopholes in the legal system by reorienting their identities to fulfil the Empire’s specific requirements at a particular time and place, such as Hindus registering as Sikhs to take advantage of the preferential recruitment of Sikhs in the British Indian army (Fox, 1987), thus employing tactics as a mode of resistance. In the case of Komagata Maru, Gurdit Singh’s ( Modern Review, 1914: 905) recognition that ‘all opposition to the landing comes from the cheap labour element’ and awareness of the regulations relating to the entry of artisans and labourers allowed him to put forward his credentials as a merchant of considerable worth in order to support his demand to land in Vancouver. Similarly, Sikh soldiers and policemen aboard the Komagata Maru presented themselves as cultivators and landowners on arrival in British Columbia to circumvent the clause barring the entry of artisans and labourers, corroborating Walton-Roberts’ (2017: 242) notion that Canadian immigration laws and policies have historically produced the Canadian subject through migrants’ appropriation of desirable skills to stake their claims to citizenship.
The Immigration Act of 1910
In contrast to the Asiatic Exclusion League, which viewed itself as protecting White Canada from the perceived threat of ‘Hindoo’ barbarians, the Sikhs that were led by Gurdit Singh staked their rightful claims to entering Canada as British subjects. While the Canadian government viewed the Komagata Maru as a problem of admitting aliens, the leaders of the Komagata Maru saw themselves exercising their right to move freely as subjects of the British Empire (Singh, 2007), making Komagata Maru truly an issue of imperial citizenship (Mongia, 1999). 3 The exclusion of the passengers on the Komagata Maru, who were British subjects, exposed an anomaly in the Immigration Act.
The Canadian government deprived the subjects of the British Empire to move through adding a section that transformed the Sikh subject into an alien by restricting the definition of the British subject to those domiciled in Canada.
Section 2(e) of the Immigration Act begins by stating that, for the purpose of the Act, ‘Alien means a person who is not a British subject’, but for immigration purposes, British subjects were divided into Canadian citizens and others, and only Canadian citizens possessed an unqualified right to enter and remain in Canada. A Canadian citizen was in turn defined as (a) ‘a person born in Canada who had not become an alien’, (b) ‘a British subject domiciled in Canada’ or (c) ‘a person naturalized in Canada not having lost domicile or become an alien’ ( Library and Archives Canada, 1910: 206). The decision of the Privy Council upheld the ‘right of the Dominion to exclude aliens, but it is not certain whether the Dominion has the right to exclude, by an order in council, British subjects who fulfil the requirements of Immigration Law’ ( The Sun, 1914: 1).
The contradictions within imperial policies on citizenship complicated the situation further, with leaders of the Komagata Maru invoking the discourse of rights and responsibilities underpinning the idea of secular citizenship to demand the right of the passengers to work in any part of the Empire. While emphasizing that ‘we scrupulously complied with every provision of law and took special care to see that there was no infringement of the rules at any step’ and that ‘the conduct on our part was in all respects lawful and unexceptionable’, Gurdit Singh points out that both Indian and Canadian governments ‘violated and ignored the laws of their own creation’ (Singh, 2007: 64). 4
India
The juridical procedures initiated by the Canadian government to prevent the passengers from entering Canada were complemented by the British Indian government’s implementation of existing Acts and framing of new ones to detain the passengers on their return to Budge Budge. The Sikh migration to Canada as well as their obstruction was the product of economic, social and political interactions between the British, Canadian and American nations (Millis, 1911: 76). Imperial anxieties related to the Ghadr insurrection that had acquired a large following among diaspora Sikhs drove the British government to make arrangements with the US and Canadian governments to maintain strict surveillance over the movements of South Asian radicals (Sohi, 2011: 423). Imperial apprehensions about the Ghadr revolution that spread across India made the government detain or regulate the movements of all passengers arriving by land or sea so that they could not cause disaffection among the troops conscripted in the War or the Indian people at large.
Indian Press Act of 1910 and Proscribed Literature
The British Indian government passed a series of laws related to the proscription of literature beginning with the Vernacular Literature Act in 1878 that may also be viewed as tactics used by the government to achieve its ends. In Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in Northwest India, 1907-1947, Barrier had argued that the government, ‘aware that the publications were both a symptom and cause of unrest’, had ‘coupled checks on extremist literature with enlarged executive and judicial powers to combat sedition in all forms’ (Barrier, 1974: 16). Morton (2013: 203) points out that the colonial government’s positing of ‘a causal relationship between the affect of seditious literature and revolutionary terrorism’ led to the proscription of ‘seditious literature’. He avers that the imperial state passed the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which was subsequently repealed in 1881, to control Indian language newspapers’ printing of seditious material that could produce disaffection against the British government in India (Morton, 2013: 203). The Press Act of 1910 extended censorship to all kinds of publications, and the powers of officials were enlarged to execute the Act.
The Act authorized customs and postal officers to intercept and scrutinize suspicious content, permitted local governments to declare and forfeit any newspaper, book or document and empowered the police to search and seize the same. With the migration of Indian students and intellectuals to North America and Canada, the production of vernacular literature was no longer circumscribed by the boundaries of the Indian nation. Therefore, English and vernacular papers published overseas needed to be brought under the purview of the Press Act; and thus, custom officers were entrusted with the responsibility of intercepting proscribed literature on ships. The proscribed literature published overseas included the Hindustanee, the organ of the Hindustan Association of America, Sandesh and most importantly Ghadr, the weekly paper produced by the revolutionary Ghadr party that was founded in 1913. A note, dated 3 December 1914, by an official of the Central Intelligence Bureau stated that ‘among the foreign Arabic, Persian and Urdu letters’ ( West Bengal State Archives, 1914a: 1) brought to him, the official found a very important envelope containing a highly seditious leaflet in Urdu called Ghadr, which was full of abuse against the British government and asked Indians to take up arms. Yet, the second note mentions a letter and telegram from September 1914 that considers any special order notifying proscription or the making of any special order under the Sea Customs Act undesirable. However, the 1913 records of the Political Department of the Home Ministry reveal the adoption of pre-emptive measures taken by the British government through the proscription of a number of newspapers, books and other published material under the Press Act and Sea Customs Act.
Not only were Ghadr leaflets sent by mail intercepted by postal officers ( West Bengal State Archives, 1915), Punjab and Kolkata police were provided the specific brief to search for seditious literature, particularly the Ghadr, on board the Komagata Maru before it could be allowed to land in Budge Budge. Although the passengers had allegedly been instructed by Gurdit Singh to dispose of any seditious literature in their possession, carelessness on the part of some enabled the search party that came aboard the ship to intercept some proscribed publications on the Komagata Maru.
Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1907
The Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1907 was a law passed by the British government that enabled the government to prohibit unauthorized political meetings attended by more than 20 persons in any province designated as a ‘proclaimed area’ by provincial authorities. Under this law, any person holding a prohibited meeting or delivering a ‘lecture, address, or speech on any subject likely to cause disturbance or public excitement’ during an unsanctioned political meeting was to be ‘punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or with fine, or with both’ (Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1911: n.p.). The Act of 1907 that included the whole of India, except for Part B states in India, was amended to include any of such states by notification in the official gazette in the similar Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act of 1911.
The Seditious Meetings Act of 1911 also empowered the District Magistrate or the Commissioner of Police as the case may be at any time to prohibit any public meeting in a proclaimed area if, in his opinion, ‘such meeting is likely to promote sedition or disaffection or to cause a disturbance of the public tranquility’ by order in writing (Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1911: n.p.). The penalty for anyone who: delivers any lecture, address or speech on any subject likely to cause disturbance or public excitement to persons then present may be arrested without warrant and shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or with fine or with both…[without] the permission in writing of the Magistrate of the District or of the Commissioner of Police’. (Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1911: n.p.)
Second, the challenge offered by the mobile space of the ship to the scope of the Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act constrained officials from enforcing it. It is after its landing in Budge Budge and confirmation of the proposed intention of the passengers to voice their grievances to the Viceroy in Kolkata, which was deemed to be a proclaimed area, that the possibility of any ‘lecture, address, or speech on any subject likely to cause disturbance or public excitement’ (Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1911: n.p.) could invite preventive action such as that taken by the Commissioner of Police Calcutta, Sir Fredric Halliday, and the District Magistrate of 24 Parganas, Mr. J Donald. Apprehensions that the sentiments of disaffected passengers aboard the Komagata Maru would inflame other populations in Kolkata in public spaces is cited as the justification for the government’s decision to prevent the passengers from proceeding to the Howrah Gurdwara to deposit the Guru Granth Sahib and to prevent Gurdit Singh from settling his financial affairs in Calcutta. Additionally, the government referenced these anxieties to justify sending the passengers on a special train to their home districts. Hardt and Negri’s (2000: 15) reminder that the Empire ‘is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace’ puts the preventive actions taken by the British government against those who they believed could disturb the tranquillity of the nation into context, especially if one considers that Kolkata was viewed as the hotbed of revolutionary activities during this period.
Ingress into India Act, Ordinance v, 1914
The hasty formulation of the 1914 Ingress into India Act, or Ordinance V, days before the expected arrival of the ship in India is the most glaring example of the British Indian government’s use of laws as a tactic for meeting its ends. The government’s understandable anxieties about the security of the state in view of the impending Ghadr threat that could strengthen Bengali resistance drove it to introduce laws, such as the Ingress into India Act, which it used as tactics to achieve its ends of curbing seditious activities. The British government in India accomplished its ends of preventing the disaffected passengers of the Komagata Maru from making trouble through publicly airing their grievances by introducing a notification that authorized the police to restrict or detain any undesirable arriving by ship or land on 17 September 1914. A secret correspondence from the Commissioner of Police Calcutta dated 19 September 1914 about Ordinance V unambiguously states that his orders were to meet ‘the cases known as undesirables’ ( West Bengal State Archives, 1914b: n.p.). The dilemma faced by the Commissioner of Police is related to the application of an Ordinance, which was modelled on that applicable to foreigners, to persons not being foreigners who enter the Presidency of Bengal whether by land or sea. It acknowledges that since British subjects could not be lawfully denied entry, power under the Ordinance could be exercised on the justification that prohibition of entry was desirable ‘in order to protect the state from the prosecution of some purpose prejudicial to its safety, interests and tranquility’ (Cumming, 1914: 176). It also elaborates in great detail the procedures to be adopted by officers if they were to intercept ‘undesirables’.
As the government had made arrangements with the authorities in the Far East to give telegraphic information about any dangerous person on board en route to India, the identification of potential troublemakers could begin well before the arrival of the ship in Kolkata. The British Consul General in Kobe, in his letter to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, dated 2 September 1914, warned that he had received an anonymous letter from two passengers stating that the Indians intended to make trouble on arrival in India. Since the term undesirable was open to interpretation, it could be used to include both the suspected Ghadr members, the brothers Jawahar Mal and Narain Das, Gurdit Singh and five other passengers. The British Ambassador in Tokyo, in a telegram to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, depicted Jawahar Mal as an agitator and warned that he was likely to cause trouble on arrival in India (Waraich and Sidhu, 2005: 114–15). An Englishman called Young in Singapore intercepted Gurdit Singh’s telegram to the newspaper Bengalee, Calcutta, and to Sardar Harchand Singh, Lyallpur, requesting Indian leaders to meet the Komagata Maru and to move the government to appoint a Commission of Enquiry to investigate grievances. This resulted in the British government branding the Singaporean merchant as a troublemaker. The British officials who were interrogated by the Inquiry Committee admitted to having received a list of 8 to 10 persons who were deemed to be dangerous by their informers and needed to be detained. While their instructions were to scrutinize passenger lists speedily and let the majority leave without delay or inconvenience to question ‘the small residue’ and ascertain their antecedents and identity, their inability to isolate Gurdit Singh and other leaders from the passengers compelled their decision to restrict the movement of all passengers. In other respects, the officials meeting the ship appear to have followed their instructions to the letter by arranging to dispatch residents of other provinces to their home districts by the special train under escort. The support and loyalty of the ship’s passengers to Gurdit Singh on their disembarkation in Budge Budge led to the application of severe forms of restrictions, such as detention, not only to the leaders but also to the majority of the passengers who had no political intentions.
Machineries of Surveillance
The resistance to the anti-Indian Continuous Journey Regulation began by deputations, which were sent by the Khalsa Diwan Society and United League of India to Ottawa, Canada on December 1891, to London in March 1913, to Lahore in August 1913 and to the Viceroy of India in December 1913. The meetings in Caxton Hall, London and Bradlaugh Hall, Lahore in combination with the launch of the first Ghadr newspaper on 1 November 1913 invited the close surveillance of the Komagata Maru before it set sail for Vancouver. The British Indian government planted an intelligent agent, Dr. Raghunath Singh, who was with the Indian Medical Service in Hong Kong attached to the eighth Rajputs, as the Medical Officer on the Komagata Maru. His reports were the primary means used by the imperial authorities to incriminate Gurdit Singh and the passengers indulging in seditious activities. Intelligence and other records reveal the close monitoring of the voyage at every port of call by vigilant officials of the Empire or by their agents, who diligently reported the journey’s progress through speedy telegraphic communication to alert and prepare the subsequent port about the arrival of the ship. 6 Therefore, both stopovers en route to Canada and details of passengers and visitors boarding the ship were duly recorded and the information was passed on to concerned authorities. Before its arrival in Canada, pre-emptive steps were taken by officials forewarned about its progress including the appointment of Hopkinson, a spy of Anglo-Indian descent fluent in Indian languages, to elicit information about passengers.
During the ship’s 2-month detention in Vancouver, which took place between May and July 1914, the Canadian authorities installed an effective espionage system, which ensured that every activity on the ship including the increasing differences within Sikhs, the acrimonious exchanges between Sikhs on board and on the shore, the secret meetings between Gurdit Singh and suspected Ghadr leaders were duly reported. In addition to Raghunath Singh and Hopkinson, the authorities, taking advantage of the divisions between passengers, were successful in obtaining details about Gurdit Singh’s plans and the state of affairs on the ship through other agents of the government. The Canadian government’s monitoring of passengers – through close scrutiny of every verbal and written interaction between Gurdit Singh and his lawyer, Sikhs community members in Canada, the shipping company and the British, Indian and Canadian authorities, the press or Indian leaders – made it impossible to conduct business or private activities outside the government’s intrusive gaze. 7 Through its trusted sources, the Canadian authorities were not only able to intercept Gurdit Singh’s failed attempt to purchase arms but also intercepted the letters of passengers addressed to the Secretary of the Khalsa Diwan Society about supplying provisions. Moreover, Canadian authorities gleaned information regarding factions and infighting among passengers. Equally important was the network of Sikh informers on shore such as Bela Singh who would infiltrate the gurdwaras to pass on information about the deliberations of the Khalsa Diwan Society and the whereabouts of Ghadr leaders.
According to HH Stevens’ telegram, dated 19 July 1914, the Japanese captain of the ship and the crew, fearing threat from passengers, had ‘given evidence of more willingness to assist’ the Canadian authorities with the latest developments on the ship and informed them about the German brokerage firm, the former captain of the vessel who had chartered the ship without the owners’ consent and about his removal at Moji (Waraich and Sidhu, 2005: 62). In addition to the captain, the frenzy of correspondence exchanged between Colonials in Hong Kong, Singapore and India offices following the ship’s return ensured the fixing of the disciplinary imperial gaze on the ship and its passengers. Harcourt’s letter on 8 July 1914 to Governor May of Hong Kong instructed the Governor to send information about ‘attempts to divert Indian passenger traffic from British to Japanese or other foreign vessels’ and ‘to secure direct steamship communication with Canada or the other self-governing dominions’ (Waraich and Sidhu, 2005: 53). This initiated the process of surveillance that continued to be in force for all the ships returning from overseas. These transnational machineries of surveillance mobilized by the imperial state were strongly supported by the domestic machinery within British India in which the Central Intelligence Department in Simla collaborated with exemplary speed and efficiency with not only the government of India but also with the Punjab and Bengal governments as well as with the police of these two provinces to counter the suspected seditious threats posed by the passengers. The high-level confidentiality maintained in the passing of the Ingress into India Act, and instructions related to its implementation on the arrival of the ship, elevates the procedures followed on the ship’s return to the status of a top secret intelligence operation planned to intercept dangerous seditionists’ intent on disturbing the tranquillity of the state. The officials entrusted with the operation, alerted about every leg of the ship’s progress, including details of suspicious persons who boarded the ship on its return as well as Gurdit Singh’s plans, took elaborate precautions to detain the 8 or 10 suspects by surrounding the ship on its arrival in Diamond Harbour and searching the cabins and luggage of the passengers.
Conclusion
The body has been central to the exercise of biopower in the context of Punjab in which bodies of Sikhs were co-opted to achieve the ends of the imperial government, in which the Sikhs were equally complicit. The simultaneous production of the Punjabi ‘villager’ and the ‘soldier’ by the British Empire facilitated the appropriation of Punjabi labour in the agricultural economy and in the imperial army, respectively. However, even as the labour of the Sikh body was being appropriated in the military, economic and infrastructural agendas of the British Empire and the Canadian lumber mills until 1907, the ‘visceral sensibility’ of the labouring body produced deep apprehensions in White Canadians and had to be excluded from the space of the Canadian dominion. The contradiction between the British empire’s coerced mobility of the Sikh body in military service and restricted mobility of Sikh free movements illustrates the selective and differential immigration policies that continue to regulate mobilities to further the interests of dominant nations in the new Empire as under imperialism.
The passengers’ exclusion from the host countries depended on them being labelled as categorized and tracked individuals deemed to be dangerous so that they could be secluded. The deportation of the passengers from Hong Kong, by using the law of vagrancy, and from Kolkata, by citing their possession of insufficient funds, brought the unemployed, the unemployable and the destitute under the category of punishable status. Failing to find concrete evidence of their involvement in seditious acts, the state used the war as an emergency to express its sovereignty to exclude undesirables within India.
If the concept of Empire, in Hardt and Negri’s (2000: 10) view, ‘united juridical categories with universal ethical values, making them work together as an organic whole’, the Komagata Maru interrogated the ethical underpinnings of the juridical categories by exposing them to be clever ploys and tactics designed to exploit and exclude native populations. Hardt and Negri’s (2000: 10) notion of the Empire as ‘a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths’ and their contention that ‘the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, “just wars” at the borders against barbarians and internally against the rebellious’ in order to achieve these ends is perfectly illustrated in the interventions made by the state as a part of its just war to protect the state from ‘aliens’ and ‘seditionists’.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from the Indo-Canadian Shastri Institute, the Ministry of Culture, Government of India and the Indian Council of Social Science Research.