Martyrdom,collective memory,and the contested penal authority of racial state institutions

Introduction

In 2015, a number of civic organizations in Metro Vancouver engaged in a public campaign to commemorate the centenary of Mewa Singh’s execution by Canadian state authorities in 1915. Mewa was part of a sizable group of Punjabi migrants who came to Canada before the federal government passed laws in 1908 that precluded Indian populations from entering the country and from acquiring substantive citizenship (Mawani, 2018). Mewa had been executed for the murder of William C Hopkinson, an immigration agent and court translator who played a significant role in the surveillance and legal regulation of Indian anticolonial movements in the region. These anticolonial movements, which were active along the West Coasts of Canada and the United States (US), included organizations such as the Ghadar Party, a group that campaigned against British rule in India (Sohi, 2014).

To commemorate the centenary of Mewa’s execution, the Ghadar Party Centenary Celebration Committee coordinated a petition to have the Government of Canada overturn his conviction for murder and declare him a martyr. Insofar as this campaign tried to upend the historical record of Mewa’s legal and moral guilt, it has worked to sever his legacy from the discursive and moral ambits of criminal law and reframe it against the exigencies of racial and colonial rule. By tracking how Mewa’s conduct has been configured across historical and contemporary contexts, this article suggests that such public practices of memorialization not only complicate the racial state’s authority over political violence but also the temporal parameters of its penal fields of power.

Although the original research for this article centers on an ostensibly minor episode in Canadian history, my analysis of its political dimensions is intended to develop new analytical terrain in critical penology by extending its engagements with theories of racial governance, postcoloniality and collective memory. Mewa’s murder of Hopkinson was conditioned by racial state practices¹ that subjected Sikh and Indian populations to disenfranchisement, immigration restrictions, and intensive processes of surveillance. Following Goldberg (2002: 104), I conceive of state practices as racial by virtue of the ‘structural position they occupy in producing and reproducing, constituting and effecting racially shaped spaces, places, groups and events, lifeworlds and possibilities, accesses and restrictions, inclusions and exclusions, conceptions and modes of representation’. When Mewa killed Hopkinson, the racial state’s governance of Indian populations was guided by the imperatives to (1) establish and maintain Canada as a white nation-state; and (2) extend the duration of British rule over India in the face of anticolonial movements (Mawani, 2018; Mongia, 2018; Sohi, 2014). By showing how these imperatives intersected in Mewa’s execution, this article offers new insights into the racial scales of punishment that have tethered contemporary nation-states to the logics and infrastructures of empire.

This article also contributes to the growing chorus of postcolonial criminologies that reckon with the residues of empire on contemporary penal imaginaries and legal institutions, attending to the ‘continuities and disruptions of governance over the colonial/postcolonial divide’ (Brown, 2017: 187). Mewa’s execution and its memorialization offer a unique vantage point to consider this divide as they illustrate how the practices of imperial state actors have elided distinctions between (1) political and criminal conduct and (2) migration and crime control, elisions that are the hallmarks of contemporary border penologies (Bosworth et al., 2020; Melossi, 2015). This article looks to expand the analytical considerations of postcolonial criminologies by showing how collective memory practices can reveal the complex, sometimes fractured temporalities of penal fields of power. Because these practices memorialize Mewa as a martyr and national hero, they illustrate that the state’s capacity to criminalize and punish political conduct can be unsettled and refigured across different temporal horizons.

The remainder of this article is organized into five sections. The first section establishes the methodological basis for attending to the varied historical and discursive trajectories of Mewa’s execution. Here I explain how postcolonial theories of law, memory, and nationhood provide the rationale for working across archival and observational data, a process that illuminates the complex temporalities of race and imperial penologies. The second section of the article analyzes archival records regarding the racial governance of Sikh and Indian migrants to show how it conditioned Mewa’s killing of Hopkinson as well as his execution by state authorities. Insofar as these records suggest that the legal regulation of Indian migration was deeply entangled with the suppression of anticolonial politics, this section offers new analytical resources for explicating the racial histories of migration’s ‘illegality’. In the third section I analyze the political dimensions of Mewa’s criminal trial, explaining how it has figured as both a site of racial authority as well as a mnemonic event that has been generative of anti-racial critique. The section considers how the epistemic and juridical parameters of the trial have shaped the complex temporalities of Mewa’s memory. The fourth section examines the notions of martyrdom that feature prominently in contemporary campaigns to memorialize Singh’s death, which posit different visions of Canadian nationality and its relation to race and empire. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of how Singh’s political legacies offer new insights into the legalities of racial governance and the varied relations between punishment, memory, and racial state authority.

Historical and methodological contexts

Mewa Singh’s execution in 1915 occurred amidst broader tumult sowed by the British Empire’s continued rule over India and the administration of racial immigration and citizenship laws by the Canadian state (Sohi, 2014). Between 1904 and 1908, a sizable Punjabi population had migrated to the coastal regions of British Columbia (BC) (Nayar, 2012). This migration was part of a global movement of Sikh and Punjabi populations across the British Empire, which was precipitated by the British Empire’s conquest of Punjab in 1849 (Axel, 2001). In BC, this migration was circumvented by the passage of immigration laws that sought to preclude the entrance of Indian migrants to Canada. These laws had been stoked by racial concerns that migration from China, Japan and India was changing the desired profile of whiteness that was cultivated by state authorities (Mawani, 2009). In 1914, these laws were invoked to refuse landing to the Punjabi passengers of the Komagata Maru, whose journey was subject to surveillance and legal maneuvering by Canadian and British authorities (Mawani, 2018). The exclusion of the Komagata Maru became a galvanizing event for anticolonial movements in and beyond Canada and has acquired infamy as an example of state racism within narratives of Canadian history (Johnson, 2014).

Born in Punjab in 1881, Mewa Singh came to Vancouver in 1906. He worked in a local lumber mill and was active in the anticolonial Ghadar Party; the local gurdwara (Sikh places of worship and assembly); as well as the Shore Committee for the Komagata Maru, which coordinated legal and economic support for the ship’s passengers (Chewter, 2019; Johnston, 2014). Because Hopkinson’s murder occurred just months after the ship’s exclusion, it acquired additional significance for state actors concerned about the integrity of Canadian law as well as India’s threat to Britain’s imperial authority; in this context, Mewa’s expeditious conviction and execution were a means to deter and criminalize opposition to racial governance in Canada and across the British Empire (Sohi, 2014). Through Mewa’s execution, the state’s penal institutions exercised its authority to determine how his conduct was understood and remembered, enacting a kind of closure that Brown and Rafter (2013) suggest is foundational to penal authority. Yet, as I explain in this article, it has been against this history of penal closure that Mewa’s memorialization has occurred.

This article considers the legal and political significance of these collective memory practices by tracking how Mewa’s life and death have been configured across different public realms. Here, public realms are not conceived as discretely parametered spaces but rather as the shifting configurations of places that are made public through political relations of visibility, accountability, and accessibility. In this regard, the courts, state archives, and public events that I analyze have become embedded in public realms by virtue of how they are made discursively accessible within a given political order. I prioritize how Mewa’s life and death have been articulated across these public realms precisely because the political effects of his execution are negotiated and contested as part of the state’s legitimacy and penal authority. The legal and political legacies of Mewa’s execution are akin to the ‘complex truths’ of law and penality that are negotiated through collective memory, which Brown and Rafter (2013: 1029) suggest are, ‘subject to contest, denial and amnesia, operate in fields of recovery, where a perpetual sorting and sifting-through of contextual knowledge occurs […]’. Although this article is focused on a specific instance of penality, the complex mnemonic truth of Mewa’s sacrifice not only concerns the racial conditions of his execution but also its legacy for the legal and penological parameters of the contemporary nation-state.

To discern these legacies, I have examined how Mewa’s conduct and execution are configured and articulated across documents archived by state institutions as well as collective memory practices, each of which required different practices of data generation and analysis. Within BC, Mewa’s execution and sacrifice have been commemorated in multiple institutional contexts, primarily by local South Asian communities: local gurdwaras have long staged processions of varying sizes on the anniversaries of his execution; a theatrical adaptation of his trial was undertaken in 2018; and, in 2020, the anniversary of his execution was declared ‘Mewa Singh Day’ by New Westminster, the municipality where his execution occurred. While these instances of remembrance form the backdrop of my analysis, I primarily attend to how Mewa’s sacrifice has been memorialized during local Vaisakhi celebrations where I have done observational fieldwork since 2013.

Vaisakhi celebrations are held to mark a Punjabi harvest as well as the anniversary of the Khalsa’s formation as a distinct order of Sikhs in 1699 (Mandair, 2009). In Metro Vancouver, these celebrations occur over consecutive weekends in April and center on parades that weave through neighborhoods of significance to Sikh and South Asian communities. Amist these celebrations, Mewa’s life and death have been memorialized as part of a broader genre of mnemonic practices that commemorate different sacrifices for the religious and political sovereignty of Sikhi. Insofar as Vaisakhi has also become a place for politicians and their parties to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, these events have acquired broader significance as sites where Canadian nationhood is negotiated and the political positions of minorities are consolidated and contested (Buffam, 2019a). Given their discursive potency, I have prioritized Vaisakhi celebrations as sites to examine how Mewa’s legacy is articulated through petitions, parade floats, billboards, and informational stalls that have appeared around the parade routes. While generating this data through photographs and fieldnotes, I have not only attended to the content and form of this vernacular media but also the specific ways that it is made visible to people around and beyond the parades.

Archival documents have served as the other source of data for my analysis, specifically the collections of the British Columbia Provincial Archives, which house documents related to law enforcement within the region, and Library and Archives Canada, which has materials related to the Government of Canada’s administration of immigration laws. It was in these collections that I located documents concerning Hopkinson’s employment as a translator, immigration agent, and ostensible spy; correspondence related to the criminal and political threats posed by local Punjabi communities; as well as records related to Mewa’s trial and execution. Analysis of these archival documents gestures to the historical conditions of Hopkinson’s murder as well as the discursive processes through which the memory of Mewa’s criminality was fabricated. Of course, state archives and the documents they administer are governed by different relations of publicity than Vaisakhi celebrations. Although state archives are constituted through modes of state and racial power that determine how they exist as part of the public realm, the documents they administer are ultimately formative of the sanctioned public record (Mawani, 2012). The vast majority of the archival records that I analyze were produced within a horizon of public visibility and political accountability that has assured these texts some measure of authority over how Mewa’s life and death have been understood and remembered.

In working across archival and observational data, I am not suggesting that contemporary practices of memorialization form a continuous historical trajectory with the archival texts that I gathered. Insofar as these practices serve as acts of collective memory, they work to resignify images, elements, and scenes of the past to create and extend relations of social and political commonality. Bhabha (2004) suggests that these kinds of commemorative practices create a catachrestic space wherein concepts and events are ‘wrested from their proper meaning, “a concept-metaphor without an adequate referent” that perverts its embedded context’ (263). The disjunctive temporality of these practices, the manner in which they escape and disrupt conventional historical timelines, necessitates a careful analytical approach that attends to how the state’s penal authority has been exercised and contested across these different historical contexts and public realms.

Race and the political conditions of Hopkinson’s death

Two months after Hopkinson’s murder, the member of Parliament for Vancouver City, H.H. Stevens, wrote to the federal Minister of Justice regarding the prospect of granting clemency to Mewa before his execution. In the letter, Stevens alludes to petitions received by the Minister that requested Mewa be granted this mercy because of the political discord that surrounded Hopkinson’s murder. According to Stevens, such an offer of clemency would be ‘exceedingly unwise’ because,

Hopkinson was murdered in the most malicious and cold-blooded manner and because he was a material witness in another serious case before the courts. To release the murderer now is to place premium on this class of work and will make the enforcement of law-in-order a practical impossibility. Kindly bear in mind this, that only a vary small number of Hindus are interested in the lawlessness, but they have been very powerful in their influences over others. Their influence is now broken and should you mitigate this sentence of Mewa Singh’s it will reinstate them in power in the Hindus Colony [sic] again (Stevens, 1914).

Mewa shot Hopkinson inside the Vancouver courthouse. Hopkinson was preparing to testify on behalf of one of his Sikh informants, who were being tried for the murders of two men inside the local gurdwara. During his murder trial, Mewa blamed Hopkinson for the gurdwara shootings, remarking that, ‘All this trouble and all this shooting Mr Hopkinson is responsible for and I shot Mr Hopkinson out of honour and principle to my fellow men and for my religion’ (R v Singh, 1914: 17). Later I consider how Mewa articulated the political dimensions of his sacrifice; what concerns me here is the manner in which his testimony references the tensions sowed by Hopkinson’s tactics of surveilling, detaining, and deporting local Sikh and Indian populations, which exemplify his multifaceted role in their racial governance.

In 1909 Hopkinson was hired as an immigration inspector in Vancouver’s Canadian immigration branch. Having already worked as a police officer in India, Hopkinson was given what his supervisor described as ‘the special duty of keeping in close touch with all matters relating to the Hindoo community’ (Cory, 1909). Hopkinson’s duties spanned the provision of court translations for Indian witnesses and defendants; the enforcement of immigration laws that stratified the political status of ‘Indian’ and ‘Oriental’ populations; as well as the surveillance of anticolonial movements (Mawani, 2018; Sohi, 2014). Hopkinson also acted as a node in the elaborate webs of racial and colonial intelligence gathering that spanned law enforcement and security institutions in Canada, Britain, India, and the US.

The expansion of these intelligence networks across the infrastructures of ostensibly sovereign states is but one of the juridical mutations affected by growing concerns about Indian migration and radicalism (Mongia, 2018). Across these imperial networks, the activities of the Ghadar Party were at once a threat to Britain’s imperial rule over India and the integrity of racial governance in BC (Sohi, 2014). To govern this threat, Hopkinson cultivated and deployed intelligence in a manner that refigured the jurisdictional boundaries between Canadian law enforcement and the security agencies of the British Empire, which deployed intelligence as a mechanism of power to extend imperial rule in India and the Middle East (Thomas, 2008). In both Canada and the US, Hopkinson was notorious for deploying immigration law to initiate deportation proceedings against leaders in the Ghadarite movement and any other Indian men identified as agitators against imperial interests (Sohi, 2014). This use of deportations is symptomatic of how settler colonial nation-states were formed through transformations in legal authority that are acquiring different permutations in contemporary border penologies (Bosworth et al., 2020).

The tensions between Hopkinson’s discrepant forms of authority engendered backlash within Sikh communities and broader global anticolonial movements. Just over a year into Hopkinson’s tenure with the Government of Canada, the Department of the Interior received a petition from a local organization, the Hindustani Association, that suggested he abused his power, alleging, amongst other problems, that Hopkinson has ‘intentionally or unintentionally rendered misrepresentation of dispositions in courts and the Immigration Department’ (Kumar, 2010). Yet, when this petition circulated within the Department of Immigration, it primarily generated suspicion from state actors who assumed that the Association was inventing the problem to fuel anticolonial discontent. Histories of empire suggest that the security apparatuses of empire-states were typically unable or unwilling to discern the validity of discontent expressed by colonized populations: reports of dissent and upheaval were most likely to generate inertia or violent repression (Thomas, 2008). The petition from the Hindustani Association precipitated paranoid speculation that local Sikh and Indian groups were trying to undermine the state’s authority by replacing British court translators like Hopkinson. One of Hopkinson’s supervisors even wrote that,

From my own personal experience with these people as well as from what I learned from former residents of India, I could not for a moment consent to the use of an East Indian as an interpreter, as I have never met one here in whom I had sufficient confidence to entrust with that responsibility (Fortier, 1910).

It is these sentiments that partly fueled the inertia of state actors in responding to grievances against their agents, leading Mewa and others within anticolonial movements to engage the state as a horizon of bureaucratic violence. During his trial, Mewa even remarked that, ‘The Government listened to Hopkinson and never paid any attention to us. We are poor, only coolie men and whatever Hopkinson said was law’ (R v Singh, 1914: 25). According to Lowe (2015: 125), the term coolie has ‘a great instability and multivalence’ insofar as it served as a ‘shifting, historically contingent designation for an intermediary of Asian labour, used both to define and obscure the boundary between enslavement and freedom, and to normalize both’ (25). It is precisely these multivalent meanings that Mewa mobilizes when he suggests that he and others in his position are ‘poor, only coolie men’. After all, Sikh and Indian migrants did not come to Vancouver through a formalized system of indentureship; rather, his invocation of this category reflects how his political status is conditioned by racial state power that disarticulates Hopkinson’s authority from the rule of law, which Mewa also expresses in his suggestion that ‘whatever Hopkinson said was law’. In the next sections of this article, I explain how vocabularies of law and nationality have been pivotal to Mewa’s remembrance, particularly given how the court transcript of his trial has served as the primary material for his memorialization.

Penality and the mnemonic events of Mewa’s trial

During his trial for the murder of William Hopkinson, Mewa’s counsel read aloud a lengthy statement from his client, which had been translated from Punjabi to English before the hearing. The statement constitutes roughly one third of the trial’s 32-page transcript and its content and rhetorical style mark a significant departure from the legal proceduralism that characterized the rest of the proceeding. Much of Mewa’s statement condemned the immorality of the state’s treatment of Sikh and Indian populations even as it conceded the illegality of his own conduct. At one point during the trial Mewa explicitly articulated his motivation for killing Hopkinson, explaining that,

My religion does not teach me to bear enmity with anybody, nor had I any enmity with Mr Hopkinson. He was oppressing poor people very much. I, being a staunch Sikh, could no longer bear to see the wrong done both to my countryman and the Dominion of Canada. This is what lead me to take Hopkinson’s life and sacrifice my own life. And I, performing the duty of a true Sikh and remembering the name of God, will proceed towards the scaffold with the same amount of pleasure as a hungry baby goes towards his mother. I shall gladly have the rope around my neck and think it will be a rosary (Author’s Fieldnotes, 2015).

The transcript from Mewa’s trial reads like two distinct discursive events, barely held together by the pretense of a legal proceeding: the ostensibly legal event of Mewa’s conviction and the political event of his religious sacrifice. The event of Mewa’s conviction pivots around the intentionality of his conduct. ‘For law’, Douzinas (2012: 283) explains,

acts have identifiable authors (legal persons) who reflect and decide freely, act on their decisions, and cause willed changes in the worlds. Intended action; foresight and acceptance of its consequences; clear causal links between actors, act, and effects; and, finally, a close match between act and the definition of the relevant crime are cornerstones of criminal justice.

Legal authorities across Canada, the US and the British Empire all worked to manage the visibility of trials related to Indian colonialism. This included the trial of Gurdit Singh, who chartered the Komagata Maru to challenge racist immigration laws (Mawani, 2018); as well as the Hindu Conspiracy trials of 1917, which were mounted in the US to punish Ghadar party members accused of promoting sedition within the British Empire (Sohi, 2014). Each of these legal proceedings was coordinated to demonstrate the integrity of imperial sovereignty, both in terms of the extent of its penal authority as well as its commitment to the rule of law. Later in this section I explain how this commitment to the rule of law opened discursive spaces for Mewa to disrupt and unsettle the archive of law that was being generated through the trial. Yet, according to Mawani (2012: 340–1), law not only has a specific archive of trial transcripts, statutes, and evidentiary documents; law should be understood as the archive, explaining that,

as a self-referential system mandating recall, reference, and repetition, while also drawing selectively from other domains of knowledge, law generates documents and renders them potentially (ir)relevant. In so doing, it continually produces, expands, and destroys that which comprises its archive and in turn, that which constitutes law.

This proceduralism was at once banal and perfunctory. When Mewa tried to enter a guilty plea, both the Crown and the presiding judge refused to accept it. This refusal committed the court to generating the truth of Mewa’s guilt through the testimonies of eyewitnesses, which formed part of the archival record without clarification or cross-examination from Mewa’s defence attorney. At Mewa’s instruction, his attorney even agreed to waive the translation of the proceedings into Punjabi because ‘it will save a great deal of time’ (R v Singh, 1914: 5), a decision that effectively circumvented Mewa’s capacity to engage with the trial. These acts of perfunctory proceduralism illustrate how this trial was not only directed toward matters of factual adjudication; rather, insofar as they are oriented to the different temporal horizons of law’s archive, the trial worked to perform and generate a record of Mewa’s guilt for the projected futures of the British empire and the Canadian nation-state. Such a record of Singh’s criminality works to foreclose the extent to which penal fields of racial governance have decided the symbolic and material parameters of the Canadian nation-state.

Yet, this penological record was unsettled by Mewa’s statement, which ruptures the discursive event of his conviction even as it formed part of the archive via law’s proceduralism. After all, this proceduralism obligated the court to solicit a statement from the defendant, making possible the event of Mewa’s religious and political sacrifice. Throughout this statement, Mewa conceded his legal guilt for Hopkinson’s murder even as he widened the causal frame of this killing, suggesting it had been conditioned by racial state power. His statement explained in extensive narrative detail how the tactics of Hopkinson, along with his colleagues and informants, sowed desperation and violence within local Sikh and Indian communities, which culminated in the shootings at the Vancouver gurdwara. At one point, Mewa even declared,

I know I have shot Mr Hopkinson and I will have to die but it is for the others that the case will be properly represented, and to help all the others, and show this treatment to the public, and bring it in front of them (R v Singh, 1914: 17).

Mewa’s statement has immediate temporal horizons insofar as it was directed at those gathered for the public trial as well as the broader public(s) to whom the trial’s proceedings might circulate within the region and the British Empire. In the immediate wake of the trial, local Canadian newspapers made little, if any reference to Mewa’s statement, framing the trial in terms of his guilt and criminality; yet, his statement circulated more gradually through diasporic media, sometimes as excerpts and other times in its entirety (Johnston, 2014). At different points during this statement, Mewa directly addressed these publics to persuade them of the immorality of Hopkinson’s conduct. After describing how Hopkinson’s tactics lead to the gurdwara shooting, Mewa explained that,

you, as Christians, would you think there was any more good left in your church if you saw people shot down and killed in it, and you would not put up with it, because it would be bringing yourselves to a nation that is dead, to tolerate such conduct and it is better for a Sikh to die than to bring such disgrace and ill-treatment in the temple (R v Singh, 1914: 17).

Mewa undertakes his testimony as a kind of oath that binds him to the utterance of truth through legal codes that govern his conduct as an evidentiary witness as well as through moral codes that govern his conduct as a Sikh. The layered demands of this witnessing reflect how the oath is a particular genre of performative utterances, which Dean (2018) likens to a public liturgical rite. According to Dean (2018: 90), ‘oaths seek to bind ethically, the individual to conscience; linguistically, words to things; ‘veridically”, speech to truthfulness; and politically, individuals to each other in common purpose’. As an act of public liturgy, Mewa’s oath is framed to ethically and politically enjoin its public in new ways of regarding the racial position of Indian populations in BC. Later in his statement, Mewa even remarked that he killed Hopkinson,

to show the Vancouver Public the truth of this matter, and of our sufferings, and Mr Reid and Bela Singh and Baboo Singh [local Sikh informants], there is no use the Vancouver public listening to Mr Reid and Baboo Singh any longer. If they listen to them, there can be no justice done to us, and in the case of justice I wish this exposed and the Sikhs helped (R v Singh, 1914: 25-26).

By undertaking his act of public liturgy in this legal forum, Mewa committed his oath to legal and historical records that afforded it different historical and discursive trajectories. This statement forms the principal material for contemporary practices that memorialize his execution. The passage of Mewa’s statement that I included at the outset of this section, which explains the ethical basis of his sacrifice, has appeared prominently on a float about his martyrdom during Vancouver’s Vaisakhi parades. The recurrence of his statement in these collective memory practices suggests that the penal fields of power occasioned by Mewa’s trial have dynamic temporal parameters that can be extended and subverted across historical contexts, which I explain in the next section of this article.

Martyrdom, remembrance and racial penologies

In 2015 local Vaisakhi celebrations in Vancouver served as prominent sites in the centenary commemorations of Mewa’s execution. These celebrations, which include sizable parades and an array of stalls offering free foods, are held to mark Punjab’s winter harvest season as well as the anniversary of the Khalsa’s formation as a distinct spiritual and military order of Sikhs. Amidst one of the busiest stretches of Surrey’s parade, the Ghadar Party Centenary Celebration Committee mounted a public installation that centered on a petition to have Mewa pardoned for Hopkinson’s killing. Posted on a billboard between two portraits of Mewa, the petition read,

We, the undersigned, call upon the government of Canada to overturn the conviction of Shaheed Mewa Singh for the murder of William Hopkinson. He shot Hopkinson to uphold and defend the honour and dignity of the community. He also committed this act to uphold the Canadian values of a just and equitable society. We demand that he should be exonerated and declared a martyr and Canadian hero (Fieldnotes, 2015).

Local Vaisakhi celebrations represent very specific staging grounds for these acts of collective remembrance, particularly given that notions of sacrifice and martyrdom frame how the events unfold. Within Sikh philosophy, sacrifice and martyrdom have long histories that are connected to experiences of religious and political persecution under the Mughal and British Empires as well as the Indian nation-state (Oberoi, 1994). These histories have weighted the Khalsa initiation ceremony with specifically political notions of sacrifice and martyrdom (Axel, 2001). At recent Vaisakhi celebrations in Surrey, a municipality in Metro Vancouver, parade floats and fixed installations have featured images of martyrs from the separatist movements that have sought to create a sovereign Sikh nation-state in Punjab known as Khalistan. These include images of Khalistani leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed in the Indian military’s siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar where Khalistanis were stockpiling weapons; and Talwinder Singh Parmar, who is typically credited with planning the bombings of two Air India flights. At the Surrey celebrations these images form part of a broader genre of Khalistani media that engage the Indian nation-state as a site of political violence, generating controversy within and beyond local Sikh communities.

Mewa’s commemoration has been less evocative in its imagery than the Khalistani media and it makes no reference to the Indian state. Yet, like this Khalistani imagery, his memorialization foregrounds notions of martyrdom that position his sacrifice as a mechanism of collective remembrance and as an axis of political engagement. According to Barash (2016: 91), collective remembrance ‘engages acts of presentification through which the past is drawn into the horizon of the present. The acts of presentification involve, at different levels, what I term the temporal intentionality through which a synthesis between group past and present is brought about’. As acts of presentification, public appeals to remember Mewa as both a martyr and Canadian hero translate the historical conditions of his execution and sacrifice into the social and political idioms of its prospective public(s). Although this campaign is ostensibly pitched to a broad Canadian audience, Mewa’s martyrdom has primarily circulated within local Sikh and South Asian publics, reflecting how public practices of commemoration can be the basis for different forms of political commonality (Kelleher, 2017).

Whereas the sacrifices of Khalistani martyrs are understood against visions of national sovereignty, Mewa Singh’s martyrdom is not plotted toward such determinate political ends. In the excerpts from his trial that appear around the parade, Mewa implies that he sacrificed himself for Sikhs well as for Canada as an emergent nation; one of these excerpts, which has circulated on a float around the Vancouver parade route, quotes Mewa when he says that Hopkinson was ‘oppressing poor people very much. I, being a staunch Sikh, could no longer bear to see the wrong done both to my countryman and the Dominion of Canada. This is what lead me to take Hopkinson’s life and sacrifice my own’ (Author Fieldnotes, 2015). As I explain later, it is significant that Mewa and those who remember him suggest that his sacrifice was in the service of Canada rather than at its expense. Yet, insofar as these practices of collective memory appeal to the state’s authority for a pardon on the basis of this martyrdom, they complicate the racial state’s capacity to draw and affect penological distinctions between criminal and political conduct.

Against the horizon of the present, Mewa’s martyrdom has been weighted with a plurality of meanings. ‘To be martyred’, Eagleton (2018: 91) explains, ‘is to allow one’s death to be taken into public ownership, undergoing a form of semiosis in which one’s body is converted into a sign.’ The practices that commemorate Mewa as a martyr have been undertaken within a public context that projects criminality and danger onto South Asian men by virtue of their racialized association with the violence of local gangs and Khalistani groups (Buffam, 2018). Within this context of racialization, the petition to pardon Mewa enjoins its audience to consider and challenge the racial authority that law has been afforded in deciding the categorical distinctions between criminal, political, and religious conduct.

Yet, these practices of remembrance also position the Canadian nation as an important axis for particular kinds of political action and commonality. Just as Mewa said that his sacrifice was for ‘the Dominion of Canada’, the petition’s call to remember Mewa as a Canadian hero necessitates a reading of the nation that differs from the kinds of political sentiments that saturate local Vaisakhi celebrations. Over the last twenty years, these celebrations have become important sites to stage liberal visions of the Canadian state’s diversity, positioning it as an actually and already existing beacon of tolerance and multiculturalism (Buffam, 2019a). These liberal articulations of the nation depend upon the complex, often discordant, temporalities that Bhabha (2004: 208–9) suggests are characteristic of the nation’s narrative tactics and practices of discursive address, which posit a ‘pre-given or constituted origin in the past’ even as nationness becomes ‘that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process’. Around the Vaisakhi parades, these temporalities are reflected in the way politicians cite the Canadian government’s apology for the Komagata Maru incident, an apology that was formalized by the House of Commons in 2016. When addressing the crowds around these celebrations, various politicians have cited the apology and the incident as evidence of Canada’s unique history of diversity. In these framings, Canada’s nationness sanctions a singular historical timeline between its people’s past and present, as if the expulsion itself begat the apology. Such practices of commemoration reflect forms of memory that augment and extend penal fields of authority as they naturalize state power (Brown and Rafter, 2013).

Mewa and those who commemorate his death have mobilized notions of Canadian nationhood that differ from these liberal articulations. Insofar as Mewa suggested that his sacrifice was for Canada, he imagined its nationhood as irreducible to Britain’s imperium and the tactics of racial governance that constituted the Canadian nation-state. Such an articulation inverts how nationality was generated by the state ‘not on a terrain of affective bonds of national community but on a terrain overdetermined by race and the relationship between states’ (Mongia, 2018: 129). In this regard, Mewa’s sacrifice represented a challenge to the state’s growing monopoly over its capacity to assign Canadian nationality; Indian populations had been legally denied enfranchisement in 1907 (Mawani, 2009). The injunction to recognize Mewa as a national hero rewrites the history of his legal exclusion from Canadian nationhood, affording him a place within its horizons of social and political commonality. Engaging the nation as an entity that is yet to come, these collective memory practices serve as potent mechanisms of minority discourses, which ‘acknowledge the status of national culture – and the people – as a contentious, performative space of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fulness of life’ (Bhabha, 2004: 224). Such disjunctive articulations of nationhood not only disturb the racial authority of penal fields of power but also open the present to notions of political commonality that are not overdetermined by state borders, penal imaginaries, and the machinations of British empire.

Conclusion

According to Eagleton (2018: 8), the act of sacrifice is inescapably political because it ‘concerns the passage of the lowly, unremarkable thing from weakness to power. It marks a movement from victimhood to humanity, destitution to riches, the world as we know it to some transfigured domain’. By explaining how Mewa Singh’s execution has been remembered as an act of sacrifice, I do not want to suggest that his death would be assured this kind of political significance; rather, these collective memory practices are themselves historically contingent, engaging and critiquing how the state exercised its racial and penal authority against Mewa according to the political vocabularies and priorities of the present. Given how these practices suggest that the efficacy and legitimacy of punishment can be revised and renewed across historical contexts, this article opens new analytical terrain to theorize punishment and state sovereignty through the dynamic temporal parameters of penal authority.

Mewa’s conduct and execution were conditioned by the intersecting imperatives of state racism and British Empire, which worked to secure the Canadian nation-state against the movements of Indian migrants and insulate British rule from anticolonial organizations. This article documents the complex fields of penal authority that were galvanized by Hopkinson’s murder. Yet, in extrapolating the significance of Mewa’s execution, care must be taken to reckon with the specificity of this case; as with existing microhistorical studies of crime and penality (Earner-Byrne, 2015; Seal, 2009), it is precisely this specificity that affords new insights into the means by which nation-states have been shaped by complex linkages between migration control and criminal law. Bosworth et al. (2020: 35) suggest that critical studies of penology undertake a ‘wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society’. Mewa’s execution and its resonance through collective memory practices provide valuable vantage points to consider how historical configurations of race and empire have occasioned the penological dimensions of geopolitical borders; such insights underscore that fields of penal authority have been a crucial temporal and scalar nexus between liberal democratic nation-states and the institutional apparatuses of the British Empire (Brown, 2002).