British Subjects on the Komagata Maru: Canada, India, and Nation within Empire

This paper examines the imperial dimensions of the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, wherein over 300 Indian migrants were denied entry to Canada. The passengers fought the anti-immigration law which excluded them all the way through to the British Columbia Court of Appeals, which, while acknowledging Indian migrants legally as “British subjects,” simultaneously affirmed Canada’s right to pass immigration laws against so-called “Asiatics.” The imperial government in Britain did nothing to intervene on the migrants’ behalf, and tacitly sanctioned a Canadian right to discriminate against Indians. With no government to support them abroad, Indians found themselves in a worse position than other trans-Pacific migrants to western Canada, who had governments and ambassadors advocating on their behalf. Using archival sources from Ottawa and British Columbia, and the writings of both Canadian officials and the migrants on the Komagata Maru, this paper shows the incident as a moment which pushed both Indians and Canadians toward demands for greater autonomy within the imperial system. It exposed a tension between the broad rhetoric used by imperial officials who championed British liberty and imperial belonging for all, and the reality of an empire which increasingly sanctioned barriers against the movement of colonized subjects into white settler colonies. Building on recent scholarship which emphasizes connections throughout the “British World” in the late nineteenth century, this paper expands that understanding to also examine moments of purposeful disconnection between settler colonies and colonies of exploitation. In spite of shared legal and political systems, Canada successfully created a barrier against Indian immigrants, which affirmed the Dominion’s right to self-government. At the same time, the British legal system’s failure to protect the rights of Indians in Canada during this incident helped expose the deepest flaws of an idealized imperial system, and bolstered Indian calls for reform or rebellion.