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THE SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORA...
characters, a complex of influences highlighting how little significance
borders retain in our globalized world. The earliest event thus represented
is the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, which occurred in a liminal space as
passengers from the Indian subcontinent on board the ship Komagata Maru
were denied entry into Canada off the coast of Vancouver. The second such
event is the Partition of the Indian subcontinent into the independent states
of India and Pakistan on an ethno-religious basis after the British colonizers
left in 1947. It was followed by chaos erupting in the region, mainly in the
Punjab, due to mass migration: around ten million people changed places
between the two countries fearing for their lives, not without reason, amidst
hightened tensions between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. In the riots, raids
and the horror of the massacres, “[t]he loss of life was immense, with estimates
ranging from several hundred thousand up to a million.”*°
The third event is the violent attack carried out by the Indian army on
the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines, in Amritsar on the order of
Indira Gandhi to evict armed extremists fighting for Sikh separatism in the
summer of 1984. “The temple is not only the highest seat of religious and
temporal authority for the Sikhs (analogous to the significance of St Peter’s
for Catholics) it also was the symbolic centre of a world without boundaries.”*!
Obviously the attack enraged the Sikhs and also led to the Prime Minister’s
assassination by her Sikh bodyguards later in the same year. The assassination,
in turn, provoked anti-Sikh riots in India, during which Sikhs were hunted
down all over the country. “Some 2,000 Sikhs were killed in communal riots
and Sikhs responded by terrorism and violence, adding several thousand more
to the casualties.”? The final, related event also involving violence, terror and
exclusion is the bombing of Air India flight 182 by Sikh terrorists from Canada
in1985, killing all of its 329 passengers, 280 of whom were Canadian citizens,
mostly of South Asian descent. This last tragedy occurred in mid-air off the
coast of Ireland and was transnationally linked to both India and Canada. Yet,
fordecades, neither country took upon itself the responsibility of investigating
the incident, each claiming that the task belonged to the other.
It is the first and the last of these four events that have ramifications in
the hostland of the South Asian diaspora in contemporary Canada to this
day and reveal problems in multicultural tolerance and acceptance when
these ideals are not only proclaimed but tested in practice. The Komagata
Maru incident of 1914 and the bombing of Air India flight 182 in 1985 are
regarded as instances of exclusion often deliberately omitted from the official
narrative of Canadian history. Due to their lasting influence and incomplete
30 Barbara D. Metcalf — Thomas R. Metcalf, The Concise History of Modern India, 2" ed.,
Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2006, 221.
31 Cohen, Global Diasporas, 117.
32 Tbid., 117.
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