Oldal 132 [132]
MÁRIA PALLA
resolution, they present the relationship between South Asians and the
dominant society as highly problematic even today. According to Mariam
Pirbhai, the Komagata Maru incident functions significantly as "a diasporic
metanarrative [articulating] the struggles, hopes, and aspirations common to
multigenerational communities of South Asian Canadians.”*?
The Komagata Maru was a Japanese steamship that transported 376
passengers of South Asian origin aiming to immigrate to Canada. As they
had the status of British subjects coming from the Raj, as a matter of course
they should have been granted entry to Canada, still a Dominion at the time.
However, the Canadian government had introduced the Continuous Journey
Regulation, and because an uninterrupted voyage from India to Canada was
almost impossible in the early twentieth century this regulation effectively
imposed requirements these passengers were unable to comply with. So the
ship was detained off the shores of Vancouver for two months, during which
time “the passengers aboard the ship were threatened at gunpoint and forced
to leave Canadian shores.”** In the end, all the passengers except 21 were
denied their rights and freedom and had no choice but to return to India.
The Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908 made it possible to keep Canada
white by allowing “the government to restrict both Indian and Japanese
immigration without specifying exclusion on the basis of race, nationality or
ethnic origins.”** Historian Peter Ward recalls the figure of H.H. Stevens, a
Conservative Member of Parliament and a leading anti-Oriental spokesman,
who “voiced the central concern of west coast nativists, the belief that
unassimilable Asian immigrants threatened [British Columbia’s] cultural
homogeneity.”?®
Another traumatic and shocking example of racial injustice followed the
terrorist attack on Air India flight 182. Not surprisingly, the inverstigation
was viewed by South Asian Canadians as a “symbol of betrayal by the state,”?”
since the Canadian government stalled it for a long time claiming it was
not a Canadian issue. The Canadian authorities involved simply ignored the
fact that the flight had departed from Toronto carrying mainly Canadian
passengers, and that the attack was carried out by Sikh extremists living in
British Columbia. Responsibility for the investigation was handed over to
Pirbhai, Introduction, 7.
Alia Somani, What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten? South Asian Diasporic Histories
and the Shifting National Imaginary, Studies in Canadian Literature - Etudes en Litterature
Canadienne, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2015), 79.
Continuous Journey Regulation, 1908, Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21,
https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/continuous-journey-regulation-1908
(accessed 2 November 2018).
36 Peter Ward qtd. in Somani, What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten?, 88.
37 Pirbhai, Introduction, 17.
+ 130 +