browncanada:

Brown Canada PSA

With Brown Canada and Shaunga Tagore.

Brown Canada is a community-led  history project to encourage South Asian communities to create and document their histories in Canada creatively, through writing, video, interviews, art, theatre or other means.  Our collective entry point for this project is through the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, when a ship of South Asian people was denied entry into Canada due to restrictive immigration policy known as the continuous journey regulation. Through this project, we will be creating an interactive website, offering educational & creative workshops, producing a short video as well as seeking to tour a short theatre piece to raise awareness of the incident and spark community dialogue within Ontario.

——

The Komagata Maru Incident:

In 1914, Gurdit Singh, a Sikh entrepreneur based in Singapore, chartered a Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru, to carry Indian immigrants to Canada. On May 23, 1914, the ship arrived in Vancouver Harbour with 376 passengers aboard  (Kazimi) The passengers were challenging the Continuous Journey Regulation which was an effective way of keeping people from India out of Canada until 1948.   

Only a half-mile from Canadian shores, the Komagata Maru was surrounded by immigration boats and the passengers were held as prisoners on the ship.  Following a two month stalemate, the ship was escorted out of the harbour by the Canadian military on July 23 and forced to sail back to India, where the passengers encountered hostile British authorities who suspected them of being members of the revolutionary Ghadar Party. Over forty people went missing or were killed.

The Komagata Maru incident is an example of the enforcing of an exclusionary “White” Canada immigration policy and is also an important part of the anti-colonial narrative against British rule in the Indian subcontinent.  

Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/browncanadaproject

Check us out on tumblr: http://browncanada.tumblr.com