In May 1914, 400 Sikhs left for British Columbia by chartered ship, resolved to claim their right to equal treatment with white citizens of the British Empire and force entry into Canada. They were anchored off Vancouver for over two months, enduring extreme physical privation and harrassment by immigration officials, but defying federal deportation orders even when the Canadian government attempted to enforce them with a gunboat. The leaders of the group, who were thought to be closely associated with the nationalist, terrorist movement in India, were finally persuaded to return to India. They were by then full of revolutionary fervour against the Raj. On their disembarkation at Calcutta, troops opened fire while attempting to control the passengers, and a number of them were killed. The event, which had already raised a great deal of interest and concern among the governments of India and Canada, was now invested for Indian nationalists with a tragic significance which can be compared to that of Jallianwallah Bagh, while Gurdit Singh, the leader, was acclaimed as a heroic revolutionary figure by eminent Congressmen.

Hugh Johnston is a professor emeritus in history at Simon Fraser University, where he has taught for thirty-seven years. For eleven of those years, he was department chair. Johnston was educated at the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and King's College at the University of London. From 1992 to 2001, he served on the board of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, which promotes collaboration between India and Canada through scholarly activities and cultural exchange, and in 1995-96, he was resident director of the India officer of the institute. Johnston's previous books include British Emigration Policy 1815-1830; Shovelling Out Paupers, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada's Colour Bar and The Four Quarters of the Night: The Life Story of an Emigrant Sikh.

Hugh Johnston's profile page

A beautiful job, piecing together materials from Canadian, British and Indian archives and from personal interviews, and organizing them into a lucid, very readable account of this shameful event in our past.

BC Studies, 1981

Johnston’s unravelling of the whole Komagata epic is dramatic, absorbing and must be a revelation to Vancouverites, who have never realized what murky seas of international intrigue that rickety ship was floating on in the city’s harbor for two months … Johnston writes history correctly, accurately and exhaustively. Also, entertainingly … A considerable feat of scholarship.

The Vancouver Sun

Johnston has constructed a magnificent montage of the early Sikh immigration from India to Canada in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In an evocative prose Johnston moves from personalities to events and then with great ease he links the two together to provide a powerful insight into the imperial policies. He lays bare the the hypocricy, the ruthlessness and the shallow liberalism of the British Raj.

Indian Book Chronicle, 1981