The Free Sea: A Juridical Space

Modern steamship traffic and cheap passages have brought the Asiatic into contact with the new continents that are being peopled. — JOHN COWEN, "Race Prejudice," 1910

The visions of men are widened by travel and contact with the citizens of a free country will infuse a spirit of independence and foster yearning for freedom in the minds of the emasculated subjects of alien rule. — GURDIT SINGH, Voyage of the Komagatamaru, 1928

Gurdit Singh's turn to the sea was preceded by a much longer history of Indian maritime travel. From the seventeenth century onward, thousands of men left the subcontinent as lascars working on vessels that expanded the commercial, political, and legal reach of the East India Company and subsequently the British Crown. Indian seafarers, G. Balachandran writes, were among the first global workers. They "manned decks on the world's ships, and crewed engine rooms, saloons, cabins, and galleys." Though many were drawn to oceans as sites of freedom and adventure, they "inhabited a world deeply marked by race which determined what they could do, how much they could be paid, and how they could be treated." To be sure, British vessels were ordered and regulated through rigid hierarchies of race, caste, and religion. With increased maritime traffic, imperial control expanded from the ship outward, creating planetary divisions between land and sea and inaugurating new spatial, temporal, and civilizational orders. This juridification of the sea did not deter Indian travelers, however. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, advances in steam technology offered unprecedented opportunities to Indians and other "Asiatics." It was no longer only lascars and seafarers who crossed the seas, but also merchants, soldiers, and laborers. Ordinary men (and women), including the Komagata Maru passengers, sought opportunities to see and experience the world, though not often in conditions of their own choosing. Others pursued maritime routes to escape from British imperial rule. By the early twentieth century, colonial authorities and their supporters feared that "cheap passages" would avail the seas and open the "new continents" to "Asiatic" peoples. And they did.

The Komagata Maru was not the only ship to carry Indian migrants and travelers to Canada's west coast. Many real and imagined journeys preceded it. In 1913, Canadian authorities received news of an Indian merchant in Seattle who had plans to hire a steamer to transport his countrymen from India to Vancouver. But the report was unfounded. One year later, these fears were materialized with the Komagata Maru's arrival along British Columbia's coast. This was the only vessel to be chartered and commanded by a British/Indian subject and the first to be turned away from Canadian waters. The ship's ingress, which coalesced with wider speculations on the dangers of Indian seafaring, spawned two interrelated concerns. One centered on the presumed maritime ambitions of Indian men who many feared were newly asserting their rights to mobility as British subjects. The other revitalized European debates on the freedom of the sea. Increased outbound migration from the subcontinent to the white Dominions was met with greater restrictions, prohibitions, and increased surveillance. These contests over transoceanic travel produced a renewed interest in the racial and legal status of the seas: were they open or closed and for whom?

Until the early twentieth century, Indian migration to Canada was relatively insignificant. From 1905 onward, rates of outbound passage increased slowly and steadily. Like their counterparts in Australia and Natal, Canadian officials responded with calls for tighter immigration laws. Efforts to control Dominion borders were tightly bound up with maritime governance. In 1908, fearing a sharp rise in ocean travel from India to Canada's Pacific coast, the Dominion government passed the continuous journey regulation. Written without explicit reference to race or nationality, the law required all prospective immigrants to make a direct journey from their place of birth or naturalization to their port of entry. In its objectives and in practice, the law was openly and unabashedly aimed at excluding Indian migrants. To ensure its successful enforcement, Canadian officials halted the Calcutta-Vancouver route almost entirely. They also instructed steamship companies not to grant passage to Indian travelers seeking to leave the subcontinent or from ports of call in East and Southeast Asia. In so doing, Dominion authorities transformed a seemingly race-neutral law into one with markedly racial effects. Between 1908 and 1914, following several successful legal challenges, the Dominion revised and reenacted the continuous journey provision, adding further restrictions on the seabound passage of Indians and other "Asiatics." Together, these prohibitions extended Canadian jurisdiction outward, from land and littoral into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Though Gurdit Singh's efforts to charter the Komagata Maru and lay claims to the sea were unprecedented, it is important to note that his maritime ambitions were established upon and shaped by the struggles of many others. One of the first and most significant challenges to the Dominion's continuous journey provision came from Husain Rahim (see fig. 1.1). Rahim arrived in Vancouver in 1909 and immediately began initiating legal measures aimed at defying the Dominion government. In 1914, he quickly rose to prominence as the leader of the "shore committee." Composed of fifteen men — mostly, but not only, Sikhs from Punjab — the group accumulated a considerable sum of money to assist Gurdit Singh and the other passengers to disembark. Their campaign began with an appeal for financing, issued by Husain Rahim and Bhag Singh, and which I discuss in the introduction. Although these men eventually assumed the Komagata Maru's charter, their efforts to secure the vessel's disembarkation was ineffective and even disastrous.

On account of his own discontinuous itineraries and his ongoing legal troubles, Rahim was deeply sympathetic to those aboard the ship. To begin, his journey from India to Canada did not follow a continuous or direct route. Rather, Rahim left the subcontinent in 1895, ten years after Gurdit Singh, and lived in Kobe for over a decade. Though the two men resided in different ports — in Malaya/Singapore and Kobe, respectively — and though they came from distinct regions in India, their travels followed similar patterns, animated by commercial aspirations, itinerant movements, and legal restrictions. Because of Rahim's "great capacity for business," particularly his experience in the cotton trade, he was recruited as a working partner in a newly established Kobe firm owned by Jamshedi...