Komagata Maru and the Ghadar Rising: The Ship Canada Turned Away and the Punjabis Who Went Home to Fight

Vancouver, Saturday 23 May 1914. A rusty Japanese steamer drops anchor in Burrard Inlet, a few hundred metres from the city’s docks. From the shore you can see the turbans: hundreds of men packed along the rails, looking at the wooded hills of the country they have paid to reach.

The ship is the Komagata Maru. Its passengers have renamed it Guru Nanak Jahaz. On board are 376 people from Punjab: by the usual count 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus. Many are ex-soldiers of the British Indian Army. All of them are British subjects, travelling inside the British Empire.

Their leader stands on deck in a light suit and a white beard: Gurdit Singh, a contractor from a village near Amritsar who made his money in Malaya. He chartered this ship to test a law he believed was a lie.

Canada will keep the ship in the harbour for two months. The story ends under rifle fire near Calcutta, and on a gallows in Lahore, where a 19-year-old Ghadar rebel from a village near Ludhiana is hanged.

The first Punjabis reached British Columbia in the early 1900s, many of them ex-soldiers, and found work in sawmills and on railway gangs. By 1908 officials estimated up to 5,000 Indian men in the province.

They also found open racism. In September 1907 a white mob rioted through Vancouver’s Chinese and Japanese quarters. Indian workers, whatever their faith, were lumped together as ‘Hindoos’.

In January 1908 the Khalsa Diwan Society opened a gurdwara on West 2nd Avenue in Vancouver, believed to be the first in North America: a place of prayer, a community hall and, soon, a political headquarters.

That same month Ottawa shut the door, without ever saying so. An order in council of 8 January 1908 barred any immigrant who did not arrive by a ‘continuous journey’ from his country of birth, on a ticket bought there. No shipping line ran directly from India to Canada, and Canada leaned on the companies not to start one. From June 1908, migrants of ‘Asiatic origin’ also needed $200 in cash, a fortune for a Punjabi labourer.

The rule never named India. London had warned that an open ban on fellow subjects of the King could inflame nationalists in India, so Canada kept them out indirectly.

The man who shaped that thinking, the young civil servant William Lyon Mackenzie King, later Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, argued in his 1908 reports, historians record, that Canada should remain a ‘white man’s country’ and that Indians were unsuited to its climate. He also said he was protecting them from shipping agents and employers who lured them with false promises.

Lawyers kept beating the rules on technicalities, in 1911 and again in November 1913, when 35 of 39 Indians on the Panama Maru were let in. Each time Ottawa rewrote them, most recently on 7 January 1914.

Astoria, Oregon, 1913. A timber town at the mouth of the Columbia River, smelling of salmon canneries and fresh-cut wood. Punjabis worked at the Hammond lumber mill there. In the Finnish Socialist Hall, borrowed from their immigrant neighbours, they met to found a party.

The date is disputed: spring 1913 in Astoria’s own accounts, 15 July 1913 in many histories, Portland in 1912 in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism. The Oregon historian Johanna Ogden’s research put Astoria back on the map.

It started as the Hindustan Association of the Pacific Coast. Its president was Sohan Singh Bhakna, born in 1870, a farmer from near Amritsar who had come to America in 1909 to work in the mills. Its general secretary was Lala Har Dayal, an Oxford-educated scholar from Delhi who had turned his back on a career under the Raj. The treasurer was Pandit Kanshi Ram.

In November 1913 the party opened a press at 436 Hill Street, San Francisco, and called it the Yugantar Ashram. On 1 November it put out the first issue of its weekly, in Urdu; a Gurmukhi edition followed on 9 December. The paper gave the movement its name. Har Dayal’s first issue asked a question and answered it.

What is our name? Ghadr.Ghadar, first issue, 1 November 1913

Ghadar means mutiny, the word the British used for 1857. The paper called openly for armed revolt. The British banned it in India as soon as it arrived in December 1913; copies were smuggled in anyway.

The party was overwhelmingly Punjabi and Sikh: by one estimate about nine in ten members, and about half of them old soldiers. But its leaders were Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, and its inner political circle reportedly did not allow religion to be discussed at all. Its enemy was the Raj, not any faith.

The youngest of its stars was Kartar Singh Sarabha, born on 24 May 1896 in Sarabha village near Ludhiana. He had sailed to San Francisco in July 1912 to study at Berkeley (the university has no record that he enrolled). He helped run the paper, oversaw its Gurmukhi edition and wrote poems and articles for it.

The British were watching, through Hopkinson, Canada’s spy on the Punjabi community. In March 1914 US officials arrested Har Dayal; facing deportation to India, he jumped bail and fled to Switzerland, then Berlin.

Gurdit Singh was born in 1861 in Sarhali, Amritsar district, to small farmers. Turned down by the Indian cavalry, he followed his father to Malaya in 1885 and became a successful contractor.

In Hong Kong in early 1914 he met Punjabis stranded on their way to Canada. His answer was audacious: if no ship sailed from India to Canada, he would hire one. He founded the Guru Nanak Steamship Company and chartered the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamer, in March 1914.

The British in Hong Kong arrested him on 25 March and then let him go, finding no case. On 4 April the ship sailed with 165 passengers. It picked up more at Shanghai, then 86 at Moji in Japan and 14 at Yokohama. Among the visitors at Yokohama were two Ghadar leaders, Maulvi Barkatullah and Bhagwan Singh, who brought the party’s literature on board.

When the ship left Yokohama on 3 May, it carried 376 passengers.

Counting the passengers. Most accounts say 376 passengers: 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism counts 359 Sikhs and says the ship left Hong Kong with 194 people, not 165. Everyone agrees almost all were Punjabis and British subjects.

The Conservative premier of British Columbia, Richard McBride, said flatly that the passengers would not land. The local Conservative MP, H.H. Stevens, led the campaign to keep them out, warning Ottawa that landing them was more likely to cause riots than keeping them on board.

On the water, the immigration agent Malcolm Reid and his inspector, Hopkinson, took charge. The ship was not allowed to dock and was kept at anchor under guard. A handful of passengers who already lived in Canada were let ashore. Everyone else waited.

The weeks dragged on. Food and water ran short; the passengers said Canada was starving them into leaving.

On shore, Vancouver’s Punjabis fought back with lawyers and money. A shore committee, led by Husain Rahim with Bhag Singh, Balwant Singh and others, raised about $20,000 and took over the ship’s charter so the Japanese owners could not sail it away.

The committee wanted one test case. They got it. On 29 and 30 June the lawyer J. Edward Bird argued the case of a passenger named Munshi Singh before the British Columbia Court of Appeal. On 6 July the judges ruled unanimously for the government, upholding Canada’s power to decide who could land.

In the early hours of 19 July, the tug Sea Lion came alongside with about 150 police and special immigration officers, armed, to force the ship out to sea.

The passengers were ready. From the high deck they hurled down lumps of coal, firebricks and scrap iron. The tug was driven off. To the passengers and their supporters, men without guns had beaten back the police.

Prime Minister Robert Borden now sent in the navy. The old cruiser HMCS Rainbow was brought in, under orders to enforce the law firmly, as he put it, but ‘with no unnecessary violence’. Crowds watched from the waterfront and from small boats.

A cabinet minister, Martin Burrell, negotiated a deal: Canada would supply food and fuel for the voyage home. On 23 July 1914, two months to the day after it arrived, the Komagata Maru sailed out of Burrard Inlet with the Rainbow behind it. Only 20 to 24 people, depending on the source, had been allowed to stay.

The men who kept the ship out did not think of themselves as villains, and the record should hear them.

Both can be true: Canada broke no law of its own in 1914, and the law itself was built to keep people out because of where they were born.

The ship was gone, but Vancouver’s Punjabis were now at war among themselves. Hopkinson ran informers inside the community.

In late August 1914 one of the informers, Harnam Singh, was found dead; another, Arjan Singh, died soon after. Then, on 5 September, at a service in the West 2nd Avenue gurdwara, another informer, Bela Singh, pulled out a revolver and opened fire on the congregation. Two men died, among them Bhag Singh Bhikhiwind, a leader of the shore committee. Bela Singh claimed self-defence.

On 21 October 1914, Hopkinson was waiting in the Vancouver courthouse to give evidence at Bela Singh’s trial. Mewa Singh, a 33-year-old mill worker from Lopoke near Amritsar, walked up and shot him dead.

Mewa Singh pleaded guilty, saying he had acted because of the killings in the gurdwara. He was hanged in New Westminster on 11 January 1915, the first Sikh executed in Canada. Vancouver’s Sikhs remember him as a shaheed; to the officials of the day he was a murderer.

By the time the ship reached the mouth of the Hooghly, near Calcutta, on 26 September 1914, the Government of India had a new law. The Ingress into India Ordinance of 5 September let it hold or restrict anyone coming home from abroad.

On 29 September the ship was brought to Budge Budge, a river port about 23 km below Calcutta. Police searched it for weapons. A special train stood waiting to take the passengers straight to Punjab.

Seventeen Muslim passengers boarded it, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says. The Sikhs refused. They wanted to go to Calcutta instead. Carrying the Guru Granth Sahib before them, they set off on foot along the road to the city.

Troops and police turned them back and herded them to the railway yard. By evening, the passengers were sitting on the ground near the line, surrounded. A British police officer went in to fetch Gurdit Singh. Then the shooting began.

Who fired first is still disputed. The official inquiry accepted the police account: a shot was fired at the officer, the passengers attacked, and the troops fired only when they had to. Passengers and later Sikh accounts say troops opened fire on unarmed, seated men.

did not fire until it was absolutely necessary to do soBudge Budge Committee of Inquiry, 1914, on the troops

How many died depends on whom you ask. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says 18 Sikhs were killed and 25 wounded. Most histories and the memorial count 20 passengers killed. Government records, cited in later studies, list 26 deaths in all: the passengers, two Europeans, two Punjab policemen and two local people.

Gurdit Singh escaped; most of the others were rounded up. The committee concluded that the passengers had firearms, though it could not say where they got them.

Britain went to war on 4 August 1914, and in San Francisco that was the signal. Britain’s trouble was India’s chance, the Ghadar leaders said: go home and raise the army against the Raj.

They went in thousands. The first group of about 60 sailed from San Francisco on 29 August 1914. Sohan Singh Bhakna was arrested on his return on 13 October and would not walk free for 16 years. Between October 1914 and February 1915, by official count, 2,312 Ghadar men entered India; by 1916 more than 8,000 had come back.

They were not quiet about it: men sang revolutionary songs on the ships, and spies took notes. Most were stopped at the ports. Of those the police picked up, about 2,500 were confined to their villages, about 400 were jailed as dangerous and about 5,000 let go with a warning.

Kartar Singh Sarabha got through. He landed at Calcutta via Colombo in October 1914, met the Bengali revolutionary Rash Behari Bose at Benares and went to work in Punjab, visiting army cantonments and trying to win over Indian soldiers.

The returned men also turned to violence, and some of it was aimed at Indians. They murdered policemen and informers, planned to derail trains and blow up bridges, made bombs and carried out armed robberies, or ‘political dacoities’, to raise money, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records. On 27 November 1914, near Pheru Shahr in Ferozepur district, a band on its way, by one account, to raid the Moga treasury shot dead a police official and a zaildar, a village headman; Ghadarites died in the fight, and others were hanged.

Most villagers did not rise; many had done well from the Raj’s canals, and some turned the returned men in.

The plan was for a single day. On 12 February 1915 the leaders, now gathered round Rash Behari Bose in Lahore, fixed 21 February for a rising in the army: regiments at Lahore, Ferozepur, Meerut and beyond would mutiny and seize the arsenals.

They had a spy in the room. Kirpal Singh, a police informer, had joined them; when the leaders, fearing a leak, moved the date to 19 February, he passed that on too. Police raided the Lahore headquarters and arrested 13 of the leaders. Suspect regiments were disarmed or moved. On the day, in Punjab, almost nothing happened.

Far away, on 15 February, in Singapore, about half the 850 men of the 5th Light Infantry, an Indian Muslim regiment, mutinied and held out for nearly a week. Some 47 British soldiers and local civilians were killed. Sources differ on the punishment: 37 death sentences in one count, 47 men publicly shot in another.

Sarabha fled Lahore. On 2 March he was at Chak No. 5 in Sargodha, still trying to rouse soldiers. A risaldar, Ganda Singh, had him arrested there with two comrades, Harnam Singh Tundilat and Jagat Singh. On 23 March the young Maharashtrian revolutionary Vishnu Ganesh Pingle was caught in the 12th Cavalry lines at Meerut with ten bombs. Rash Behari Bose slipped away to Japan.

The trials began in Lahore on 26 April 1915, before a special tribunal of three judges set up under the new Defence of India Act. There was no jury and no appeal.

In the first case, judgment came in September. Twenty-four accused were sentenced to death and 27 to transportation for life. Sohan Singh Bhakna was among those sentenced to hang.

Kartar Singh Sarabha took the whole blame on himself. The judges, struck by his age, are said to have urged him to soften his statement. He refused. Asked about an appeal, his biographers record, he gave an answer that Punjab still knows by heart.

If I had more lives than one, it would have been a great honourKartar Singh Sarabha, as recorded by his biographers, 1915

Lawyers, among them Motilal Nehru, The Tribune reports, argued that 17 of the men had been seized at the ports before they could act in India. The Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, commuted those 17 sentences. Bhakna was saved; he spent the next 15 years in the Andamans and other jails.

Seven were not saved. On 16 November 1915, in Lahore Central Jail, the British hanged Kartar Singh Sarabha, 19, with Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, Jagat Singh, Harnam Singh, Bakshish Singh and two men named Surain Singh. (Some sources give the date as 17 November.)

In all, the Lahore conspiracy cases tried 291 people: 42 were sentenced to death, 114 transported for life, 93 jailed and 42 acquitted. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who ran the crackdown, called Ghadar this:

by far the most serious attempt to subvert British rule in IndiaSir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab

Four years later O’Dwyer was still governing Punjab when General Dyer opened fire in Jallianwala Bagh. One of the Ghadar Party’s later recruits, Udham Singh, shot him dead in London in 1940.

And in a house in Lyallpur district, a boy born in 1907 grew up with Sarabha’s photograph in his pocket. His name was Bhagat Singh. Sixteen years after the first, a second Lahore Conspiracy Case would end with his hanging, in the same jail.

Gurdit Singh stayed in hiding for seven years. On 15 November 1921, the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, he gave himself up at Nankana Sahib; Gandhi, by some accounts, had advised him to. He was soon jailed again for a speech at the Golden Temple, and in 1926 he stood in as president of the Shiromani Akali Dal. He died in Amritsar on 24 July 1954.

Har Dayal broke with the movement in March 1919 and asked the British for an amnesty. He died in Philadelphia in 1939.

In America, Ghadarites who had taken German money for arms were tried in San Francisco in 1917–18; 29 Indians and Germans were convicted. On the last day, in April 1918, one defendant, Ram Singh, shot dead another, the party leader Ram Chandra, whom he suspected of betraying the cause or its funds; Ram Singh was himself shot dead in the courtroom.

The party lived on through the Kirti movement and the Babbar Akalis, and after 1947 gave its San Francisco property to India.

Canada’s ‘continuous journey’ rule outlived almost everyone in this story. It was finally revoked on 26 November 1947.

The apologies came slowly, and some came twice. On 15 May 2008 the House of Commons passed a motion on the incident moved by the Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla. On 23 May 2008 the British Columbia legislature unanimously apologised.

On 3 August 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised in a park in Surrey, at a Ghadar festival, before a crowd of about 8,000. Many were angry: they said they had been promised an apology in the House of Commons.

On 18 May 2016, Justin Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons, with passengers’ descendants watching from the gallery, and apologised on behalf of the government of Canada for the laws that had kept them out.

The Komagata Maru incident is a stain on Canada’s past.Justin Trudeau, House of Commons, 18 May 2016

Vancouver’s city council apologised in 2021. In 2019 Ottawa took H.H. Stevens’s name off a federal building, and in 2024 part of Vancouver’s waterfront was co-named Komagata Maru Place. India struck centenary coins in 2014.

Britain, whose troops and police fired at Budge Budge and whose tribunal hanged Sarabha, has made no formal apology for either that we could find.

For Punjabis in Canada, the story never became ancient history. Canada now counts more Sikhs than any country outside India, and Punjabi Sikhs sit in its Parliament. The harbour that turned the ship away is in the same province where Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead in 2023, a killing that set India and Canada at odds.

Strip away a century of speeches and the story is still plain. Canada wrote a rule to keep out brown subjects of its own Empire without saying so, and enforced it on a hungry ship for two months. British India met the same men with rifles on a riverbank. Neither government has much to be proud of.

The Ghadarites were brave, and some were very young. They also killed policemen, informers and headmen, many of them fellow Punjabis. The violence ran every way: an informer firing into a congregation, an inspector shot in a courthouse, troops firing on seated men, a 19-year-old hanged.

What they won was not a free India in 1915. It was an idea that outlived them: that ordinary Punjabi workers abroad, Sikh, Hindu and Muslim together, could stand up to an empire. Bhagat Singh carried it in his pocket. Canada, a century late, admitted they had been wronged. That is worth remembering, all of it.