Komagata Maru descendants push to have street renamed
A group of 15 families descended from passengers on-board the Komagata Maru that was turned away from Canada in 1914 and had to return its passengers to India hope that soon a portion of Main Street will be named after the ship.
The group has lobbied to have the stretch of Main between Marine Drive and 57th Avenue (better yet, all the way to 49th Avenue) be co-named Komagata Maru Road or Street or Way ...
Doing so would educate today's citizens and remind people of Canada's and Vancouver's diversity, said Raj Singh Toor, vice-president of the Descendants of Komagata Maru Society. “We are all richer when we remember how special it is to have so many different ethnic communities living together. I hope that it will help to connect Canadians, British Columbians and Vancouver residents with their past to build a more peaceful and tolerant tomorrow.
“We can't undo the past, but we can move forward.”
The Komagata Maru sailed from Hong Kong on April 4, 1914, with 376 passengers, including Toor's grandfather. Most were seeking to escape the poverty of their villages and saw Canada as a tremendous opportunity for a better life.
Of that total number, according to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 340 were Sikhs, 24 were Muslims and 12 were Hindus — all British subjects carrying British Indian passports — and their ship sailed into Vancouver Harbour on May 22.
The Canadian government, however, would let none of them ashore. And to make things as unpleasant as possible for the ship's passengers, immigration officials strictly rationed food and water, sometimes withholding both for 48 hours.
After two months, the Komagata Maru was escorted out of Canadian waters by the HMCS Rainbow.
“My grandfather was seven or eight years old,” Toor said. “He told me his story: Little children were starving, there was no medicine, people were hungry and sick.”
When the ship arrived in India on Sept. 26, 1914, British troops were waiting, suspecting it was a boatload of radicals and revolutionaries. An altercation led to 22 people being shot to death (16 of them passengers) and more than 200 of the survivors were imprisoned, including Toor's granddad.
“My grandfather survived, but he served a five-year jail term,” Toor said. “And when he was released, he was not allowed to leave his village.”
That travel ban lasted until Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947. It's been a four-year odyssey for the Descendants of Komagata Maru Society, which began to lobby the city in March 2018 to have something — a street, a park, a building, a public square — named after the ship to honour the memory of the passengers.
Now, these years later, the search has been narrowed to a strip of Main Street along the South Asian business corridor and where the Vaisakhi Parade is held, except it turns out there is no mechanism in place for the city to co-name a street. City hall staff have told Toor a secondary-signage policy motion will come before council in June.