The Legacy of the Komagata Maru

The Komagata Maru was a ship that sailed in to Vancouver from India in 1914, with the hopes that the passengers could make a life in Canada. Unfortunately, Canada was extremely racist at the time, and didn’t want anyone who wasn’t white, so they held the passengers on the ship for a few months, then made up some laws, sending the ship and it’s passengers home.

In August of 2008, the prime minister at the time, Stephen Harper, attempted an apology for the incident, but ended up causing more harm by apologizing in a park, instead of parliament, making the apology too casual and unofficial.

However, in May of 2016 prime minister Justin Trudeau did make an official apology in parliament, 102 years after the incident.

Seeing that the apology was so long after the incident that all of the direct victims would already be gone, we might think, why bother? But when it comes to this story, an apology is really important because the Komagata Maru was more than just a ship, it really represented a big part of Canadas racism, especially to South Asians. It would be significantly important to hear an official apology and start to feel recognition in Canadas history, and to start the move into a fully told history, because even now, there are so many untold stories.

Canadian history has tons of untold stories in it, so much so that one of the only places you can see Canadians of colour in the early days is in a book of mugshots. Racism in Canada has been a problem since Canada was founded and before that too. The Komagata Maru was a huge demonstration of that deep seated racism and those events have left a racial legacy that should be talked about. 

The racial legacy of the Komagata Maru is interesting because we know that in the early 1900s racism was booming, but nowadays sometimes we think it’s gone. Unfortunately it’s not. Although racism is less, it’s actually just a lot more subtle, and that’s kind of the legacy that the Komagata Maru left us with. It left us with apologizing for the massive fault from ages ago, but still having us creating smaller faults that are not so different.  A bit of anti-Asian racism today

In conclusion, the Komagata Maru demonstrated one main thing, which was racism, and that’s what we need to remember today in order to memorialize the victims and the story.