The steamship Komagata Maru, chartered by Gurdit Singh with three hundred seventy-six mostly Sikh passengers, is held for two months in Vancouver harbor under Canada's exclusion rules and forced back to India, where police fire on the returnees at Budge Budge; the incident becomes the diaspora's emblem of imperial exclusion and a spur to the Ghadar cause.
Tagged: Persecution Sikh Sikh Diaspora
The Event
- Date
- 1914 (exact)
- Also called
- Komagata Maru
- Era
- Reform and Colonial; Standard periodization of Sikh history
- Location
- Vancouver; today British Columbia, Canada
- Traditions
- Sikhism
- Streams
- Sikh Diaspora
- Key figures
- Gurdit Singh
Primary Sources
- The Canadian inquiry records
Secondary Sources
- Tatla, The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood (Washington, 1999)
- Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, vol. 1 (Oxford, 2nd ed. 2004)
Provenance: HIST-0528; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-27.
Related on This Site
- Jallianwala Bagh massacre History Event
- Martyrdom of Guru Arjan History Event
- Martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur History Event
- Partition in the Punjab History Event
- The Ghadar Party founded in San Francisco History Event
- The Kuka outbreak and the Malerkotla executions History Event
- The Oak Creek gurdwara shooting History Event
- The first gurdwara in London History Event