Imperialism and sikh migration, Roy, Anjali Gera (indian Institute Of Technology, Kharagpur, India)

Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan, has witnessed multiple nomadic, mendicant, trading and pastoral mobilities for centuries. Imperial assisted mobilities in the 19^th century produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs, who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in South East Asia, Africa, Australia, America and Canada. The practices of the British, British Indian and the Canada government to obstruct free flows of Sikhs offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty.

This book focuses on the Komagata Maru episode of 1914: This Japanese ship was chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Sikh businessman from Malaya. It carried 376 passengers from Punjab and was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure. It was forced to return to Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance. The author isolates juridical procedures, tactics and apparatus of security through which the British Empire exercised power on imperial subjects to investigate the significance of this incident to colonial and postcolonial migration. Juxtaposing public archives including newspapers, official documents and reports with private archives and interviews of descendants, the book analyses the legalities and machineries of surveillance that regulate the movements of people in the old and new Empire.

Addressing contemporary discourse on neo-imperialism and resistance, nation, migration, diaspora, multiculturalism and citizenship, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of diaspora studies, post colonialism, minority studies, migration and mobility studies, multiculturalism and Sikh /Punjab and South Asian studies.