Canadian Sikhs: Through a Century (1897-1997)

This book is an account of the Sikhs who created a respectable place for them in Canada through sheer hard labour, inexhaustible vitality, a deep sense of responsibility, an indomitable spirit and unbounded inherent capacity to bear hardships. A century-old history of the Canadian Sikhs is marked by many stages as: from penury to affluence and from deprivation of all human rights to full-fledged citizenship with representation in city councils, provincial assemblies and federal parliament. This book opens with the description of the situation in which the Sikhs were born, raised and disciplined before they journeyed to Canada and elsewhere in the world. Two major events in the history of the Canadian Sikhs, that kept them shaking to their spine, were the refusal of the passengers of the Komagata Maru to land in Canada in 1914 and the denial of franchise in British Columbia for forty years (1907-1947). Their active participation in the Ghadar movement has also been duly projected in this study. In this work the author has explained the Sikh identity and the steps taken by the Canadian Sikhs to preserve it in its distinct form. Canadian government’s policy of multiculturalism is noble in letter and spirit but some of the whites take the policy as an affront to their pretended cultural superiority and cultural imperialism, the author says. Racism is still an unspent force in Canada where it is manifest in all its forms: individual, institutional and structural racism. It is openly at war with human values. Sadly, the Canadian immigration department does not treat all its immigrants equally. The author finds that at present there is hardly a vocation or profession that the Canadian Sikhs have not adopted. They included successful and rich businessmen, industrialists, educationists, doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, politicians, realtors, transporters and big farmers and are on the high-income-earners lists. The author has attempted to tell the Canadian Sikhs as to who they have been in the past and who they are at present and what they are likely to become in the days to come. The multifarious and commendable roles of the Khalsa Diwan Society, Vancouver, for almost a century, have also received the author’s attention in this work. This is perhaps the first coherent and detailed study of the virile and enterprising Canadian Sikh community.