Community Solidarity & Resolve : The Gurdwara
Despite the intense discrimination felt by South Asians in Canada, the community still forged on as they began to solidify their permanent presence through the creation of the Khalsa Diwan Society in 1907. This Society brought South Asians together to build the first Sikh Gurdwara in North America on West 2nd Avenue in Vancouver. It provided a place of communal consciousness, camaraderie, and even practical help by providing food and housing to new arrivals. The Gurdwara became a site for sharing of concerns within the community, of rhetorical speeches and poetry, and for strategizing on how to overcome the racism they faced as a community. It was a communal space shared by Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims alike.
By 1920, gurdwaras existed in Vancouver, Abbotsford, Victoria, Paldi, New Westminster, Nanaimo, Golden, and Fraser Mills.
This Gurdwara shares a unique and powerful story reflecting Sikh migration experience in British Columbia. The first Sikhs had arrived in the Fraser Valley in 1905 from Punjab and settled in the valley by working on the farms and in the lumber industry. In 1908 local Sikhs started to build a Sikh Gurdwara in a true community effort, under the auspices of the Khalsa Diwan Society. It would take four years of hard work and great commitment – both financial and physical to finish building it. The project was spearheaded by Sunder Singh Thandi, who along with Arjan Singh purchased a one acre property on a prominent hill adjacent to the mill at Mill Lake where about fifty or so Sikh men worked. These men and others who worked on the farms in the area used to carry local timber donated by the Tretheway family’s Abbotsford Lumber Company on their backs up the hill from Mill Lake to the Gurdwara site. The temple was completed in 1911 and officially opened in the New Year.
Community Solidarity & Resolve: Early Leadership
During the critical period of South Asian migration history, in the early 1900’s while the community continued to face legal and social forms of discrimination in British Columbia, all within the colonial frame of a “White Man’s Province,” there were many figures in the community who attempted to better the plight of their fellow South Asians. These brief snapshots capture the stories of those figures.
Gurdit Singh was the central figure in the Komagata Maru incident. Gurdit Singh chartered Komagata Maru in 1914 to help Indian citizens immigrate to Canada. Komagata Maru was denied entry and was sent back to Kolkata, India where the British government suspected the passengers of inciting rebellions and went to arrest the leaders of the ship. Shots were fired and nineteen of the passengers were killed. Gurdit Singh escaped and lived in hiding until 1922 when Gandhi urged him to surrender. He was imprisoned for five years, after which he lived a long and politically active life.
Kapoor Singh Siddoo embodied the enterprising spirit of all immigrants by partnering with Mayo Singh on Vancouver Island in building a lumber empire. He was also prominent in community efforts, fighting for full citizenship rights and for changes in immigration regulations in favour of immigrants from India.
Teja Singh was a highly educated and accomplished individual, after finishing his MA in English, LLB, and working at Northern Indian Salt Revenue Services under the British. He attended University of Cambridge, Columbia University, and Harvard University. While at Columbia he delivered a lecture on India that caught the attention of Tarknath Das and Balwant Singh. Thus, began his long association with Sikhs in British Columbia and California.
Community Solidarity & Resolve: Organizations (KDS)
The Khalsa Diwan Society was founded on July 22, 1906 and registered on March 13, 1909. Incorporated under the name “The Khalsa Diwan Society,” the first Canadian Gurdwara (meaning the doorway to the guru) was built in 1908 at 1866 West 2nd Avenue. This gurdwara was the very first in all of North America and the Society itself being the oldest South Asian Society to date in the Americas. The Vancouver Gurdwara was built through the generous spirit of the South Asians living in British Columbia at the time who each donated a portion of their wages to its construction.
During times of stress, success, challenges or community discourse the Khalsa Diwan Society Gurdwara was a critical site. This was the site where the community gathered to advocate for the passengers on board the Komagata Maru and this was the site where community empowerment occurred through the poetry of Ghadar. This was the site that housed and gave sustenance to the first migrants because no one else would provide them housing or access to basic necessities.
In the 1940s the Khalsa Diwan Society served in a leadership role as Indo-Canadians fought for voting rights, and it did so in a secular capacity. The Khalsa Diwan Society had a secular role as a community centre that also served Hindus and Muslims. By the 1960s, the main gurdwara was in Vancouver with branch gurdwaras in New Westminster, Abbotsford, Victoria, and Port Alberni. By 1973, Khalsa Diwan Society’s gurdwaras were built in Abbotsford, Victoria, Mesachie Lake, New Westminster, Paldi, Port Alberni, and Vancouver.
In 1975 the Khalsa Diwan Society of Abbotsford separated and the title of the Abbotsford gurdwara was transferred to the new entity. The Abbotsford Sikhs wanted to have local control over their gurdwara, the Gur Sikh Temple.
Community Solidarity & Resolve: Survival
So often we hear of the macro stories of these early South Asian migrants, but what about the personal stories, testimonies and emotional impacts faced by those men? What was it like to live for years without your wife, your partner, your children and your loved ones because of the discriminatory policies that prevented them from coming?
There were many sites of significance for South Asians in British Columbia. Many of these were sites of labour including the mill towns of Hillcrest, Youbou, Squamish, Golden, Prince George, Lake Cowichan, New Westminster, Abbotsford, Vancouver etc. Overcoming the overt racism and discrimination of the time, prominent South Asians in the community would end up purchasing their own mills and managing their own companies. However the story of Paldi is so unique and significant to the South Asian experience in BC and Canada, that it deserves special mention.
In late 1906 Mayo Singh Manhas arrived in Canada and started to work as a lumber stacker at a sawmill near Abbotsford. By 1917 Mayo Singh had moved to Vancouver Island where he acquired the defunct Island Lumber Co., which was located in the Cowichan Valley. He moved machinery and equipment to the site, which later became known as the village of Paldi. A camp was established, and logging operations began in 1918 when Mayo Singh invited three Japanese men whom he had worked with in Chilliwack to come to Paldi to work for him.
As the lumber mill’s business expanded, so did the community of Paldi, becoming a mixed community of people including South Asians, Japanese, Chinese and people of European descent.
By the time South Asian women were allowed to join their families in Canada in the 1920’s, Paldi was equipped with a successful mill, its own company store, bunkhouses for workers and housing for their families. A school had been established in 1921 and in that same year the second Sikh gurdwara on Vancouver Island was constructed in Paldi (the first one had been built in Victoria in 1912). A Japanese temple was eventually constructed as well. South Asian and Japanese children attended language classes at their respective temples after school. The community grew steadily and even through the great depression despite the fact that the mill temporarily closed down from 1931-1933. At its peak, Paldi had a population capable of supporting its own high school.
Paldi challenged the racism of its time and stands as a testament to the agile and persevering nature of South Asians and their solidarity with other marginalized groups.
A poem convey this deep sense of loss between a husband and wife:
by Kuldip Gill
Can I live this love, matching you to poetry
In Urdu, Gurmukhi and HIndi,
And have as reply only your few unlettered
Lines telling me that our children are well,
Relating my mother’s love and brother’s wife’s whine?
I wait. No letters. Not even paper-love rewards.
Chained to pulling green lumber all night, dragged
Through black sleepless nights, thoughts of
Your long green eyes, your face, blaze my mind.
My children’s voices cry/laugh through my dreams.
Enfeebled by endless greenchain shifts, I fear
A war, the years.
No passports yet? Fathom my heart’s great dukh. I watch.
Droves of birds fly away together, another winter.
Come before the war, come through Hong Kong and Yokohama.
Please let me know as soon as you can.
And I will send money to Moga
To bring you, the children, across
The kala pani to Victoria.
Come soon. Before the war.
I’ll tell you what you will need to bring:
Sweaters for the children, books,
Seeds, are hard to get. Bring yourself. Yourself,
And surma for your beautiful green eyes.
I am your beloved Inderpal Singh,
Who would spread flower petals for you,
And fly to you on feathers, if I could.
