Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru

left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered

by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the

ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months

later were deported to Calcutta.

In Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press, 2018) Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru.

Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that

repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual

stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime

worlds.

Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the

anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's