Renisa Mawani: Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12192 |
| Author | Jennifer Hendry |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
Book Reviews
ACROSS OCEANS OF LAW: THE KOMAGATA MARU AND
JURISDICTION IN THE TIME OF EMPIRE by RENISA MAWANI
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 352 pp., £21.99 (pbk))
Across Oceans of Law's striking front cover shows what appears to be a
jaunty little steamer on the open sea. For anyone unfamiliar with the sad tale
of the Komagata Maru, as I was, this pleasingly soft-hued image depicting the
ship's departure from Vancouver Harbour could be misinterpreted as showing
the hopeful beginning of a voyage, rather than the enforced final leg of a 1914
journey that launched from Hong Kong and ended, in violence, in Calcutta.
A controversial piece of Canadian history, the story of the Komagata
Maru, as detailed in Across Oceans of Law, serves to expose the racially
unequal nature of the British Empire, its Dominions, territories, and colonies.
Denied entry on arrival into Vancouver, the steamship languished in the
harbour for two months, its 376 predominantly Punjabi Sikh passengers
detained aboard, while a stand-off played out in the courts. The issue at hand
was a clash between the Canadian Dominion's assertion of its continuous
journey regulations ± nakedly discriminatory legislation intended to reduce
Indian immigration into Canada ± and the exercise by Indian nationals of
their rights, as British subjects, to mobility within the Commonwealth.
Recounted here with insight and sensitivity, Renisa Mawani's almost literary
account follows the chronological journey of the Clyde-built and Indian-
owned Komagata Maru across the juridical space of the ocean arena.
I interviewed Mawani in June 2019 about Across Oceans of Law, her second
monograph, and the approach of following one ship through its different
histories. While the Komagata Maru's 1914 voyage is the book's central focus,
this is also `a critical porthole through which to explore larger questions on the
so-called free seas and the circulations of law that its putative freedoms
demanded' (p. 10). Intrigued by this choice to narrate the journey through legal
artefacts ± the ship, of course, but also the sea, the manifest, the indigenous, and
the fugitive (p. 31) ± I asked the author which came first, the reimagining of
land/sea via `oceans as method' (p. 8) or the reliance upon the Komagata Maru
as an artefact and thus a lens. Mawani is categorical in her answer:
The book started with the ship. I decided that I would follow this ship through
time and space, so I spent a lot of time looking through Lloyd's Weekly
Shipping Registry and plotting the ports that the ship landed in. From the time
that it was first built as the SS Stubbenhuk, when it was renamed the Sicilia,
and then when it became the Komagata Maru . . . it was all really born out of
following this one ship through these three lives. It was only much later that I
began to focus on the sea as a juridical space and oceans as a method.
662
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
To continue reading
Request your trial