In Vancouver’s Coal Harbour, the city government on Saturday will inaugurate the refurbished memorial to the 376 passengers of the Komagata Maru, the Japanese steamship with South Asian passengers turned away from Canada in 1914.

The memorial had been unveiled in 2012.

The information panel now carries rewritten text that presents the ship primarily as the Guru Nanak Jahaz, with the name Komagata Maru visually and textually subordinated.

This may appear to be an act of historical redress. But it narrows a broader history of racial exclusion and introduces a present-day political claim into the documentary record without fully reckoning with the consequences.

The Komagata Maru voyage turned into a landmark case that shone a spotlight on the structural racial discrimination of the British Empire.

In 1914, a Sikh businessman in Hong Kong named Gurdit Singh chartered the Japanese steamship SS Komagata Maru to challenge Canada’s exclusionary immigration laws. In his promotional material, aimed at potential Sikh emigrants, he dubbed this Japanese ship the Guru Nanak Jahaz –literally, the Guru Nanak ship. He added a religious layer by ceremonially bringing on board the Sikh holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Though Singh drew on his faith to fight injustice, he saw in the voyage an opportunity to challenge the colour bar and fight for the rights of all Indians.

Gurdit Singh had commercial control over the voyage but the contract he signed did not transfer ownership of the vessel to him or alter its legal registration. He could name and frame the voyage as the Guru Nanak Jahaz, but the ship remained the Japanese-owned and registered SS Komagata Maru.

This distinction is vital. With its renaming initiative, the City of Vancouver is enabling a sleight of hand that aims to change the name of the ship to the name of the voyage.

When the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver harbour on May 23, 2014, its 376 passengers were overwhelmingly Punjabi Sikhs. But it included 24 Punjabi Muslims and 12 Hindus. Only 22........

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