Making and Unmaking of Strangers – The Komagata Maru Episode and the Alienation of Sikhs as Undesirable Persons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Komagata Maru episode, which became a test case for White Canada and Asian Exclusion polices, epitomizes the process of ‘the making and unmaking of strangers’ under British imperialism (Bauman 1997 Bauman, Zygmunt. 1997. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: Polity. [Google Scholar]). While the passengers on board the ship chartered by Gurdit Singh, a descendant of one of the Sikhs who had arrived in the British Malaya as part of Captain Speedy’s force in 1872, viewed themselves as British subjects who were free to move within the borders of the British Empire that included the Dominion of Canada, the Immigration Act of 1910 posited the immigrant, as Audrey Macklin convincingly argues, as the other of the Canadian subject (2011). The Komagata Maru episode strongly underlines grave inconsistencies in the definition of the stranger in different parts of the British Empire. In movements triggered by imperial policies and agendas such as those to Shanghai, the British Malaya or East Africa, the Sikh was regarded as a favourable stranger. In movements initiated by himself, the Sikh was resignified as a hostile stranger and his movements were closely regulated. This paper will closely examine newspaper reports, letters, telegrams and witness statements of the Japanese crew and British officials in the Komagata Maru Inquiry Committee Report to focus on the resignification of the Sikhs from favourable to hostile strangers under the British Empire through their being labelled as aliens, undesirable persons and ‘dangerous seditionists’ prejudicial to the safety and tranquility of the British state.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".