Who were the passengers on the Komagata Maru? This question has challenged historians for decades because there has never been one definitive list. Instead, what we have are multiple passenger lists with varying degrees of "authenticity" that feature inconsistencies in everything from the spelling of passengers’ names to places of origin. Compiling a definitive list is even more difficult because some of the original ship’s documents and manifests have been lost.
The lists may be incomplete, but there’s still a lot we can learn. Each passenger list was created for a specific purpose and audience, and therefore include and exclude information based upon what each compiler valued as important. The silences and gaps in knowledge speak to the limits of how much we can know, but also speak to the processes of history collection and deficiencies in the colonial archive.
Our researcher has compiled a list that brings together information from a variety of passenger lists and presents them in an attempted “master list”. You can click on a particular passenger to view detailed information and (where possible) follow a link to further biographical information. Within this attempt is an acknowledgement that there are facts that are still unknown and that the list can change over time as new sources are found.
