Historical context

British Columbia has long been a unique site of racial governance for Sikh and South Asian populations. Although Indian communities did not form in other Canadian provinces until after the Second World War, Sikh and Punjabi communities first emerged in coastal regions of British Columbia during the early twentieth century as part of broader migrations that were occurring elsewhere in the British Empire (Mawani Reference Mawani2009; Nayar Reference Nayar2012). In the 1850s, the British East India Company had annexed Punjab via military force. This instigated decades of emigration from the region as Punjabi men, the majority of who were Sikh, travelled between India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong via different circuits of war, commerce, and law enforcement (Axel Reference Axel2001; Ballantyne Reference Ballantyne2006; Mawani Reference Mawani2018).

In British Columbia, the employment of early Punjabi migrants was restricted to specific resource extractive industries, most often in lumber and agriculture. The economic conditions of racial state governance embedded the labor of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations in these resource economies, which transformed the region into a critical node of British and Canadian settler colonialism (Mawani Reference Mawani2009; Nayar Reference Nayar2012). The racialization of their labor advanced the dispossession of Indigenous lands and extended practices of racial categorization into the economic, civic, and political realms of the Canadian nation-state (Mawani Reference Mawani2014; Day Reference Day2018). Although each group was generally confined to different sectors of the resource economies, the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian populations were sometimes grouped and governed as “Asians,” “Asiatics,” and “Orientals,” categories that reflected the commonalities in their social and legal circumstances (Roy Reference Roy1989).

By 1908, the Canadian government passed a series of laws to circumvent the patterns of Indian immigration that started in 1904. One of these laws, an order-in-council known colloquially as “the continuous journey clause,” required all immigrants to arrive by way of a continuous journey from their port of departure (Mawani Reference Mawani2018). Although the law makes no explicit reference to markers of ethnicity and nationality, it was designed to counter Indian migration because the prescribed travel route was not tenable given shipping technologies at the time. As I explained in the introduction, the other racial immigration law, which was introduced in 1908, required all people categorized as “Asiatics” to be in possession of two hundred dollars to enter the country (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). The racial prohibitions created by these orders-in-council assumed a legal form similar to the multiple versions of the Chinese Head Tax that followed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885; both sets of laws buried the extent of the prohibition they instituted behind a universalized economic fee, cohering with liberal forms of racial governance that are obscured and justified by contractual notions of consent (Mongia Reference Mongia2018).Footnote ¹ In the sections that follow, I attend to how immigration laws varied in the extent to which Indian populations were identified and governed as a distinct group or aggregated as a part of “Asian,” “Asiatic,” or “Oriental” populations.

In the United States, a patchwork of state and federal laws was also introduced during this time to restrict immigration from Asia and delimit the civic rights of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian populations, forming a kind of “hemispheric Orientalism” with Canada (Lee Reference Lee2007). Against mounting racial concerns about Chinese immigration to its Pacific coast, the US Congress introduced the first immigration restrictions based on ethnicity: the Page Act of 1875 effectively banned the entry of Chinese women and the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 introduced an extended immigration ban on Chinese male laborers (Lee Reference Lee2015).Footnote ² While this legislation instituted more explicit immigration restrictions than Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act, the United States eventually restricted Japanese immigration through bilateral agreements with its government that were similar to those established in Canada.

The Canadian and American governments struck these agreements to assuage virulent anti-Japanese sentiments while trying to maintain diplomatic relations with the Empire of Japan (Chin and Ratner Reference Chin and Ratner2022). In the first decades of the twentieth century, the US Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization had excluded Indian immigrants on a more piecemeal basis, rejecting applications on the basis of health, physicality, and religious customs (Harpalani Reference Harpalani2013). The Immigration Act of 1917 formalized these prohibitions by instituting an Asiatic Barred Zone that excluded the immigration of people who were classified as “natives” of a delimited geographic region spanning China, India, the Dutch East Indies, and Afghanistan (Lee Reference Lee2015).Footnote ³ Given the parallels between immigration restrictions in Canada and the United States, anti-Asian racisms must be understood as a political force that spanned individual nation-states even as their specific forms and permutations should be situated within the local, regional, and transnational contexts of their articulation (Lee Reference Lee2007).

National differences in these anti-Asian racisms are also reflected in the categories that formed the basis of each country’s citizenship laws and population censuses. In 1907, the BC government amended its Provincial Elections Act to disenfranchise people of Indian descent.Footnote ⁴ Thereafter, “Indians” in Canada occupied a convoluted legal status that made them subjects of the British Empire; they were precluded from legal citizenship but in possession of domiciliary rights to remain in the country (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). In naming the groups prohibited from citizenship, Canadian laws differed in their manner of racial prohibition from the American Naturalization Law of 1790 that reserved citizenship for “free, white persons.” In the early twentieth century, this stipulation informed a complex body of case law that adjudicated whether Indian applicants could be classified as white, which was framed by prevailing racial sciences that supported Indian claims to “Caucasian” and “Aryan origins.” In United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the most consequential of these decisions, the US Supreme Court ruled against the naturalization of Bhagat Singh Thind by declaring that he was not white according to standards of common knowledge, thereby establishing average perceptions of whiteness as the primary criterion for adjudicating racial identity (Harpalani Reference Harpalani2013).Footnote ⁵

These prohibitions on citizenship remained in effect in both countries until after the Second World War when their governments introduced legislation that removed all citizenship restrictions based on racial origin – the Canadian Citizenship Act, which was passed in 1946, and the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed in 1952.Footnote ⁶ During this postwar era, both countries also created immigration quotas to facilitate the limited growth of South Asian populations. The United States permitted a small annual immigration of Indian nationals through the Luce-Cellar Act of 1946Footnote ⁷ before significantly expanding the quota through the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which was designed to attract scientific expertise that could advance the country’s Cold War interests (Harpalani Reference Harpalani2013).Footnote ⁸ Later in this article, I explain how the quotas introduced through the Canada-India Agreement balanced the anti-Asian sentiments of state officials with diplomatic considerations related to India’s status as a newly sovereign nation-state.Footnote ⁹

For the period covered by this article, Canada used similar census categories as the United States to identify and enumerate Indian populations. In 1911, the first time that Indians were counted, the census used the “Hindu” category to classify the “racial origins” of Indian populations and counted “Sikhs,” “Hindus,” and “Mohammedans” amongst Eastern religions that were recorded under “religious denomination” (Statistics Canada 1911). Over the next three censuses, the “racial origin” of Indians continued to be counted as “Hindus,” most often as a subcategory of “Asiatic races”; in 1951, they were counted as “Others” under the aggregate category of “Asiatic races” but identified as “East Indian” in enumerations of British Columbia’s population (Statistics Canada 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951). The primary difference in the American census was the use of the categories “Non-White Asiatic/Hindu” in 1910, “Non-White/Asiatic Indian” in 1950, and “Non-White/Hindu” in 1960, which reflected the taxonomic primacy given to whiteness in the United States (Harpalani Reference Harpalani2013). Conversely, white was not a category used in the Canadian censuses that were completed during the periods covered by this research; instead, when documenting the “racial origins” of its population, the Canadian census used categories that differentiated between “British races” and “other European races.” The use of these categories in Canadian census regulations and citizenship laws should not be taken as a sign that whiteness played a diminished role in its histories of racism and immigration regulation; rather, these regulations reflect how whiteness has been differentially coded, demographically and legally, through ascriptions of British and European ancestry, illustrating another way in which racial governance has worked through multiple scales of difference.

The political conditions of South Asian communities in Canada were not singularly determined by state institutions. In British Columbia, South Asian groups undertook varied political practices to organize against British rule in India and the racial immigration and citizenship laws passed by the Canadian government (Mawani Reference Mawani2018). Gurdwaras served as important sites of religious assembly for Sikhs, and political mobilization for South Asian communities more broadly, including for anti-colonial movements like the Ghadar Party. These communities were also marked by religious, political, and caste differences. In Canada and the United States, notions of caste informed the racial taxonomies used by state officials and mediated relations of stratification amongst these groups (Harpalani Reference Harpalani2013; Sabherwal Reference Sabherwal2024). Sikh communities have also had protracted disagreements about religious orthodoxy and its influence on the political affairs of gurdwaras (Dusenberry Reference Dusenberry1981; Buffam Reference Buffam2021b). These various political dynamics were not generally named in the bureaucratic correspondence analyzed for this article, but recent historical literature suggests that they had a significant influence on how the racial categories of state institutions were interpreted, challenged, and institutionalized (Ballantyne Reference Ballantyne2006; Mawani Reference Mawani2018).

Although British Columbia has been a distinct political context for Indian communities, this context was shaped by processes of racial governance of varied scales and jurisdictions. First, Indian immigration to the region was primarily governed by federal infrastructures that were, in turn, guided by national priorities, which included British Columbia’s relation to other regions in Canada. Because British Columbia was understood as Asia’s port of entry to the country (Mawani Reference Mawani2009), Indian immigration to the region was typically regulated according to its possible impacts on the economic and demographic features of the country (Roy Reference Roy2007). In the 1920s, this jurisdictional arrangement enflamed the racist sentiments of white populations in British Columbia who felt that the federal government was not addressing immigration from Asia with sufficient urgency (Roy Reference Roy2003).

Second, the racial governance of Indian populations in British Columbia had different institutional and ideational linkages to the regulation of Asian migration along the Pacific Coast of the United States; beyond the similarities in legislation referenced above, these linkages were evident in bureaucratic communications about the tactics that each government used for limiting Indian and Asian immigration as well as more direct coordination that occurred between their law enforcement institutions regarding illegal immigration and anti-colonial mobilization across the Pacific Northwest (Sohi Reference Sohi2014). Finally, on an even larger scale, the regulation of Indian populations in the region was guided by the racial imperatives of the British Empire, including the control of diasporic movements that sought to change or bring an end to British rule in India (Ballantyne Reference Ballantyne2006; Mawani Reference Mawani2018; Bose Reference Bose2020; Buffam Reference Buffam2021a). Given such complexities in scale, this article does not focus on British Columbia to demonstrate that it was a site for racial governance at the expense of these other relations of state power but, rather, to reveal how this region emerged from intersecting scales of racial governance.

British Indian demands and Asian restrictions, 1910–15

In November 1911, Canada’s deputy minister of the interior wrote to the undersecretary of state for external affairs to contextualize a petition that both offices received from a group identifying themselves as “British Indian subjects living in BC.” Formally addressed to the secretary of state for India, the petition requested immediate relief from the discriminatory impacts of Canada’s immigration laws, explaining that these laws (1) required all “Asiatics” to have two hundred dollars at the time of their arrival to the country and (2) prohibited people from arriving in Canada unless they came by way of a continuous journey from a point of departure in their country of origin. In his memo to the undersecretary, the deputy minister of the interior dismissed the claims advanced by the petition, explaining that it was merely

Here, the deputy minister distinguishes between “East Indian” as a marker of nationality and “Asiatic” as a distinction of geography or heritage. Under this conception of racial difference, legal restrictions on Indian immigration could not be discriminatory because all “Asiatic” people were precluded from entering Canada, suggesting that such laws were informed by the realities of immutable geographic differences. In this section, I document how such categorical distinctions between race, geography, and nationality shaped state responses to petitions from Indian groups in British Columbia and elsewhere in the British Empire during the 1910s. My analysis tracks how Indian populations were governed through their identification as “Asiatic,” a racial and geographic category that state actors deployed against anti-colonial agitation and Indian claims to special status within the British Empire.

For nearly a decade after the passage of racial immigration laws in 1908, different groups of Indian men petitioned Canadian and British state institutions to gain relief from this legislation and the broader consequences of racial state rule in British Columbia. In formulating their grievances as petitions, these groups mobilized its conventions as a genre of political correspondence that was used to demand redress from state actors and institutions. Although petitions can be verbally communicated, the written form of petitions enters collective demands into new horizons of political obligation as the authorities addressed by this correspondence are at least nominally expected to address the concerns they articulate (Mark Reference Mark1998; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2021). As I explain below, these conventions were reflected in the terms of the petitions crafted by Indian groups as well as the bureaucratic correspondence they engendered.

When formulating the petitions, Indian groups typically used political vocabularies that stressed their status within the British Empire to articulate their identities and underscore the moral and legal bases for demanding redress against racial rule. In multiple petitions, including the one referenced above, these groups identified themselves as “British Indian subjects.” This category, which was enshrined in British law, reflects the peculiar status of Indians with domiciliary rights in Canada, a group who were subjects of the British Empire but explicitly precluded from citizenship in one of its dominions. By using this category with state authorities, Indian groups articulated their identities in a manner that rendered them legible as subjects of the British Empire and deserving of its political entitlements, a practice that is also evident in the texts of other petitions. For example, in a petition that was written in April 1910, a group of British Indian subjects demanded relief from Canadian immigration laws because they were “not allowed to enjoy the birth-right of travelling from one part of the British Empire to the other.”Footnote ¹¹

Petitioners also mobilized the terms of British subjecthood to distinguish their legal status as Indians from Chinese and Japanese immigrants in Canada. In the 1911 petition that instigated the foreign minister’s response, its authors claimed that

Here, the petitioners cite their status as British subjects to disaggregate their legal and racial standings from Chinese and Japanese populations in Canada who did not have the same “inalienable rights” of empire. Some anti-colonial movements raised questions about whether such appeals to British rule of law risked legitimizing its moral and political authority. Yet, in this correspondence, the petitioners invoked their legal status in a manner that disrupts the taxonomic force of the Asiatic category as it was institutionalized under Canadian and British law.

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, the imperatives of racial rule in India and British Columbia intersected in this complex legal regulation of Indian migration (Sohi Reference Sohi2014; Mawani Reference Mawani2018). Restrictions on Indian immigration were partly animated by the anti-Asian racial sentiments that were also directed against Japanese and Chinese populations (Roy Reference Roy2003). Yet the growing presence of Indian anti-colonial movements on the west coasts of Canada and the United States led British and Canadian authorities to regard this immigration as a threat to their authority over India. To project the legitimacy of their rule, immigration restrictions were formulated in a manner that disguised the discriminatory terms of the exclusions (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). Through categories like “Asiatic,” “Oriental,” and “place of origin,” Canadian legislators imagined and naturalized geographic difference as a basis for political personhood in Canada.

Such taxonomical priorities were reflected in the interdepartmental correspondence that followed these petitions. The common form and focus of this writing were at once an effect of the conventions of political obligation mobilized by the petitioners as well as the expectations that the bureaucratic correspondence will remain out of the public realm. The correspondence worked to establish and clarify the racial and legal terms through which bureaucratic officials should govern Indians who made claims on Canadian residence. In most of this correspondence, officials sidestepped invocations of British subjecthood and repositioned Indians within the legal and geographic parameters of Asian populations. In the same response to the 1911 petition, which is excerpted above, the deputy minister of the interior also wrote:

In this passage, the deputy minister invoked social and climatic differences as a basis for excluding Indians as a group akin to a stratum of “Asiatic” populations, inferring that their ascribed place of origin makes them unsuitable to the Canadian climate. Such an assertion traffics in different vocabularies of race: Orientalist logics homogenize the varied climates that exist within and across China, Japan, and India, while climatological ideas posit that “Asiatic” populations will exhibit incompatible cultural practices through their exposure to the Canadian environment. Moreover, the deputy minister’s assertion that Order-in-Council PC 920 did not discriminate against “East Indians” is betrayed by archival records that demonstrate how the order-in-council was specifically designed to circumvent the migration practices of diasporic Indians across the British Empire (Mawani Reference Mawani2018; Mongia Reference Mongia2018).Footnote ¹⁴

In 1915, the Government of Canada also received a number of petitions about Indian migration that were framed by the “Hindu women’s question,” which was shorthand for public debates about whether domiciliary rights should be extended to the spouses and children of Indian men already residing in Canada (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). Canadian state actors feared that such domiciliary rights would provide Indian populations too much of a foothold in the province and alter the course of its demographic composition. The groups protesting the exclusion of these dependents often claimed that such laws specifically discriminated against Indian women. When a federal politician asked for clarification about these concerns, the superintendent of immigration, W. D. Scott (1915, 1), explained that

This particular letter is characterized by several categorical tensions. First, the minister claims that immigration law does not differentiate between “Asiatics” on the basis of sex even as he articulates that the status of South Asian women was tied to their positions as wives. As I explained earlier, such a gendered articulation of legal personhood has long shaped political formations of Sikh and Indian families in Canada, the United States, and other diasporic contexts (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). Second, the minister characterizes Asiatic as a legal category with immutable boundaries, one that precludes all men and women from acquiring Canadian citizenship if they are positioned within its taxonomical parameters. Yet, in this same correspondence, the minister lists the battery of different laws that exclude Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations on the basis of their specific nationality, betraying his assertation that “Asiatic” functions as a singular aggregative category in the legal regulation of immigration.

Across these practices of bureaucratic correspondence, Canadian and British state actors expose their concerns that the status of Indians within the British Empire could unsettle the racial regulation of immigration to British Columbia. In response to Indian petitions that invoked this status, immigration authorities repeatedly asserted the primacy of their standing as “Asiatics” for deciding their legal personhood in Canada. Under these conditions of racial governance, “Asiatic” was used as an aggregative category to afford taxonomic priority to attributions of geographic and climatic difference(s). Conversely, the categorical practices of immigration officials do not configure Indianness as a subcategory of Asian or Asiatic but, rather, as a marker of nationality, which they treated as part of a taxonomical order with more mutable boundaries. Given that these taxonomical priorities continued to shape the enforcement of immigration law, this archival correspondence reflects how bureaucratic officials were afforded different measures of authority to establish the categorical parameters of legal personhood in Canada. Yet, as the petitions illustrate, state authorities did not have a monopoly over which categories were used to mediate the political conditions of South Asian populations; the taxonomical negotiations that occurred in this interdepartmental correspondence happened precisely because immigration officials worked to reassert Asiatic as the most salient category for deciding their status, limiting the moral and political force of claims to British Indian subjecthood.

Categorical questions and boilerplate exclusions, 1921–29

In the 1920s, the federal Department of Immigration and Colonization (DOIC) contributed to a sizeable body of correspondence about “the Oriental question in British Columbia.” The vast majority of this correspondence was instigated by Canadian residents and foreign state actors who requested statistics about the extent of “Oriental” or “Asian” immigration to Canada or information about immigration laws in Canada that were specific to Asian, Oriental, or Asiatic populations. Although private citizens did not always specify a reason for wanting information about immigration, many articulated that it would be used in debates about the Oriental question that were organized by voluntary associations in different areas around Canada. In this section, I examine how the taxonomic terms of this correspondence reflect contingent racial concerns about the presence of Indian and Asian populations in British Columbia as well as a particular moment in the shifting categorical terms through which Sikh and Indian populations have been aggregated and governed as “Asiatic,” “Asian,” and “Oriental.”

In this correspondence from the DOIC, state actors and public officials repeatedly referenced “the Oriental question” or “the Oriental problem.” Such references reflect the influence of a specific meta-national vocabulary through which modern racial states approached and administered populations that are defined as different on the basis of culture, ethnicity, phenotype, and religion. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discursive and political grammars of modern nationhood posed such national questions as a way to reference and refigure the legal and social conditions of minorities. These national questions typically concerned the status of minorities as they existed within a given nation-state (for example, “the Woman question”) or the prospective national sovereignty of a group within another jurisdiction (for example, “the Armenian question” that was posed in the Ottoman Empire). For example, across much of Europe, state officials, intellectuals, and civic organizations considered the Jewish question: shorthand for how states should address or reconcile the distinct religious status and political entitlements of Jewish communities within the emerging, ostensibly horizontal structures of the nation-state (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2015).

When framed as this kind of question, the presence of minority populations is rendered equivalent to a matter of dispute or a political issue that can be opened for discussion and resolution. Under these conditions, the meta-national grammar of the racial state is given a veneer of democratic populism as its modes of governance are configured according to the horizontal priorities of a national people (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). Across the varied contexts in which these national questions were posed, they offered a discursive shorthand for referencing a range of issues about a group’s difference(s) from the national majority and reinscribing those differences according to the priorities of modern statecraft. In this regard, national questions were consistently scaffolded to the logics and practices of modern statecraft in a manner that subjected minorities to the epistemic and material demands of law, demography, urban planning, and military security.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Canadian state institutions posed a series of different national questions about Indian populations in British Columbia. Between 1904 and 1919, Canadian law enforcement and immigration officials explicitly referenced “the Hindu question” when considering Indian immigration and the anti-colonial activism that was undertaken by diasporic Indian groups in British Columbia. When posed in this context, the Hindu question at once assumed that Indian populations were immutably different from white Canadians and that their cultural and political influence on the region had to be eliminated. State responses to the Hindu question included the passage of restrictive immigration regulations, the expansion of infrastructures for deportations, and the intensive surveillance of the community’s political practices (Sohi Reference Sohi2014; Buffam Reference Buffam2021a). As I explained in the previous section, there were also extensive public deliberations about the “Hindu women’s question,” a more specific debate about whether domiciliary rights should be extended to the wives and children of Indian men who already resided in British Columbia (Mongia Reference Mongia2018). In both instances, the categorical terms of these national questions referenced Indian populations according to their political status within the British Empire.

By the end of the First World War, intensifying racial sentiments about Asian immigration gave new visibility to the Oriental question in British Columbia. These racial sentiments were enflamed by labor unrest and economic instabilities, which were worsened by the closure of wartime industries and the return of soldiers to the workforce (Roy Reference Roy2003). Regional politicians, manufacturers’ associations, and labor organizations were amongst those to most vocally attribute economic problems to Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations, whose varied social conditions were flattened by the use of “Asiatic” and “Oriental” categories (Roy Reference Roy2003). The presence of these groups in British Columbia became the subject of obsessive census calculations and fantastical scenarios about their influence on the region’s future. These concerns were animated by rumors of an inflated birth rate amongst Japanese women; continued Chinese immigration in the face of the Head Tax legislation; and modest increases in agricultural holdings and merchant opportunities for Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations (Roy Reference Roy2003). By the 1920s, perceptions of “Oriental” control over the merchant and agricultural sectors even prompted the creation of a community shopper’s guide that directed consumers on how to avoid “Oriental” owned businesses, instructing its readers, “don’t be content with saying the Government ought to do something, You do it, trade with white merchants, employ only white maids, and soon we have a WHITE CANADA.”Footnote ¹⁶

The scale of public concern about this Oriental question was also evident in the correspondence that the DOIC received from private citizens. As I mentioned in the introduction to this vignette, many private citizens wrote to the DOIC to obtain information about immigration laws and the extent of “Oriental,” “Asian,” and “Asiatic” immigration to prepare for debates hosted by voluntary associations. Whereas one group in Saskatchewan prepared to debate whether “Orientals are suitable for Canada,”Footnote ¹⁷ a young people’s union in rural Ontario requested information about immigration laws to debate the resolution that “the Asiatic should be allowed to enter Canada under the same conditions as the people of Eastern and Southern Europe.”Footnote ¹⁸ The recurrence of such debates not only reflects the extent of the public concern about the Oriental question but also the political conditions that authorized white publics to pose, debate, and answer such national questions about minority populations.

Government officials within the DOIC developed a series of form responses to requests for information about the Oriental question, which generally included the specification that, “Oriental immigration naturally falls into three classes—(1) Chinese, (2) Japanese, (3) East Indians.”Footnote ¹⁹ These responses from the DOIC generally shared two sections of boilerplate text: one that explains the laws that governed the immigration of these groups and another that specifies the typical objections to their presence in Canada. This boilerplate response should be understood as an example of the bureaucratic forms that anti-Asian racism acquired through the legal regulation of immigration, a process that institutionalized contingent iterations of these aggregative categories.

In the first section of boilerplate text, the DOIC explicitly identifies the legal mechanisms that governed Chinese and Japanese immigration to Canada: (1) the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which restricted the immigration of “persons of Chinese origin or descent into bona fide merchants and university students”;Footnote ²⁰ and (2) the Lemieux-Hayashi Agreement of 1908, which obligated Japan to limit how many of its citizens could emigrate to Canada each year (Roy Reference Roy1989).Footnote ²¹ Notably absent from this boilerplate text is any mention of the orders-in-council, first passed in 1908, that effectively banned the immigration of Indian populations to Canada; instead, the narrative produced by the DOIC implies that the end to Indian immigration was a natural demographic event, writing that “[t]he movement of East Indians to this Dominion began about 1904 and practically ceased in 1908 since which date the total admissions have not been very large. Many of those who came to Canada during that period have left and the present East Indian population in Canada exceeds one thousand.”Footnote ²²

By omitting any reference to the legal orders that ultimately ended this immigration, the DOIC obscures how Indians were excluded from immigration as an identifiable group, publicly disassociating the Canadian government from the racial force of its legal practices. Such narratives differ from intragovernmental correspondence that explicitly identifies legislation as the cause of this change in immigration. In a letter to the private secretary of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, a DOIC official even wrote that “the adoption of the continuous journey regulation was brought about by protests from residents of BC against the admission of East Indians.”Footnote ²³

In the correspondence, “East Indian” exists on a scale that is commensurate with categories like “Chinese,” “Japanese,” and “Middle Eastern,” each of which refers to groups that are positioned as a kind of substratum of Asian populations. Whereas “Chinese” and “Japanese” are used as markers of nationality and racial difference, “Middle Eastern” and “Latin American” signify regional and racial differences. Yet, as part of this racial statecraft, East Indian was used to distinguish Indian populations from Indigenous peoples in Canada who had been dispossessed and were governed as “Indians.” Under the earlier workings of the British Empire, the category “East Indians” had emerged out of geopolitical distinctions between “the West Indies” and “Dutch East Indians,” distinctions that were eventually transposed onto demographic racial categories (Indra Reference Indra1979; Mawani Reference Mawani2014).

The second section of boilerplate text specifies a list of objections to Oriental immigration that are attributed to the Canadian public, an entity that is only referenced in abstract terms. As Radhika Mongia (Reference Mongia2018) explains, state actors and institutions commonly projected racial sentiments onto vague articulations of a national public to guise their constitutive racial exclusions as an artifact of (white) national sentiments and affiliations. There are slight variations across these standardized lists of objections, which assumed three major permutations—one from 1921 and 1922, another from 1923, and a final list in 1927, which appears the most frequently in the DOIC correspondence.

In every permutation of this list, the DOIC cited “the impossibility of assimilation” as one of the grounds for public opposition to Oriental immigration. At different moments during the racial governance of British Columbia, Canadian state institutions governed Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations according to Orientalist logics that stressed their immutable biological and cultural differences as Asians, suggesting its salience as an organizing logic in anti-Asian racisms. Amidst public debates about the “Hindu women’s question,” which I explained earlier, public objections to the admission of Indian women were often premised on this impossibility of assimilation, which the deputy minister of the interior demonstrated by juxtaposing it with the assimilative capacities of European populations:

The minister’s explanation obscures how the social segregation of Indian populations is actually conditioned by state practices of racial governance. His remarks are also structured by eugenic and biopolitical concerns about the reproduction of Indian and Asian populations within British Columbia. Yet this objection also reflects the modularity of concerns about the inassimilability of Asian and Indian populations such that they can be remade according to historical and political contingences; in the case of the Hindu women’s question, these modular racial logics were populated by lore about “polygamy” and “child marriage.”

The different permutations of the DOIC’s list also identify the labor standards of “Oriental populations” as a basis for public opposition to immigration from China, Japan, and India. Yet, across the varied lists that appear in the correspondence, the DOIC articulated this concern through different discursive codes. In 1921 and 1922, the DOIC framed these objections in terms of “the competition of such labor with Canadian and European labor”;Footnote ²⁵ in 1923, the DOIC cited concerns about “the impossibility of meeting the Oriental labor standards”;Footnote ²⁶ and, in 1924 and 1927, the DOIC referenced “the lower standards of life and the economic difficulties that would result if the supply of oriental labor were unlimited.”Footnote ²⁷ According to Ikyo Day (Reference Day2018), such ideas about “Oriental labor standards” are an effect of racial logics that projected the abstracting force of capitalism onto the habits and dispositions of Asian populations.

The first list explicitly frames this concern about Oriental labor in terms of the competition that it will create for white “European labor.” In the second permutation of this list, the reference to “Oriental labor standards” betrays how Asian populations were governed according to Orientalist fictions that assumed their work habits shared a different and elevated level of attainment, which could subvert the labor power of white populations in Canada (Mawani Reference Mawani2018). The final articulation of this concern, which appeared in the list from 1927, more explicitly identifies the existential costs of these fabricated economic concerns, warning of “the lower standards of life and the economic difficulties that would result if the supply of oriental labor were unlimited.”Footnote ²⁸ This objection trafficked in scenarios of racial dystopia that imagined British Columbia and Canada as places that would be overrun and ultimately undone by the economic and cultural habits of Asian immigrants. In the list from 1923, these anxieties were expressed, albeit without reference to labor and economic standards, when the DOIC cited concerns about the “danger of British Columbia becoming decimated by Asiatic rather than white races.”Footnote ²⁹ Such references to the decimation of British Columbia cite prevailing racial fears that its desired white visage would collapse without the strict regulation of Asian immigration.

Finally, each list of objections shared by the DOIC also identified the social and religious differences of Oriental populations as a basis for their exclusion from Canada, albeit while using slight variations in the wording of these objections. In the first list from 1921, the DOIC specified that one basis for objecting to the immigration of “Oriental populations” was their “differences in standards of living coupled with differences in faith, social order, language, etc.”Footnote ³⁰ Once again, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations were subject to the racial notion that they share common standards of living. In this instance, the racial differences conjured by the idea of Oriental standards are articulated through a laundry list of other characteristics, which assume almost endless iterative and metonymic permutations with the addition of “etc.” to this clause. In the subsequent lists circulated by the DOIC, these racial logics appeared in more abbreviated terms through references to objections about the “social and religious differences” of Asian populations in 1923 and “differences in religious faith, social order, language” in 1927.Footnote ³¹ Without further explanation, this reference to the social and religious differences of Asian populations projects different taxonomies onto Asian populations and collapses the distinct religious and spiritual practices of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian populations into a single set of immutable qualities; these differences only acquire their coherence against caricatured Occidental iterations of Christianity. In correspondence that predates the Second World War, state actors rarely used the term “Sikh” to name the religious practices and identities of South Asian populations in British Columbia; when “Sikh” does appear in these archival records, it typically refers to buildings or organizations that already have the name embedded in their institutionalized title.

Through this body of correspondence, the DOIC helped disseminate and institutionalize the complex scalar taxonomy that formed one basis for the racial governance of South Asian populations in Canada. This taxonomy embedded South Asian populations within the categorical parameters of the Oriental question, which aggregates and governs them according to racial ascriptions of geographic origin and cultural difference. This correspondence was generated in a period of virulent anti-Asian racism that generally collapsed existing legal, national, and cultural distinctions between Indian, Chinese, and Japanese populations to implement more expansive immigration bans against “Asians” as a distinct demographic group. Through such categorical practices, Sikh and South Asian populations were positioned as a substratum of Asian populations more broadly. Yet, in these archival documents, the aggregative force of these categorical practices was at least partially disrupted by references to the distinct legal and political conditions of South Asian populations. Such references are traces of the racial logics that have governed Indian, Sikh, and South Asian populations according to national, cultural, and religious differences that cannot be subsumed by the broader taxonomies of anti-Asian racism. Of course, these categorical tensions must be understood as an effect of the iterative dynamics of all racial governance, which fabricate realities that are marked by fantasy and contradiction. Yet, in the specific context of British Columbia’s racial governance, such tensions reflect how Sikh and South Asian populations have been subject to categorical practices that are animated by discordant visions of difference and political order.

National quotas and racial outsiders, 1948–51

In 1951, the governments of Canada and India reached an agreement to allow the immigration of 150 Indian nationals to Canada each year. The introduction of this quota was part of a broader series of postwar changes to Canadian laws that governed the immigration and citizenship of Indian populations (Kelley and Trebilcock Reference Kelley and Trebilcock2010). Because Indian immigration had been restricted to very select familial dependents of those already domiciled in the country, quotas were touted as a departure from these earlier regulations insofar as they provided for the annual immigration of a set number of Indian nationals whose entry was not dependent on their relation to people already in Canada. This section of the article analyzes the bureaucratic correspondence related to the quota’s introduction to explain how it reflected and refigured the Canadian state’s racial authority over Sikh, Indian, and South Asian populations. It pays particular attention to how the quota’s legal authority redrew the relationship between the discursive categories of the Indian national and “the Asian” or “Asiatic migrant.”

Since the 1920s, nation-states have implemented immigration quotas to establish and validate limits on the numbers of people that can immigrate from a given country or geographic region. As demographic instruments of law, immigration quotas work to actively regenerate the racial contours of a nationally delimited population as well as mediate the linguistic and numerical terms through which these populations are identified and differentiated. According to Mae Ngai (Reference Ngai1999, 69), the American Immigration Act of 1924, which refined quotas for Eastern and Southern European countries, “comprised a constellation of reconstructed racial categories, in which race and nationality—concepts that had been loosely conflated since the nineteenth century—disaggregated and realigned in new and uneven ways.”Footnote ³² In this regard, nation-states deployed quotas not only to decide how these racial categories would be populated but also to establish their taxonomical boundaries and coherence as categories.

Before the introduction of quotas, Indian immigration to Canada was governed by Order-in-Council PC 2115, which was passed in 1930 amidst a particularly virulent period of anti-Asian racism. This law prohibited “the landing of immigrants of any Asiatic race, with the exception … of the wife, husband or unmarried child under 21 years of age, of any Canadian citizen legally admitted to and resident in Canada, who is in a position to receive and care for his dependents” (as cited in Kelley and Trebilcock, 325).Footnote ³³ As with earlier immigration restrictions, this law codified the Asian immigrant as a laboring heterosexual male who was enmeshed in conjugal relations of dependency (Mawani Reference Mawani2018). It was against these prohibitions and their discretionary exemptions that some Indian community leaders advocated for quotas as a way to open Canada to more immigration from India.

The introduction of these quotas exempted select Indian nationals from the authority of this order-in-council and made the legal dimensions of nationality the basis for entry to Canada. This change disaggregated a select grouping of South Asian populations from the legal category of the “Asian race” as it had been (re)codified under Order-in-Council PC 2115. In an interdepartmental memorandum about the quotas, the deputy minister of citizenship and immigration even suggested that “the intent of the Canada-India Agreement was to remove nationals of India from the “stigma” of being classified as Asiatics.”Footnote ³⁴ Here, “Asiatic” is treated as a legal category with parameters that are fungible rather than an immutable fact of geographic origin. Yet the deputy minister’s assertion ultimately obscures how the taxonomic practices of Canadian state actors were the ongoing source of this categorical stigma. The layered, racial architecture of laws governing immigration to Canada meant that quotas did not fully disassociate Indian populations from the stigma of this classification.

In the first year of the quota’s administration, personnel within the DOIC corresponded about the need to maintain a legal basis for rejecting applications from Indian nationals who were not admitted under the Canada-India Agreement. Because the agreement exempted Indian nationals from the authority of Order-in-Council PC 2115, immigration authorities had no other legal means to restrict the entry of Indians to the numbers stipulated by the quota. Other laws and regulations that were intended to limit different forms of immigration were not applicable to Indian nationals either because their purview did not extend to “immigrants of Asiatic race” (as per Order-in-Council PC 2856) or because, as British subjects, Indian nationals were not required to obtain visas to enter Canada (as per Order-in-Council PC 2744)Footnote ³⁵ To address this possible gap in administrative law, the deputy minister of citizenship and immigration ultimately advised the Cabinet that, “since the Canada-India Agreement was intended to widen the admissible classes of Indian nationals only to the extent of an additional 150 person each year, it is considered that Order-in-Council PC 2115 should be amended so that it will remain a positive control over the immigration of Indian nationals generally.”Footnote ³⁶ Based on this instruction, Order-in-Council PC 2115 was revised to prohibit the landing of “immigrants of any Asiatic race” beyond the extent of quotas and allotments that have been stipulated in treaties and bilateral agreements. In reasserting this kind of “positive control” over Indian migration, bureaucratic officials worked to reposition the vast majority of Indian nationals back within the taxonomical boundaries of the “Asiatic race.”

The state’s racial authority over Indian immigration was also reflected in the administration of the quota as bureaucratic officials had the capacity to decide which groups of Indian nationals were prioritized for immigration and which groups would remain tethered to stigmatizing classifications. In the first years of the Canada-India Agreement, quotas were administered according to a formula that was allocated different ratios of the 150 spots to five categories of applicants. Four of the categories related to Indian nationals who were in different familial relations with Canadian citizens. Each category was assigned ranked allotments according to how it corresponded to the normative relations of the white conjugal family. Spouses and dependent children of Canadian citizens could claim one-third of the quota’s allotment, while parents and unmarried siblings were assigned 15 percent. These policies served as yet another mechanism through which the racial state refigured the political and legal terms of the Indian and Punjabi family form. Bureaucrats actively made the imperiled future of the Indian conjugal family a persistent focus of their deliberations about quotas. For example, a memorandum to the Cabinet Committee on Immigration Policy in 1948 cited concerns that “the Canadian born males choose their women in India with the result that Canadian born females must remain spinsters.”Footnote ³⁷ Within the first decade of racial immigration restrictions, such tropes of Indian bachelors and spinsters motivated state authorities to offer discretionary exemptions from these bans, especially in the face of racial anxieties about intermarriage with white populations (Mawani Reference Mawani2009). In both of these historical periods, state institutions decided immigration policies about Indian families according to racial priorities that would mitigate their capacity to disrupt the white familial futures of British Columbia.

Only one of the five categories in the quota’s formula was for applicants without familial connections in Canada. This group, which accounted for 7 percent of the total allotted quota, was reserved for applicants “whose admission will contribute to the economic and cultural well-being of the Canadian people.”Footnote ³⁸ The generality of this language afforded substantial authority to immigration officials to decide which Indian nationals would be included in the quota, especially because the vast majority of applications came from people in the non-familial category. In 1951, all 354 outstanding applications were from Indian nationals in this group. Against the persistence of this imbalance in applications, immigration officials actively deliberated about how to interpret and administer this category, with many favoring applicants possessing “technical, administrative or scientific qualifications.”Footnote ³⁹ Yet immigration authorities raised concerns that these criteria conflicted with the economic development priorities of the Indian government, possibly creating diplomatic tensions between them.

In a confidential interdepartmental memorandum that referenced these concerns, the undersecretary of state for external affairs explained that “it would therefore seem desirable to administer the immigration agreement in a manner that would reconcile this interest [in preserving diplomatic relations with India] with our desire to admit Indians who fit easily into the Canadian way of life and who will help Canadians to form a better impression of the Indian people.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This reference to the negative public image of Indians already in Canada traffics in racial valuations of Punjabi laborers, which configured their socioeconomic status as a consequence of cultural and genetic dispositions (Ballantyne Reference Ballantyne2006); in this memorandum, the deputy commissioner even complained that Indians in Canada were “drawn almost entirely from one class.”Footnote ⁴¹ Through this correspondence, he conveys how the federal government wants to use the quota to transform Canada’s Indian population to ensure it better conforms to “the Canadian way of life.”

Insofar as the Canada-India Agreement became the legal mechanism for a minimum number of Indian nationals to enter Canada each year, it marked a significant shift from earlier legislation that prohibited their immigration in explicit or coded terms. Yet the bureaucratic correspondence about this agreement reveals how its introduction worked to refigure the legal and discursive terms through which Indians were racially governed. The quota introduced through this agreement disarticulated select groups of Indian nationals from their legal status as “Asiatics,” at least partially insulating them from the “stigmatizing” effects of this category. Such categorical practices engendered particular scalar articulations of the relation between Indian as a marker of nationality and Asiatic as a marker of geographic origin and biological difference, giving juridical modes of nationality the capacity to mute or bracket these other racial markers. Through the advisory form of their confidential memorandums, bureaucratic officials helped determine how these taxonomic contradictions shaped the projects of nation-building that characterized this postwar era of immigration.