By Nadine Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 29, 2014
One hundred years ago a ship carrying some 376 immigrant hopefuls of South Asian descent arrived in Vancouver. The ship, named the Komagata Maru, was denied entry into Canada as a result of exclusion laws designed to keep out immigrants of Asian origin. The ship was forced to return to India, where passengers — who were considered political agitators and lawbreakers by the local government — were shot at. Most of those who were not killed were imprisoned.
To commemorate the anniversary of the Komagata Maru’s rejection from Vancouver’s port, UFV instructor Rajneesh Dhawan has written a play on the incident and the impact it had on a local level, titled That Land Beyond the Waves.
Earlier conceptualized as a one-act play, the production now spans two hours and features 25 characters.
The play jumps back and forth in time to illustrate the contemporary relevance of the incident.
“What I find very particularly interesting is the very contemporariness of the thing … the rejection of those passengers are pretty similar to what people are still facing,” Dhawan said.
He hopes to express the particular emotional poignancy experienced by the local Sikh population; the Abbotsford Sikh temple where the play takes place is the same one that stood one hundred years ago.
“When those people were looking at that ship, which was, say, 200 metres from the shore, how would they feel?” Dhawan said.
“How would they feel to know that there’s my sister there, my brother, my friend, who is starving … They would feel so helpless. That pain is what we are trying to portray.”
After some six months of research and four months of writing, Dhawan recruited friend and colleague John Carroll to direct the play, with UFV student Thomas Smith assisting.
“The directing process is very tricky because there are so many characters … We’ve worked to cut it back to some 20 actors, with several double roles,” Carroll says. “It’s a big panoply of action. ”
Carroll noted that all the people involved in the play are volunteers, with an interesting combination of international and local UFV students, high school students, as well as UFV staff and faculty.
“It’s bringing together a whole group of people from UFV and the larger community to work on this production of a historical event that affected Abbotsford,” he said.
Rehearsals for the play have been touch-and-go, Carroll says, with no real infrastructure to work with. The set is minimalistic as a result.
Dhawan describes the production as authentically Canadian.
“It’s not an Indo-Canadian play, it’s not a Chinese-Canadian play, it’s not a Caucasian Canadian play, it’s a real Canadian play.
“I want people to go out with this idea that when cultures come together, especially in the Fraser Valley, these things can happen,” says Dhawan.
The show will debut Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Matsqui Centennial Auditorium, with another performance on Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets can be bought online.
With files from Martin Castro.
