This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver in 1914 carrying 376 mostly Sikh passengers seeking to settle in Canada, following the small community that lumber workers and jubilee soldiers had already begun to build there. Canadian immigration law required a two hundred dollar deposit and continuous passage taken directly from India, a route that did not exist on any shipping line of the time and so made the requirement effectively unmeetable for anyone travelling from the subcontinent.
Only 20 former Canadian residents already known to the authorities were permitted to disembark. After two months anchored offshore with the rest of its passengers still aboard, the ship was forced to return to India, and when it reached Budge Budge on 26 September, police opened fire on the returning passengers, killing 20 and wounding nine.
What this changed for Sikhism's spread was less a change in numbers than a change in memory. The Komagata Maru never landed the community it was carrying, and the shooting that met its passengers on their forced return became a defining grievance in the Sikh diaspora's memory of exclusion, an episode the small Sikh settlements already forming in Canada carried forward long after the ship itself was gone.