In his 2004 award-winning film, The Continuous Journey filmmaker Ali Kazimi chronicles the story of the Komagata Maru, a ship docked in a Canadian harbor for two months due to blatantly discriminatory immigration policies that would not allow for its South Asian passengers to disembark. 

According to Kazimi’s film, this incident in part, led to the rise of the Ghadar Party on the West Coast and the Komagata Maru passengers, who were forced back to India, joined the freedom struggle against British Colonialism.

This incident is one of many stories that make up South Asian organizing and empowerment in North America.  Mobilization against unjust actions has been a common thread in our community for over one hundred years.  Then… as Now.... we make up large sectors of the service and labor industry, face policy and social forms of discrimination and are victims of bias and violence.

Then…as Now, we have risen against the tides to organize for social change within our South Asian communities and have linked our struggle with other minorities on a broad range of intersectional issues.  We aspire to link our work and our vision for justice with local movements across the United States, within the subcontinent and throughout the Diaspora.

The South Asian community is changing even as we write this and we look towards a future of organizing work that would embody the changes that happen within ourselves, our communities and the world.