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There are two versions of Ujjal Dosanjh's life story.
In Spring of 2017, B.C. BookWorld ran coverage of smartly-packaged reprise called Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond. Crediting Dosanjh as the sole author, it was from the 'hybrid' publishing enterprise Figure 1, an offshoot of Scott McIntyre's D&M domain.
But two years ago, and ten years in the making, Douglas P. Wellbanks' biography, Unbreakable: The Ujjal Dosanjh Story, covered the same territory, edited by Naomi Pauls and distributed by Sandhill Book Marketing. The unattributed biography obviously assisted Dosanjh in the re-release of his own story.
Ujjal Dosanjh was the second provincial premier of non-European descent ever to hold office in Canada. The first was Prince Edward Island's Joe Ghiz, whose father was a Lebanese immigrant. Dosanjh, in contrast, is an immigrant himself.
Here follows a review of Dosanjh's autobiography by historian Hugh Johnston from The Ormsby Review:
***
In Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond (Figure I $34.95), Ujjal Dosanjh recounts his journey from a village in the Punjab to London in 1964 and to Vancouver in 1968, to become the 33rd premier of B.C. as well as federal cabinet minister.
As premier of B.C., Ujjal Dosanjh visited his homeland at the invitation of the Indian and Punjab governments during the Christmas break of 2000-01. In his home state of Punjab he naturally visited his birthplace village of Dosanjh, named for his ancestral family.
The Government of Punjab paved a broken, pothole-filled lane of half-a-kilometer into the village of Dosanjh just so he could drive there, rather than walk in or be flown by helicopter.
Dosanjh left India at the age of eighteen, encouraged by the example of another student from his local secondary school. His declared purpose was to enroll in an electrical engineering college in London.
Dosanjh concedes that he was basically an economic emigrant, like many others, attracted mainly by the affluence of the West. His father was the founder of the village primary school but he did not have the means to pay for a university education overseas for an adult son.
Dosanjh had a one-way airfare to London, paid for by his father who had obtained the money from a maternal aunt. When he stepped off his plane at Heathrow airport in 1964, he had little money of his own. Relatives and former fellow villagers living in London gave him initial shelter and helped him find work.
Dosanjh describes a succession of low-level jobs: in a railway yard, in a crayon factory, and as a lab assistant running a projector. None of these jobs enabled him to pay tuition fees, let alone take any time off work for a college education. After three-and-a-half years he re-migrated to B.C.
An aunt and uncle in Vancouver sponsored him as a landed immigrant. They found him work in a sawmill. Within eight years of his arrival in 1968, he had completed a BA, graduated from law school, and been called to the bar, all while marrying and starting a family.
Dosanjh puts his command of English when he first landed in London at a rudimentary grade four level. But he quickly became a news junkie and an enthusiastic user of local public lending libraries.
His political outlook was shaped by the examples of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Pierre Trudeau. But he had also grown up with family members in Punjab who had a powerful commitment to progressive and revolutionary ideals: his maternal grandfather had been prominent in the anti-British movement before Indian independence and had served time in jail as a political prisoner.
In Vancouver, Dosanjh educated himself on contemporary questions of race, gender, gay rights and liberal values. His early Canadian experience also reinforced his inherently secular worldview.
The narrow religious nationalism that he encountered within his own Sikh community was something he quickly rejected. He applauded the opposition to French Canadian nationalism that defined Pierre Trudeau's politics. Dosanjh came to see the growing religious-ethnic nationalism of his own Sikh community and the provincial nationalism of French Canadians as comparable and similarly negative forces.
Dosanjh's memoir reminds us of the appalling troubles of Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora in the 1980s and 1990s, when nearly the whole Punjabi community in Canada was intimidated by the presence of terrorists in their midst.
Dosanjh and his wife Rami had been booked to fly to Delhi on Air India's tragic flight 182 in June 1985. This was the flight carrying 329 passengers and crew that was blown up over the Atlantic by a bomb that terrorists had placed on board in Vancouver. They fortuitously cancelled their booking a few days before.
A few months earlier, Dosanjh had been assaulted by a turbaned Sikh wielding an iron bar who inflicted deep wounds to his head requiring 84 stitches to repair. This attack happened at the end of a working day in a darkening parking lot and ended only when Dosanjh's law partner arrived on the scene, scaring the attacker off and saving Dosanjh's life.
For some time before that, Dosanjh had been receiving threats to his life and to the lives of his family. These threats continued. Dosanjh says that his near death experience in that parking lot attack gave him a renewed sense of life's purpose.
Dosanjh was a lumber union organizer, an advocate for Punjabi farm workers and an NDP party worker almost from the start. But at the summit of his career he was still dismissed by some opponents as an "ethnic"; candidate, although his success at election time and his handling of issues in government belied the charge.
He makes it clear that the Sikh and South Asian community was the base that launched him into politics, but when in 1991 he was first elected as an MLA - after two unsuccessful tries - it was in a riding that was fifty percent Chinese and that was only five percent Sikh and South Asian.
Dosanjh deserves great credit for the principled role he played in the provincial and federal governments between 1991 and 2011 as an NDP member of the legislature, caucus leader, cabinet member, premier of B.C., Liberal member of parliament, and federal minister of health. He made difficult decisions in major portfolios and gained general respect in the process.
As a young man, Ujjal Dosanjh had unrealized ambitions as a writer in Punjabi, and it is not surprising that he writes with sensitivity and telling effect. He records the best and worst of his political career frankly and convincingly.
Dosanjh tells his story with disarming honesty and modesty, superbly in English, a language that he ultimately mastered as an adult.
978-1-927958-56-8
Hugh Johnston's books include The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada's Colour Bar; The Four Quarters of the Night: the Life Story of an Emigrant Sikh (with Tara Singh Bains); and Jewels of the Qila: The Remarkable Story of an Indo-Canadian Family.
***
Journey after Midnight: A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada
by Ujjal Dosanjh
(Speaking Tiger/Sandhill $26.95)
Review by Gene Homel (BCBW 2024)
An independent-minded person from an early age, Ujjal Dosanjh declares “Mine is the soul of a rebel,” in his autobiography Journey After Midnight. He journeyed from a poor farming town in India’s Punjab to become British Columbia’s NDP Premier and then Minister of Health in a national Liberal government. How he rose from his origins to triumph is a story of immigrant acculturation and success, but success shadowed by an uneasy sense of harsh conflict and intolerance. The politics he describes are not often pleasant.
Almost the entire book covers the years before Dosanjh became BC Premier in 2000. He was born in 1946, the year before the granting of Indian independence and the murderous and tragic partition of Pakistan and India. He was raised in a small village; his “family was both rural and poor,” he writes. His father was politically involved and passed on to his son Gandhi’s vision of a just, non-violent, progressive society, a vision fading in India’s subsequent decades, but one that Dosanjh valued and brought to Canada.
Dosanjh joined the large tide of Punjabis emmigrating to Great Britain, arriving on the last day of 1964. While he lived in the Midlands and worked at a succession of menial jobs, he strengthened his facility with the English language. But British race and class relations left him “angry and discouraged.” In 1968, passing by the Canadian High Commission in London, he resolved to emmigrate to Canada, where some relatives already lived.
There, in South Vancouver, Dosanjh toiled in nearby lumber mills, including work on the green chain. He found sustenance in his extended family and in an already sizeable diaspora. This community and its NDP politics, “with its social democratic outlook, was a natural home for me in the political landscape of British Columbia,” wrote Dosanjh. Pierre Trudeau, though, remained his favourite Canadian because of his policies toward Quebec nationalism, despite Dosanjh decrying the excesses of the War Measures Act.
Ambitious, Dosanjh attended Vancouver Community College at Langara, Simon Fraser University and UBC Law School. As a lawyer, and even before being called to the bar in 1977, he did legal education among new Canadians, and particularly worked for labour rights for contracted farm workers, taxi drivers and janitors. He unsuccessfully ran for the NDP in the 1979 and 1983 BC elections in South Vancouver.
Dosanjh first became more widely known after a 1984 press conference for his vocal opposition to the movement by some Sikh militants for an independent Khalistan—militants appealing to what he considers alienated immigrants—that would “dismember” India and replace the Punjab state with a “theistic country” opposed to secular values. Using violence and intimidation to oppose the right to free expression, the separatists “threatened to take us back into the dark ages” for “a pipe dream supported by a lunatic fringe,” says Dosanjh. He paid dearly for his opposition: an assassination attempt put him in the hospital where a doctor told him he was lucky to be alive. But he continued to advocate publicly for non-violence and liberal-democratic secular values, placing himself solidly in the Canadian mainstream.
Much of his autobiography is focused on the divisive politics of Indian immigrants in both BC and India. Dosanjh argues against what he considers the petty, bitterly fractious relations within the Indian community, riven by regional, religious and political schisms. He denounces the growing conflict between Sikhs and Hindus, worsened by the Indian government’s military approach to Sikh militants in Punjab in 1984. Bloodshed inevitably followed. Dosanjh’s reflections on violence have currency given recent events surrounding Khalistani separatism and Hindu-Sikh conflicts in Canada as well as in India.
The internal politics of Canadian ethnic groups “are often quite ruthless,” Dosanjh says. Arguing for open, democratic votes in Sikh temples, he denounces “the pandering by Canadian politicians to faith groups at their places of worship.”
His memoir is at times surprisingly candid. He talks about his early, foolish flirtation with revolutionary Maoism in Vancouver (that later came back to haunt him) and his marital tensions. Twice as a young man he became embroiled in allegations of assault and twice he was acquitted.
Following Dosanjh’s election to Mike Harcourt’s government as an NDP MLA in 1991 in Vancouver-Ken-sington, which had just a four percent South Asian population, he eventually became NDP caucus leader. Later, he was the first person of Indian origin to become both Attorney General and, finally, Premier in 2000-2001. In 2004 he was recruited and elected as a Liberal MP for Vancouver-South until defeated in 2011, and he became Minister of Health in Paul Martin’s federal government. Dosanjh describes many of the causes of equality and equity he promoted as Premier and in Martin’s cabinet.
Because his autobiography was first published in India in 2016, apparently for an Indian readership, there is much detailed content on the politics of India and the personalities of BC’s South Asian community. Readers intrigued by the BC NDP may find much of interest, along with elements of score-settling with notable rivals and opponents. Some readers may find the family and personal details excessive.
Even more than in 2016, we need voices of liberal democracy such as Dosanjh’s. “Extremists the world over—the enemies of freedom—would like to erase both the modern and the secular,” Dosanjh says. He asserts that writing his autobiography “served as a bridge between the life gone by and what lies ahead,” and stands as a platform for his “continuing ambition that equality and social justice be realized.”
9789354471278
***
Ujjal Dosanjh’s novel, The Past is Never Dead (Speaking Tiger/Sandhill $19.95) starts with the well-known quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” Based on some of Dosanjh’s own youthful experiences, the novel relates the story of a rural Sikh Punjabi family’s resistance to caste. Emigration to Bedford in the English Midlands (where Dosanjh stayed in the 1960s) does not solve the privations of caste, and the courageous struggle against caste continues in England. 9789354474958
++++
Gene Homel has been a faculty member at universities, colleges and institutes since 1974.
In Spring of 2017, B.C. BookWorld ran coverage of smartly-packaged reprise called Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond. Crediting Dosanjh as the sole author, it was from the 'hybrid' publishing enterprise Figure 1, an offshoot of Scott McIntyre's D&M domain.
But two years ago, and ten years in the making, Douglas P. Wellbanks' biography, Unbreakable: The Ujjal Dosanjh Story, covered the same territory, edited by Naomi Pauls and distributed by Sandhill Book Marketing. The unattributed biography obviously assisted Dosanjh in the re-release of his own story.
Ujjal Dosanjh was the second provincial premier of non-European descent ever to hold office in Canada. The first was Prince Edward Island's Joe Ghiz, whose father was a Lebanese immigrant. Dosanjh, in contrast, is an immigrant himself.
Here follows a review of Dosanjh's autobiography by historian Hugh Johnston from The Ormsby Review:
***
In Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond (Figure I $34.95), Ujjal Dosanjh recounts his journey from a village in the Punjab to London in 1964 and to Vancouver in 1968, to become the 33rd premier of B.C. as well as federal cabinet minister.
As premier of B.C., Ujjal Dosanjh visited his homeland at the invitation of the Indian and Punjab governments during the Christmas break of 2000-01. In his home state of Punjab he naturally visited his birthplace village of Dosanjh, named for his ancestral family.
The Government of Punjab paved a broken, pothole-filled lane of half-a-kilometer into the village of Dosanjh just so he could drive there, rather than walk in or be flown by helicopter.
Dosanjh left India at the age of eighteen, encouraged by the example of another student from his local secondary school. His declared purpose was to enroll in an electrical engineering college in London.
Dosanjh concedes that he was basically an economic emigrant, like many others, attracted mainly by the affluence of the West. His father was the founder of the village primary school but he did not have the means to pay for a university education overseas for an adult son.
Dosanjh had a one-way airfare to London, paid for by his father who had obtained the money from a maternal aunt. When he stepped off his plane at Heathrow airport in 1964, he had little money of his own. Relatives and former fellow villagers living in London gave him initial shelter and helped him find work.
Dosanjh describes a succession of low-level jobs: in a railway yard, in a crayon factory, and as a lab assistant running a projector. None of these jobs enabled him to pay tuition fees, let alone take any time off work for a college education. After three-and-a-half years he re-migrated to B.C.
An aunt and uncle in Vancouver sponsored him as a landed immigrant. They found him work in a sawmill. Within eight years of his arrival in 1968, he had completed a BA, graduated from law school, and been called to the bar, all while marrying and starting a family.
Dosanjh puts his command of English when he first landed in London at a rudimentary grade four level. But he quickly became a news junkie and an enthusiastic user of local public lending libraries.
His political outlook was shaped by the examples of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Pierre Trudeau. But he had also grown up with family members in Punjab who had a powerful commitment to progressive and revolutionary ideals: his maternal grandfather had been prominent in the anti-British movement before Indian independence and had served time in jail as a political prisoner.
In Vancouver, Dosanjh educated himself on contemporary questions of race, gender, gay rights and liberal values. His early Canadian experience also reinforced his inherently secular worldview.
The narrow religious nationalism that he encountered within his own Sikh community was something he quickly rejected. He applauded the opposition to French Canadian nationalism that defined Pierre Trudeau's politics. Dosanjh came to see the growing religious-ethnic nationalism of his own Sikh community and the provincial nationalism of French Canadians as comparable and similarly negative forces.
Dosanjh's memoir reminds us of the appalling troubles of Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora in the 1980s and 1990s, when nearly the whole Punjabi community in Canada was intimidated by the presence of terrorists in their midst.
Dosanjh and his wife Rami had been booked to fly to Delhi on Air India's tragic flight 182 in June 1985. This was the flight carrying 329 passengers and crew that was blown up over the Atlantic by a bomb that terrorists had placed on board in Vancouver. They fortuitously cancelled their booking a few days before.
A few months earlier, Dosanjh had been assaulted by a turbaned Sikh wielding an iron bar who inflicted deep wounds to his head requiring 84 stitches to repair. This attack happened at the end of a working day in a darkening parking lot and ended only when Dosanjh's law partner arrived on the scene, scaring the attacker off and saving Dosanjh's life.
For some time before that, Dosanjh had been receiving threats to his life and to the lives of his family. These threats continued. Dosanjh says that his near death experience in that parking lot attack gave him a renewed sense of life's purpose.
Dosanjh was a lumber union organizer, an advocate for Punjabi farm workers and an NDP party worker almost from the start. But at the summit of his career he was still dismissed by some opponents as an "ethnic"; candidate, although his success at election time and his handling of issues in government belied the charge.
He makes it clear that the Sikh and South Asian community was the base that launched him into politics, but when in 1991 he was first elected as an MLA - after two unsuccessful tries - it was in a riding that was fifty percent Chinese and that was only five percent Sikh and South Asian.
Dosanjh deserves great credit for the principled role he played in the provincial and federal governments between 1991 and 2011 as an NDP member of the legislature, caucus leader, cabinet member, premier of B.C., Liberal member of parliament, and federal minister of health. He made difficult decisions in major portfolios and gained general respect in the process.
As a young man, Ujjal Dosanjh had unrealized ambitions as a writer in Punjabi, and it is not surprising that he writes with sensitivity and telling effect. He records the best and worst of his political career frankly and convincingly.
Dosanjh tells his story with disarming honesty and modesty, superbly in English, a language that he ultimately mastered as an adult.
978-1-927958-56-8
Hugh Johnston's books include The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada's Colour Bar; The Four Quarters of the Night: the Life Story of an Emigrant Sikh (with Tara Singh Bains); and Jewels of the Qila: The Remarkable Story of an Indo-Canadian Family.
***
Journey after Midnight: A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada
by Ujjal Dosanjh
(Speaking Tiger/Sandhill $26.95)
Review by Gene Homel (BCBW 2024)
An independent-minded person from an early age, Ujjal Dosanjh declares “Mine is the soul of a rebel,” in his autobiography Journey After Midnight. He journeyed from a poor farming town in India’s Punjab to become British Columbia’s NDP Premier and then Minister of Health in a national Liberal government. How he rose from his origins to triumph is a story of immigrant acculturation and success, but success shadowed by an uneasy sense of harsh conflict and intolerance. The politics he describes are not often pleasant.
Almost the entire book covers the years before Dosanjh became BC Premier in 2000. He was born in 1946, the year before the granting of Indian independence and the murderous and tragic partition of Pakistan and India. He was raised in a small village; his “family was both rural and poor,” he writes. His father was politically involved and passed on to his son Gandhi’s vision of a just, non-violent, progressive society, a vision fading in India’s subsequent decades, but one that Dosanjh valued and brought to Canada.
Dosanjh joined the large tide of Punjabis emmigrating to Great Britain, arriving on the last day of 1964. While he lived in the Midlands and worked at a succession of menial jobs, he strengthened his facility with the English language. But British race and class relations left him “angry and discouraged.” In 1968, passing by the Canadian High Commission in London, he resolved to emmigrate to Canada, where some relatives already lived.
There, in South Vancouver, Dosanjh toiled in nearby lumber mills, including work on the green chain. He found sustenance in his extended family and in an already sizeable diaspora. This community and its NDP politics, “with its social democratic outlook, was a natural home for me in the political landscape of British Columbia,” wrote Dosanjh. Pierre Trudeau, though, remained his favourite Canadian because of his policies toward Quebec nationalism, despite Dosanjh decrying the excesses of the War Measures Act.
Ambitious, Dosanjh attended Vancouver Community College at Langara, Simon Fraser University and UBC Law School. As a lawyer, and even before being called to the bar in 1977, he did legal education among new Canadians, and particularly worked for labour rights for contracted farm workers, taxi drivers and janitors. He unsuccessfully ran for the NDP in the 1979 and 1983 BC elections in South Vancouver.
Dosanjh first became more widely known after a 1984 press conference for his vocal opposition to the movement by some Sikh militants for an independent Khalistan—militants appealing to what he considers alienated immigrants—that would “dismember” India and replace the Punjab state with a “theistic country” opposed to secular values. Using violence and intimidation to oppose the right to free expression, the separatists “threatened to take us back into the dark ages” for “a pipe dream supported by a lunatic fringe,” says Dosanjh. He paid dearly for his opposition: an assassination attempt put him in the hospital where a doctor told him he was lucky to be alive. But he continued to advocate publicly for non-violence and liberal-democratic secular values, placing himself solidly in the Canadian mainstream.
Much of his autobiography is focused on the divisive politics of Indian immigrants in both BC and India. Dosanjh argues against what he considers the petty, bitterly fractious relations within the Indian community, riven by regional, religious and political schisms. He denounces the growing conflict between Sikhs and Hindus, worsened by the Indian government’s military approach to Sikh militants in Punjab in 1984. Bloodshed inevitably followed. Dosanjh’s reflections on violence have currency given recent events surrounding Khalistani separatism and Hindu-Sikh conflicts in Canada as well as in India.
The internal politics of Canadian ethnic groups “are often quite ruthless,” Dosanjh says. Arguing for open, democratic votes in Sikh temples, he denounces “the pandering by Canadian politicians to faith groups at their places of worship.”
His memoir is at times surprisingly candid. He talks about his early, foolish flirtation with revolutionary Maoism in Vancouver (that later came back to haunt him) and his marital tensions. Twice as a young man he became embroiled in allegations of assault and twice he was acquitted.
Following Dosanjh’s election to Mike Harcourt’s government as an NDP MLA in 1991 in Vancouver-Ken-sington, which had just a four percent South Asian population, he eventually became NDP caucus leader. Later, he was the first person of Indian origin to become both Attorney General and, finally, Premier in 2000-2001. In 2004 he was recruited and elected as a Liberal MP for Vancouver-South until defeated in 2011, and he became Minister of Health in Paul Martin’s federal government. Dosanjh describes many of the causes of equality and equity he promoted as Premier and in Martin’s cabinet.
Because his autobiography was first published in India in 2016, apparently for an Indian readership, there is much detailed content on the politics of India and the personalities of BC’s South Asian community. Readers intrigued by the BC NDP may find much of interest, along with elements of score-settling with notable rivals and opponents. Some readers may find the family and personal details excessive.
Even more than in 2016, we need voices of liberal democracy such as Dosanjh’s. “Extremists the world over—the enemies of freedom—would like to erase both the modern and the secular,” Dosanjh says. He asserts that writing his autobiography “served as a bridge between the life gone by and what lies ahead,” and stands as a platform for his “continuing ambition that equality and social justice be realized.”
9789354471278
***
Ujjal Dosanjh’s novel, The Past is Never Dead (Speaking Tiger/Sandhill $19.95) starts with the well-known quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” Based on some of Dosanjh’s own youthful experiences, the novel relates the story of a rural Sikh Punjabi family’s resistance to caste. Emigration to Bedford in the English Midlands (where Dosanjh stayed in the 1960s) does not solve the privations of caste, and the courageous struggle against caste continues in England. 9789354474958
++++
Gene Homel has been a faculty member at universities, colleges and institutes since 1974.
