Khalsa Diwan Society (Ross Street Gurdwara), Vancouverਖਾਲਸਾ ਦੀਵਾਨ ਸੁਸਾਇਟੀ (ਰੌਸ ਸਟਰੀਟ ਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ), ਵੈਨਕੂਵਰ

The Khalsa Diwan Society Ross Street Gurdwara is the Sikh temple at 8000 Ross Street in South Vancouver, British Columbia, home of the oldest Sikh society in Greater Vancouver and of the Guru Nanak Jahaz (Komagata Maru) Museum. The society, founded in 1906, built Vancouver's first gurdwara in 1908 and moved in 1970 to this building designed by Arthur Erickson. It is one of the entries in our guide to Gurdwaras in Canada.

What is the Khalsa Diwan Society?

The Khalsa Diwan Society, shortened to KDS, is both a Sikh society and its gurdwara: a gurdwara is the Sikh place of worship, literally the doorway to the Guru, whose prayer hall centres on the Guru Granth Sahib and whose langar hall serves a free vegetarian meal to everyone. Founded in 1906, the KDS is the oldest Sikh society in Greater Vancouver, and its original temple was the largest gurdwara in North America of its day. The society's own site today calls the Ross Street temple a religious home for a community of over 8,000 members, and its branches once ran the pioneer temples of British Columbia, including the Gur Sikh Temple at Abbotsford.

History: a first temple on 2nd Avenue in 1908

The Khalsa Diwan Society was founded on 22 July 1906 and registered on 13 March 1909. Its first site and gurdwara were built at 1866 West 2nd Avenue in Kitsilano and inaugurated on 19 January 1908, paid for by a small pioneer community whose numbers swung with the province's welcome: British Columbia's Sikh population rose to 5,185 in the years to 1908, then fell to 2,342 by 1911 and to 1,099 by 1918 as exclusion laws bit. Through those decades the gurdwara was far more than a prayer hall. The anthropologist Verne A. Dusenbery described it as truly a religious, social, political, cultural and social service centre for the entire South Asian immigrant population of the lower mainland: it held a homeless shelter and a langar kitchen, served Hindus and Muslims as well as Sikhs, and in the 1940s it led the community campaign for the vote, which was restored to South Asian Canadians in 1947.

Growth brought strain as well as strength. In the early 1950s a dispute over electing a clean shaven Sikh to the management committee split the community, and the breakaway faction founded the Akali Singh Society, which opened its own Vancouver gurdwara in 1952. The KDS network still stretched across the province: in the 1960s its branch gurdwaras included New Westminster, Abbotsford, Victoria and Port Alberni. One by one the branches became independent, Abbotsford in 1975 among them, leaving the Vancouver society to focus on the city congregation it had served since 1908.

The move to Ross Street and Arthur Erickson's lotus

By the 1960s the 2nd Avenue temple was too small, and in 1963 the society began planning a new gurdwara and community centre. In 1968 it purchased 2.75 acres of city land at the intersection of Southwest Marine Drive and Ross Street in South Vancouver. Construction began in the winter of 1969 and was completed in the first week of April 1970. The architect was Arthur Erickson, of Erickson and Massey, Canada's most celebrated modernist: he travelled to Agra and Amritsar for inspiration, and the stacked white building, rising in stepped levels to an open framed dome, was intended to look like a lotus rising from water. The Guru Granth Sahib was carried from the old temple to Ross Street on Vaisakhi day 1970, and the celebration of Guru Nanak Dev Ji's 500th birthday had already been held at the new site before the formal opening.

The Komagata Maru story and the museum in the temple

The society's defining public memory is the Guru Nanak Jahaz, the ship better known as the Komagata Maru. The City of Vancouver records that it arrived in Burrard Inlet on 23 May 1914 with 376 passengers, 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus, most of them from Punjab. British subjects all, they were denied entry under discriminatory and racist laws, kept on board for two months without sufficient medical aid, food or water, and ordered out on 23 July 1914. On the forced return to India, 19 passengers were shot and killed. British Columbia apologised in 2008 and the Government of Canada in 2016, and Vancouver now marks 23 May as Guru Nanak Jahaz (Komagata Maru) Remembrance Day. The Guru Nanak Jahaz (Komagata Maru) Museum, established at the Ross Street temple in 2012, keeps the passengers' story inside the community that campaigned for them, and a portrait of Bhai Mewa Singh Lopoke, the Vancouver Sikh executed in 1915, hangs in its langar hall: his martyrdom is still commemorated at the temple every March, with Sikhs travelling from California to attend.

Festivals, langar and community life today

Daily life at Ross Street runs on the three pillars the society puts first on its own site: Kirat Karo, honest work; Vand Chhako, sharing with others; and Naam Japo, remembering God. The temple's daily kitchen serves 400 to 500 free meals, the langar practice of feeding everyone who comes, and giving runs on Dasvandh, the Sikh discipline of donating a tenth of one's income to charity. The year's high points are Vaisakhi in April, which also marks the anniversary of the 1970 move, Guru Nanak Dev Ji's Gurpurab in the autumn, and the March commemoration of Bhai Mewa Singh. Weddings, funerals and Punjabi classes fill the weeks between, much as the 2nd Avenue temple mixed worship with the whole of community life a century ago.

How do you visit the Ross Street Gurdwara?

You visit at 8000 Ross Street, at Southwest Marine Drive in South Vancouver, and the street carries a second name in the temple's honour: in 2018 Vancouver City Council alternatively named Ross Street as Khalsa Diwan Road, and signs marking it, from the gurdwara at Southwest Marine Drive to 57th Avenue, were added in 2019. The society's own address now reads 8000 Khalsa Diwan Road, Vancouver, BC V5X 4C5, and it can be reached on (604) 324-2010. Everyone is welcome, Sikh or not: cover your head, remove your shoes, sit in the prayer hall for as long as you wish, and stay for langar afterwards. Allow time for the Komagata Maru Museum when it is open to the public, since no other Canadian gurdwara holds a national story of this weight inside its own walls.