History
The first Indo-Canadian immigrants from Punjab landed in Vancouver around 1890. The first Indian settlement is said to have come by the name of Paldi after a village near Hoshiarpur in Punjab. They settled down in Kitsilano near First Avenue and Burrard Street and were believed to have worked in lumber mills and at construction sites throughout the Lower Mainland.
East Indians who later immigrated to Vancouver are believed to have suffered the same treatment given to the Chinese (Chinatown) and Japanese (Japantown). They were subject to the bias and animosities of the predominantly Anglo-Saxon majority and occupied distinct and discrete quarters of the city.
Most of the new residents sought established homes and to earn reasonably secure incomes. They settled in the area near 49th Avenue and Main Street and many established restaurants and businesses there and throughout the city to make a living. The settlers brought with them distinctive habits and attitudes that influenced the choice of food, work and recreational activity. Over time, the area has become predominantly Indo-Canadian and has blossomed into the ethnic enclave of today.
Read more about this topic: Punjabi Market, Vancouver
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—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)