Building bridges across Canadian and Indian history: Interrogating the ‘Twin disasters’ of Indo-Canadian migration through literature and non-fiction representations

Abstract

This paper aimed to address and interrogate the power politics involved in constructing the official discourse of history in Canada as a singular monolithic entity that takes cognition of only the history of the ‘founding’ nations, and thereby, it strives to harp upon the necessity to understand the Canadian nation in terms of the multiple histories that inform the lives of its racially diverse population. The KomagataMaru Incident of 1914 and the Air India disaster of 1985 constitute the chapters of history that mainstream ‘white’ Canada would like to push under the carpet, for not only do they have their seeds in the erstwhile sociopolitical and historical premises of both Canada and India, but they also pertain to the racial prejudices that govern the way in which the Euro-Canadian society had been treating the immigrants of Indian origin since the late nineteenth century. With reference to the documentary film Continuous Journey (2004) by Ali Kazimi, The Sorrow and the Terror: The haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987) by Bharati Mukherjee and the novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006) by Anita Rau Badami, the researcher aims to understand the ‘twin disasters’ in the light of the racially biased immigration policies of the Canada government and also certain events of historical importance like Khalistan Movement and Blue Star Tragedy that have had far-reaching impacts on both the two nations. Thus, the paper would strive to highlight the need to conceptualize a ʼnon-White settler national identity’ for the Indo-Canadian diaspora in terms of transnational and transcultural histories that exceed the geopolitical boundaries of both their ‘homeland’ and the ʼnew country’.