1991
Directed by Srinivas Krishna. Toronto: Divani Films Productions
Masala is the first cinematic attempt to address the Air India bombing. The film stars Krishna as a character named Krishna, whose parents and siblings were killed several years earlier in an airline explosion while travelling back to India for a family visit.
Koppedrayer, K. “Hindu Diasporic Consciousness: Srinivas Krishna’s Masala” 2005
Psychology and Developing Societies. 17.2: 99-120.
Krishna, Srinivas and Thomas Waugh. “Home is not the place one has left Or Masala as ‘a multi-cultural culinary treat’?” 2002
Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films. Brill. 253–272
Ridon, Manjeet. “No Place like Home in Srinivas Krishna’s Masala” 2016
South Asian Review. 37.1: 93-115.
Singh, Raji Soni and Asha Varadharajan. “Between Securocratic Historiography and the Diasporic Imaginary: Framing the Transnational Violence of Air India Flight 182” 2012
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies: 177-195.
1999
Directed by Eisha Marjara. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada
In this docudrama, Marjara explores her unresolved grief at the loss of family members in the Air India bombing with multiple repressed narratives of the diaspora that are intimately connected.
Chakraborty, Chandrima “Model Mourning, Multiculturalism, and the Grief of the Air India Tragedy.” 2017
In Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning. Eds. Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, and Angela Failler. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. 195-220
Failler, Angela. “Remembering the Air India Disaster: Memorial and Counter-Memorial.” 2009
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. 31: 150-176.
Jiwa, Fazeela. “Vamps, Heroines, Otherwise: Diasporic Women Resisting Essentialism.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2011, pp. 127-144. University of Toronto Press. 2011
Vamps, Heroines, Otherwise: Diasporic Women Resisting Essentialism
2008
Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson. CBC
This documentary, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) chronicles the bombing of Air India Flight 182 and its aftermath—a devastating act of terrorism in Canadian history
Angela Failler. “‘War-on-terror’ Frames of Remembrance: The 1985 Air India Bombings after 9/11” 2012
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. 27: 253-270.
1988
Salman Rushdie. Viking Penguin
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses opens with two Indian Muslims falling from the sky, victims of a Sikh terrorist bombing of an Air India plane. The two characters, sole survivors, fall into the Atlantic Ocean—a reference to the 1985 Air India bombing.
Find out more
2006
Anita Rau Badami.Toronto: Knopf
Anita Rau Badami’s, Can you hear the nightbird call? connects the 1947 Partition of British India to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985.
Bhat, Shilpa D. “Sikh diasporic negotiations: Indian and Canadian history in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” 2018
Sikh Formations 14.1: 55-70
Chakraborty, Chandrima. “Unauthorized Pasts and Communities of Memory: Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india” 2016
Dialog 29: 11-27.
Johny, S. “Past Cultural Restrictions in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” and Tamarind Mem” 2014
Journal on English Language Teaching 4.4: 8-26.
Lansdowne, Emma. “Rustling Shadows: Plants as Markers of Historical Violence and Diasporic Identity in Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” Canadian Literature, no. 244, 2021, pp. 57–80.
Canadian Literature 244: 57-80.
Randall, Jennifer. “Jostling with Borders: Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” 2014
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36.2: 33-40.
Sayed, Asma. “Writing Beyond ‘Curry-Books’”: Construction of Racialized and Gendered Diasporic Identities in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” 2020
Canadian Culinary Imaginations. Eds. Shelley Boyd and Dorothy Barenscott. McGill Queen’s University Press. 277-94.
2014
Padma Viswanathan. Toronto: Random House Canada
Padma Viswanathan’s The Ever After of Ashwin Rao addresses the emotional aftereffects of the 1985 Air India bombing. It was a finalist for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Available Online
Dean, Amber. “The Importance of Remembering in Relation: Juxtaposing the Air India and Komagata Maru Disasters” 2012
Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 27: 197-214.
Guillemette, Joel. ‘Infantilism by Loss’: The Ghostly Child, Loss, and Embodied Witnessing in The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Conference Presentation 2016
“History, Memory, Grief: A 30th Air India Anniversary Conference,” McMaster University
2015
Farzana Doctor. Toronto: Dundurn Press
Farzana Doctor’s All Inclusive remembers the Air India tragedy through the ghost of an unknown father.
2021
Sean Patrick Dolan. Friesen Press
Sean Patrick Dolan’s, My Father’s Secret is a thriller that re-imagines the Air India tragedy through the fictional lens of Irish Republican Army inspired terrorism in Canada in the early 1970s.
2002
Uma Parameswaran. New Delhi: Indialog Publications
Uma Parameswaran’s, Sisters at the Well is a collection of poems that begins with three poems on the Air India crash of 1985. This collection was published by Indialog Publications.
Dean, Amber. “The Importance of Remembering in Relation: Juxtaposing the Air India and Komagata Maru Disasters” 2012 Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 27 (2012): 197-214.
2013
Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions
Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections, is a series of elegiac sequences exploring the nature of individual loss in the context of the bombing of Air India Flight 182.
The book won the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award.
Chakraborty, Chandrima. “Unauthorized Pasts and Communities of Memory: Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india.” 2016
McDonald, Tanis. “Un/Authorized Exhibits: Elegiac Necropolitics in Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india.” 2015
Studies in Canadian Literature (SCL/ÉLC) 40.1: 93-110.
Moosa, Farah. “‘Another version of this moment exists’: Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india and the Air India Saga.” 2016
South Asian Review 37.1: 71-91.
Bharati Mukherjee. In The Middleman and Other Stories. New York: Grove Press
This short story represents the grief of families who lost family members in the bombing and the pressure they face to manage their grief civilly and even hide it.
Bowen, Deborah. “Spaces of Translation: Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief’” 1997
ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 28.3: 47-60.
Chakraborty, Chandrima. “Official Apology, Creative Remembrances, and Management of the Air India Tragedy” 2015
Studies in Canadian Literature 40.1: 111-130.
Chakraborty, Chandrima. “Model Mourning, Multiculturalism, and the Grief of the Air India Tragedy.” 2017
In Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning. Eds. Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, and Angela Failler. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. 195-220.
Ribkoff, Fred. “Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief” and the Politics of Mourning in the Aftermath of the Air India Bombing” 2012
In Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal and Arun Mukherjee. Brill. 505–522.
Somani, Alia. “What is Remembered and What is Forgotten?: South Asian Diasporic Histories and the Shifting National Imaginary” 2015
Studies in Canadian Literature (SCL/ÉLC). 40.1: 74–92.
2001
Directed and choreographed by Lata Pada. Composition by Timothy Sullivan and R.A. Ramamani. Visual design by Cylla von Tiedemann. Dramaturgy by Judith Rudakoff. Mississauga, ON: Sampradaya Dance Creations, 200
This autobiographical show combines music, classical Indian dance, video and archival sound to express the loss and grief of Pada losing her husband and two daughters on Air India Flight 182, sixteen years after the bombing. Lata uses Bharatanatyam (a classical Indian dance form) as a cathartic tool to reclaim her life.
McNaughton, Susan. “Revealed by fire, one woman’s narrative of transformation” Fall 2010
InTensions Journal. 4
Pada, Lata. “Revealed by Fire: From the Personal to the Universal” 2011
Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 146, pp. 45-49.
Marchinko, Elan. “Mediating Memories of the 1985 Air India Bombings: A Critical Dance with Lata Pada’s Revealed By Fire” 2017
Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, and Angela Failler, ed. Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, pp. 167-182
Pada, Lata. “Revealed by Fire, Artist Statement” 2017
Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, and Angela Failler, ed. Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, pp. 183-186.
Parameswaran, Uma. “An Invocation Dance for Lata” 2017
Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, and Angela Failler, ed. Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, pp.187-188
2010
Photo series, independently produced.
In this artistic commemoration, Marjara, who lost her mother and sister in the bombing, creates eight pieces juxtaposing official documents and media images with family photographs and personal effects recovered from her mother’s and sister’s bodies postmortem. This series comments on the troubling history of the tragedy fusing together grief, anger and remembrance.
Angela Failler with artwork by Eisha Marjara. “‘Remember Me Nought’: The 1985 Air India Bombings and Cultural Nachträglichkeit.” Public: Art/Culture/Ideas, vol. 42, 2010, pp. 113-124
Weathervane Edmonton: Spring River records.
A personal song dedicated to those on-board Air India Flight 182.
Listen on Spotify:
Directed by Tom Creed, music composed by Jürgen Simpson, 6-11 Nov. 2015, Fei and Milton Wong Experiential Theatre, Vancouver.
Based on Saklikar’s poetry collection children of air india, Irish composer Jürgen Simpson produced an innovative theatrical experience. Music, voice, poetry and projections address multiple issues related to the Air India bombing.
Read Article Here
Learn More About Jürgen Simpson Here
Read more with an article “Music Review: Contemporary and Unflinching: air india [REDACTED]”
Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Swabhumi (“Homeland”), Bangla/Bengali.
Kalwant Singh Nadeem Parmar, Inder Jll. Nuv Yug Press (New Delhi), 2004, Punjabi.
Kalwant Singh Nadeem Parmar, Rape. Chetna Parkashan, 2014, Punjabi.
Amrit Diwana, Punjabi.