Remembering Air India Flight 182: A 40th Anniversary Conference, began Saturday, May 24th, 2025, at McMaster University. Conference co-organizers Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty and Dr. Amber Dean of McMaster’s Department of English & Cultural Studies, McMaster University, opened the conference alongside Dr. Bal Gupta, founder of the Air India Victims’ Families Association, and Shachi Kurl, President of the Angus Reid Institute. Their collective remarks welcomed attendees to the commemorative event and framed the remembrance of the Air India tragedy as a collective, not sectarian, history. Dr. Dean stressed the shared responsibility of remembering, particularly amid heightened nationalism, while Dr. Chakraborty highlighted the persistent silence surrounding the bombing in Canada’s national memory and called for community solidarity to counter erasure and honour the activism and ongoing grief of victims’ families and loved ones. Dr. Gupta further emphasized this call, grounding remembrance within compassion and education rather than revenge, despite the Canadian government’s long-standing indifference towards victims’ families. Concluding the remarks, Kurl stressed the urgency for intergenerational collaboration to rebuild empathy and public understanding of the Air India Flight 182 tragedy. Together, speakers emphasized the importance of remembrance to prevent recurrence and foster reparation, calling for the Air India Flight 182 tragedy to be centered within Canadian public memory.

Following the Remembering Air India Flight 182: A 40th Anniversary Conference opening remarks, the Air India Flight 182 Archive was formally launched at McMaster University. Led by Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty, a Professor in McMaster’s Department of English & Cultural Studies, the team – Maia Lepingwell-Tardieu (Research Coordinator), Jil Shah (Web Developer), Alejandro Franco Briones (Research Assistant – Digitization and Archive Curation), and Frank Wang (Research Assistant – Geographical Mapping) – shared their experiences and reflections on building the physical and digital archive. Dr. Chakraborty opened the presentation, speaking to the creation and aims of the archive. By documenting the ongoing grief of the Air India families, the archive intends to centre the voices of victims’ loved ones, bring their experiences into national consciousness, and preserve the legacy of the lives lost to counter silences caused by injustice. Lepingwell-Tardieu further shared questions surrounding the ethical representation of grief and memorialization that guide the team’s work, alongside efforts to diversify the voices included, move away from traditional forms of archiving, and include artifacts from different mediums. Shah then spoke to the creation of the Air India Flight 182 Archive website, designed to educate the wider public about the tragedy and continuing activism of the families, guided by principles of accessibility, inclusion, and sustainability. Outlining his role as digitization lead, Dr. Franco Briones detailed the processes involved in digitizing the physical archive while honouring the emotional value of the artifacts themselves, before Wang outlined his recent contributions to the project, including the Air India Flight 182 Flightpath Video, and timelines detailing events surrounding the tragedy and subsequent inquiry. Emphasizing a praxis rooted in care and compassion, the team expressed their commitment to preserving and safeguarding the materials and memories housed within the archive and hope for the project to continue to grow.

To centre the voices of those left to mourn and seek justice in the wake of the Air India Flight 182 tragedy, the second panel of Remembering Air India Flight 182: A 40th Anniversary Conference brought together Susheel Gupta, Anita Dhanjal, Deepak Khandelwal, Nisha Thampi, and Jayashree Thampi to reflect on four decades of remembrance and activism. With moderator Dr. Amber Dean of McMaster’s Department of English & Cultural Studies, panelists shared personal experiences of loss and resilience. Dhanjal, who lost her sister, spoke to the ongoing pursuit of justice and the intergenerational trauma that continues to affect the South Asian community. Dr. Gupta, who lost his mother at age twelve, discussed the families’ early struggles for recognition and the creation of the Air India Victims’ Families Association as a space for collective advocacy, while Khandelwal, who lost two sisters, highlighted the government’s persistent failures of support and security, contrasting them with more recent, though still limited, improvements in official response. Jayashree Thampi then reflected on her path from private grief to public activism, recalling her role in establishing memorials across Canadian cities despite systemic barriers and personal hardship. Nisha Thampi further spoke to the absence of meaningful government commemoration and the need to integrate the tragedy into national education, policy, and public memory. The roundtable emphasized the memorials’ power to sustain connection, transmit stories to new generations, and reaffirm resilience through remembrance. As Dr. Dean noted, the Air India families’ decades of advocacy have ensured that the Air India Flight 182 tragedy endures not only as a story of loss, but as a vital part of Canada’s collective history.

The third panel of the conference, Air India Narratives in Teaching, Media, and Government Discourse, featured scholars Dr. Jessica Young, Santa Clara University; Maya Seshia, University of Alberta; and Dr. Meera Nair, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology; and moderator Dr. Steve Hewitt, University of Birmingham; examining how teaching, research, and public engagement contribute to remembering the Air India Flight 182 tragedy. Dr. Jessica Young reflected on her journey from graduate student to scholar, emphasizing how the tragedy, though largely absent from U.S. public memory, elicited deep empathy among her students, particularly students of color who recognized parallels between this erasure and the marginalization of their own histories. She spoke to her encouragement of students to approach history through compassion and creativity, highlighting the importance of archives addressing gaps and countering institutional neglect. Drawing on her long record of scholarship and advocacy, Dr. Meera Nair then spoke to the Canadian government’s persistent failure to recognize Air India Flight 182 as a national tragedy. Decades-long struggles for official acknowledgment reflect the continued erasure of South Asian Canadians within national narratives. Dr. Nair concluded by affirming the dignity and perseverance of the victims’ families, whose activism restores faith in humanity and challenges indifference in the face of ongoing prejudice. Together, panelists reflected on the critical role of education, archives, and creative works in shaping national and transnational memory.

Closing the first day of Remembering Air India Flight 182: A 40^th Anniversary Conference, Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty opened Commemorating the Tragedy through Arts, a dance and poetry performance featuring Sampradaya Dance Creations, Lata Pada, and Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Moderated by Elan Marchinko, a PhD Candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, the session explored how the emotional depths of the Air India tragedy continue to be expressed through literature, music, photography, and dance. Marchinko introduced the performance Children of Air India by Sampradaya Dance Creations, directed by Lata Pada and Suma Suresh, and inspired by Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s poetry collection of the same name. Lata Pada, an internationally recognized artist and recipient of the Order of Canada, lost her husband and two daughters in the Air India tragedy. Through her art, she has dedicated her life to honouring their memory and preserving the collective story of the victims. The performance combined Bharatanatyam and contemporary dance with Saklikar’s poetry to reflect themes of memorialization, grief, and hybridity, capture the complexities of Indo-Canadian identity, and recognize the endurance of loss. Describing the poems as a canvas on which she and her dancers painted through movement, Lata Pada emphasized that dance, as a form of elegy, can be cathartic for both performers and audiences alike. Renée Sarojini Saklikar, a poet, author, and creative writing instructor at Douglas College, then read from her award-winning collection Children of Air India. The book, which honours the children and families who perished, merges research, imagination, and personal witnessing into what she terms docu-poetics. In conversation with Marchinko and Pada, Saklikar reflected on the tension between official history and the silenced, personal stories beneath it, explaining that her work seeks to amplify these erased voices and challenge indifference through art. During the discussion, Pada noted that classical Indian dance is inherently multidisciplinary and naturally suited to conveying complex emotions and histories. Co-creator Suma Suresh added that the Sampradaya team approached the work with deep care, aware of the continuing grief that shapes the tragedy’s remembrance. Concluding the conversation, Saklikar spoke to the metaphor of SONAR, likening its echoes to the lasting emotional impact of mass casualties and the power of collective commemoration to break through silence. The performances together offered a profound reflection on how art sustains memory, turning mourning into movement and words into acts of love.