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.

Scholarly Publications

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.

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.

Scholarly Publications

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

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

Scholarly Publications

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.

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.

Available Online

Scholarly 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.

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.

Available Online

Scholarly Publications

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.

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.

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.

Scholarly Publications

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

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.

Related Publications

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

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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.

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Learn More About Jürgen Simpson Here

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