Between Securocratic Historiography and the Diasporic Imaginary: Framing the Transnational Violence of Air India Flight 182

Abstract

In June 2010, the Canadian government published its Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182. Eight months later, in February 2011, a mass grave containing the remains of thirty-two Sikhs who perished in the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 was discovered in the Rewari District of Haryana, India. Originating in opposite parts of the world, these two events and their aftermaths may seem to have had little to do with each other; however, we relate them to a context that underscores the extent to which Canada and India as secular democratic nation-states are complicit in the transnational production of violence. The first part of our essay focuses on Bruce Hoffman’s “Study of International Terrorism,” which opens the commission’s research volumes. Hoffman argues that the Air India bombing “merely perpetuated a cycle of anti-state, inter-communal violence that fed off itself ” in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the subsequent massacres of thousands of Sikhs throughout India (2010: 34). We critique the taxonomy of secular and religious terrorism in which Hoffman’s analysis is inscribed, because it elides the managerial role of the nation-state in historiographies of violence occurring within, across and beyond the borders of India and Canada. The second part of our essay interprets Srinivas Krishna’s Masala (1991) and “When Lions Roar” (2011), among other texts, as cultural refractions of violence and the “management of grief ” (Bharati Mukherjee) that continue to mark the events of 1984 and 1985 as “unhoused” rather than distinctly Canadian episodes (quoted in Bowen 1997: 59). We pursue our analysis beyond the events themselves to investigate how they are portrayed in flawed historiographies like Hoffman’s and in transnational cultural texts that resist the implications of Hoffman’s analysis. We thus seek to represent not only the cycle of violence but also the “willed, civilised response” to it (Ghosh 2005).