Chandrima Chakraborty

Remembrance Pedagogy, Transforming Canadian History: The Air India Archive @McMaster University 

The June 23, 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182 en route from Toronto to New Delhi killed 329 people, mostly Canadians of Indian heritage. The bombing resulted in the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Canadian history and has been belatedly acknowledged as “the largest mass murder in Canadian history” and as a “Canadian tragedy” (e.g. public inquiry report; federal government apology). However, this event resonates with few within Canada and globally. 

In this paper I will reflect on how remembrance pedagogy allows me to create openings for conversations on legacies of the Air India bombings that are being erased by official forms of remembering in Canada. I will draw upon archival materials from the Air India archive at McMaster University to illustrate how they offer students and the general public creative modes of engagement with South Asian diasporic lives, i.e., the opportunity to attend to a diasporic history of loss, grief, resistance, and survival. Teaching South Asian history through the lens of a “Canadian tragedy” helps to rupture dominant versions of national history and invites us to build connections between this tragedy and other historical events that are hazily remembered. 

Biography 

Chandrima Chakraborty is Acting Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (Humanities), Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Global Peace, Justice & Health at McMaster University. She held the honorary title of University Scholar at McMaster University (2017-21) and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2019. Her research is on public memory, racial grief, nationalist history, masculinity and religion, with a focus on the literatures and cultures of South Asia and its diaspora. Her publications include, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015), Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning (co-edited 2017) and Anti-Asian Racism and the COVID-19 Pandemic (co-edited forthcoming 2025). She is creating a memory archive of the 1985 Air India bombings: https://airindiaflight182.humanities.mcmaster.ca