For its three main female characters, the devastating sequence of events begins with the violence unleashed by the 1947 Partition of the Punjab province between India and Pakistan. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? takes readers through half a century of subcontinental political upheaval and into the Indo-Canadian diaspora. So for India-born, now Montreal-based author Anita Rau Badami, grappling with Air India and related 20th-century atrocities in her third novel was a strong impulse, but not an easy one. Now young Surrey-bred author Ranj Dhaliwal, who exposes South Asian gangsterhood in his recently released novel Daaku (New Star), is getting flack for saying he believes some local Sikh temple leaders instructed local hoods to do some judicious roughing-up. Or the death threats received by Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan, author of Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder, for covering the same territory. Just remember the assassination of former Indo-Canadian Times editor Tara Singh Hayer, fatally shot in 1998 for his Air India probings. Writing about the politics of B.C.'s Indo-Canadian community is not something to take on lightly. The theory of new historicism has been used with regard to an analysis of power paradigms contributing in re-fashioning the identity of characters in the said novels through varied discourses floating in the society in the chapters of the thesis.Anita Rau Badami: 'a book that had to be written.' These incidents as shown by the authors have gone a long way in fiction to negotiate with history. Racist incidents have also been included.

An analysis has been done to show the hardships suffered by women at the altar of patriarchy and the turbulences suffered by the Sikh community in general under the said four incidents.

All these issues, as referred to in the twentieth century, highlight Sikh community with regards to colonialism and diasporic ethnic group politics in the concerned period.

This thesis is an attempt to negotiate between history and fiction with regard to new historicist readings of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers and Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? It delves, into four historical incidents namely Komagata Maru (1914), Partition of India (1947), Operation Blue Star (1984), and Air India Flight 182 Bombing (1985), through a parallel study of nonfiction and fiction as these form the background subject of the novels taken for study.

Can you hear the nightbird call