Colonialism, Diasporic Politics and Alternate History in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers and Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

Abstract

Shauna Singh Baldwin in her novel What the Body Remembers (1999) and Anita Rau Badami in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006) take up diverse treatises which are advantageous in the construction of subjectivity of a postcolonial subject. The present article deals with Baldwin’s representation of the nation and Badami’s depiction of politics, which trespass borders and affect diaspora Sikhs and members of other communities. Colonialism has been one of the causes of communalism which resulted in distortions in the historical representations of the events. Both the novelists amidst religious and historical landscapes of India also make political statements in their distinctive ways. It is interesting to analyze these statements from the perspective of postcolonial discourse as both authors belong to a period when literary texts and histories are being re-examined with a counter-narrativistic assessment. Both the authors bring out the Sikh perspective on the colonial and racist policies of the British in India and the colonial/postcolonial racist attitude of majority communities in foreign lands towards ethnic minorities through the characters taken in the novels under study. Politics of extremism and fundamentalism is the crux of both the novels. The English language has been shown to have been given a special status in the colonial regime. How language becomes a tool of both subversion and oppression is an important theme in both novels. The novels interrogate written history from alternate perspectives through the turmoil of time and space in which the novels are written. Both Badami and Baldwin conceive their characters presenting them as products of their time, place and environment.