The Fifty-Fifty Man: Understanding Diaspora through Indo-Canadian Literature

Indo-Canadian Diasporic literatures deal with the displacement of identities and the cultural assimilation that occurs over generation and with re-discovering the ‘hyphenated-identities’ that forms a major part of a diaspora. The constant conflict between ‘homeland’ and the ‘host-land’ creates a feeling of displacement that becomes a central theme for diasporic literatures. Indo-Canadian diasporic people bond over their shared nostalgia of the homeland – they experience a sort of parallel existence with one foot in the homeland and the other in the host-land. Through the two prominent novels of Indo-Canadian diaspora – Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear The Nightbird Call? And Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance we understand the diasporic identity and what it entails. We will study how the characters in both the novels are all effected by the socio-political and economic conditions of India during the 1975 Emergency and how it alters each character. Badami’s novel moves between the Sikhs living in India and Sikhs living in Canada and the plight of them, while Mistry deals with Hindu - Muslim conflicts. This paper focuses on how reading these Canadian literatures during a worldwide Covid-19 pandemic changes one’s understanding of diasporic literature, cultures and diasporic identities. In a covid-19 pandemic situation when many Indians living in Canada are horrified about the conditions in their homeland, their helplessness for not being able to visit, relying on virtual world/online modes of communication to keep themselves up to date on the conditions in their homeland. Reading Canadian literatures with historical contexts of crises, mass deaths, economic and sociological downfall, political crisis etc., at a time when we ourselves are undergoing or rather surviving through a worldwide pandemic with countless deaths, economic downfall etc., shapes or alters the approach towards diasporic literatures giving us a better understanding of Canadian literatures.