Communal Violence, Trauma and Dislocation: Females of Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Keywords:
Common Man, Politics, Secular, Trauma, ViolenceAbstract
Women have always been a victim of one or another type of violence whether it is communal, political, social, or domestic. Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? in its backdrop has communal violence which happened in India and across borders where women figure is at the receiving end. The three female characters Bibiji, Leela and Nimmo face victimization and trauma due to the Sikh separatist movement which has its echoes in Canada also, and the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots in India as Bibiji and Nimmo suffer the loss of men in their lives and Leela has to lose her life in air tragedy. The violence travels across distance and space and affects these women irrespective of their location, community, or social status. The present paper offers to critically analyze Badami’s work and explores how communalism is essentially a politicized event that eventually victimizes the innocent and helpless commoners specifically the women who bear the brunt of it.
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