Rewriting The Past: Historiographic Metafiction In Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear The Nightbird Call

Abstract

This Paper examines Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call as a work of Historiographic metafiction that interrogates the subtle narratives of partition, 1984 anti-Sikh riots and Indo-Canadian experience. A novel apart from being a representational genre also is an effective and powerful mode of discourse. Negotiations between history and novel are more frequent as compared with other modes of fiction. Novel has become an important medium of problematizing and questioning to a certain extent the discourse of history. . In historical fiction, writers attempted to write undisclosed and concealed chapters of Indian history keeping an alternative perspective towards history with a direct reference to politics, state and nation, Based on Linda Hutcheon ‘s concept of historiographic metafiction, the paper argues that the novel does not merely recount of historical events but subtly interrogates how histories are constructed, remembered and embodied thereby positioning memory as a critical tool for reimagining historiography through the principal characters like Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo. Badami thereby foregrounds how the past operates both as a site of trauma and also positioning memory as vital element for reimagining historiography.