“A Memento Mori Tale: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the Politics of Global Toxicity.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25.1 (Winter 2018): 115-133. (original) (raw)
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The titular character of Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People has been called posthuman, an environmental picaro, and the embodiment of systemic dehumanization that belies the premise of global human rights. These readings are in service of a world systems critique that highlights the production of suffering in the poverty-stricken periphery as a result of unchecked corporate offshoring from the core. However, there is less discussion of the ecocritical stakes of Animal’s environmental identity, especially the extensive forest hallucination in the novel’s final pages that contrasts his isolating slum life, an experience that first dismantles and then rebuilds his posthuman persona. This article reads the forest in the context of Indian cultural and political history as a transformative space that forces him to relate to his surroundings in a new way. By examining the environmental relations taking shape in the forest, readers can foresee a new vision of local identity formation, one more equipped to be inclusive of nonhuman co-constituents than commonly accepted modes of either national or global inclusion.
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India's history is interspersed with human rights abuses, particularly in conflict zones. Poverty, social hierarchy, institutional weaknesses, corruption, marginalisation of the various minorities/subalterns and an inaccessible justice system has to a large extent made India a democracy only in name and paper. Human lives in India are valued differently and human rights have become a far cry for people living in the margins. The story of the innocent victims of the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) industrial disaster at Bhopal in 1984 is a testimony to this. The deaths and sufferings due to the diseases caused by this man-made (industrial) disaster sadly remain mere statistics in the pages of the nation's history. Indra Sinha's Animal's People is a narrative which exposes the human rights abuses of the poor, marginalized and disempowered people whose lives apparently matters less to the state. Sinha's Animal is a metaphor of human rights abuse by the state and the society at large. Out of the countless number of stories that has emerged from the embers of this monumental disaster Sinha's novel is significant, because it is a narrative that exposes the question of what it means to be human and the lack of (human) rights of the marginalized people. Animal's People is an alternate history of India.
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This paper reads Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007) for its representation of the impasse that develops in the wake of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984) as its victims wait endlessly for justice. I examine the narrative form that the impasse takes in the novel, detailing how the stagnancy and frustration of the impasse shape the novel's narrative movement. I track the different negotiations between optimism and cynicism that shape people's attachment to justice in the novel's world. The tensions and correlations between these modes of cynicism and optimism serve to trace the affective and political contours of the impasse while offering a critique of the structural impossibilities of movement. I examine how two temporalities-the suspended time of the impasse and the toxic temporality of the poisons-intersect in the novel. At the intersection between the two is the impasse of the Anthropocene.
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The world’s worst industrial disaster to date, the Bhopal disaster which happened in 1984 in Bhopal, India still causes a threat to the environment in Bhopal, thus people who live there. Indra Sin- ha’s Animal’s People fictionalizes this disaster with a 19-year old protagonist and narrator whose spine is twisted and forced to walk on all fours due to the toxic gas spill from the factory of a transnational company. In this paper, I offer a reading of the novel and some of its paratexts in relation to the contemporary posthuman criticism. In the first section which is called “The Intersection of Disability Studies and Environmental Humanities in Animal’s Narrative”, I examine the trans-corporeality between the environment and the disabled subjects in regards to Animal’s and other characters' specific cases. In the upcoming section, I discuss how the novel is post-humanist and post- anthropocentric. The convergence of humanity and animality in Animal’s becoming makes him a hybrid posthuman subject. Firstly looking at the narrative and the generic technique of the novel, in the last section, I discuss the formal multiplicities the novel and its paratexts embrace. Along with the Animal’s multiple identities which are subaltern, human, non-human, and disabled, the multiplicities other than his own subjectivity are significant in constructing the posthumanist frame of Ani- mal’s People. All things considered, the novel exemplifies the challenge to Eurocentric Humanism, and thus it reconsiders what a human is.
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