Seeing double in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People: Local toxins, global toxicity and the universal Bhopal

Abstract

This article explores the way in which Indra Sinha’s (2007) novel Animal’s People showcases the challenges of evidencing mass suffering in an increasingly global arena. Finding that the globalized context of international law is grounded in a discourse of comparison, it argues that Sinha’s representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster veers between authenticating atrocity by evidencing its universality, putting it within the legislative purview of international human rights, and simultaneously evidencing its uniqueness, thus taking it outside the global economy. The article shows how the fallout of atrocity in Bhopal, the product of globalized corporation gone terribly wrong, gets caught between local and global spheres of legal redress, and it enquires into the ways in which a body of postcolonial literature navigates between the universal and the particular to make the experience of one local atrocity legible to a global audience.

Keywords:

• Bhopal
• atrocity
• human rights
• Indra Sinha
• Animal’s People
• globalism

Notes

1. The discourse of genocide studies and the terrain of international law are characterized by debates about the nature of comparison and the degree to which an individual atrocity must fit the requisite criteria stipulated by the terms of human rights. This concern was immanent in the genocide and human rights legislation established in the wake of the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, a comparative legal scholar who coined the term in 1945, sought to break away from known forms, thus coining the term “genocide” as a new word that would identify a new form of atrocity. The major debate in the growing field of comparative atrocity in legal and academic contexts continues to center on the question of similitude, and how closely post-1945 atrocities must resemble the form of atrocity set out by international law in order to warrant response and intervention by the international community. See Power (2013), Rosenbaum (2009) and Van Schaack (1999).

2. Upendra Baxi (1998) qualifies “modern” human rights as distinct because it is marked by what he describes as “the language of exclusion and inclusion” (127), which relies on the assumption that both the nature of the human and the nature of human rights violations are universal, that they bear universally recognizable markings, and the production of “enforceable norms”. Drawing a parallel between modern human rights and postmodernism, Baxi asks after the tension between human rights as an overdetermined form, or “meta narrative”, that predetermines any individual human rights issue, and locates this concern in the universalizing discourse of human rights the concern in the discourse human rights over form itself.

3. Concerns about the nature of comparative atrocity play a central role in post-1945 comparative genocide studies. The stakes are representational and political; since the Holocaust comes to represent an archetypal form of atrocity in popular culture, and since its form emerged as a legal model used within international legal structures as one that codified the form of human rights violation recognized by the international community, subsequent events of atrocity after 1945 must be made legible in terms of representational likeness in order to substantiate an appeal to the international community for recognition and redress.