Toxic Terror and the Cosmopolitanism of Risk in Indra Sinha's Animal's People

• Published in: Cross / Cultures Vol. 182; pp. 371 - 438
• Main Author: Levihn-Kutzler, Karsten
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Leiden Brill Academic Publishers, Inc 03.01.2015
• Subjects: Bildungsroman; Climate change; Culture; Disasters; Globalization; Novels; Postcolonialism; Society
• ISSN: 0294-1426

"37 Given the preference in many contemporary media cultures for spectacular events rather than gradual processes, the demand for closure in narrative formats, and the unimaginably long time-spans involved in scenarios of toxic endangerment, slow violence often eludes representation and becomes erased from the flows of contemporary mediascapes.38 In order to confront the representational challenge posed by this 'antiAristotelian' temporality of toxic contamination, Animal's People makes use of an array of generic conventions, including a picaresque protagonist and a framing story reminiscent of testimonial life writing. [...]elements of noir detective fiction, tragedy, and the Bildungsroman are also present in the novel.39 Some of these tropes follow the conventions of toxic discourse as outlined by Buell: for instance, the text positions Animal as a 'Virgilian' figure explicating the toxic inferno to readers.40 The text also draws on allusions to the Gothic by contrasting the apparent harmlessness of the visible and tangible world with the occult dread of unseen poison:41 "Our wells are full of poison. Yet despite these signals toward factuality, readers are likely to approach the book with an awareness of the actual disaster in Bhopal, which marks the disaster in Khaufpur as fiction. [...]the editor's note, with its claims to objective and unfiltered representation, is a paradox in itself - the reader is left to wonder how much is lost or gained in the act of translation.49 Indeed, if the book were a translation, it would be a substantially flawed one, given the narrator's hybridized jargon and grammar, the recurrence of untranslated Hindi idioms and French passages, and the indigenized spellings of English terms (including, significantly, the word "Inglis" itself). In effect, the narrative voice is not so much a translation as an emulation of what Animal would sound like if he were telling his story in English. [...]the note's proposition of faithful representation draws attention to the fact that we are reading a highly aestheticized rendition of Animal's tale that masks itself as authentic. (4) The two are introduced by a go-between, who is also supposed to act as a translator once Animal has committed his story to the journalist's tape and who will be paid for his services by the journalist. [...]in the limited local setup, the novel already demonstrates that Animal's tale will be handed down a chain of intermediaries, all of whom will profit from what he has to say.50 However, Animal, ever the roguish picaro, is unwilling to cooperate in this arrangement and tape-records a rant of Hindi insults while the uncomprehending journalist watches, thereby temporarily reversing the hierarchy of power.