Real and Fictional Bodies In and Around Animal’s People, or: What Difference Will a Story Make?

by Lucy S.


My story you wanted, said you’d put it in a book. I did not want to talk about it. I said is it a big deal, to have my story in a book? I said, I am a small person not even human, what difference will my story make? You told me that sometimes the stories of small people in this world can achieve big things, this is the way you buggers always talk.

I said, many books have been written about this place, not one has changed anything for the better, how will yours be different? You will bleat like all the rest. You’ll talk of rights, laws, justice. Those words sound the same in my mouth as in yours but they don’t mean the same…

Animal’s People (3)


This is an attempt to respond to the questions Animal raises here near the beginning of Indra Sinha’s novel. Not to answer them easily and directly, for it could only be a false ease and superficial quick, straightforward answer that could reply to these questions that way. These questions which can make us doubt and despair before we even begin say in one way or another: what is the point? And they are fundamental questions which face writers who write as and with “small people in this world” against giant, hierarchical organizations and systems which others form and maintain to accumulate ever more staggering amounts of money and power. The writer is in the same position as Animal, asking: “what difference will my story make?” The writer surely faces the questions and skeptical challenges Animal directs at the “Jarnalis,” questions which come from within, without, or both, at many points in the writing process, but especially at the beginning. “[H]ow will yours be different?” Animal must have interrogated Sinha this way as he came to life as a part of the novelist’s consciousness and Sinha wrote him into the world. Perhaps Animal begins as “a small person not even human,” not because he walks on both hands and feet, his back twisted and bent from exposure as a newborn to the poison gas released one night from the Kampani’s factory, but in part because he is a character in a story. And characters in stories tend to enter the world as small people, “not even human”; they are words on a page which the author hopes to transform for readers into real humans and real concerns.

“Many books have been written about this place,” says Animal, “how will yours be different?” It is true – many newspaper stories, many articles, and various books. Before and beyond the characters in Sinha’s story, there is a real counterpart to this novel, a backdrop against which Sinha writes – but no, not a backdrop – rather, a world. It is not in back of the story; it is the story which is utterly immersed in that world. And it is this world, the same one in which we, whoever and wherever we are, will read the story.


On the night of December 2-3, 1984, some of us in this world experienced a catastrophe. It was one of the worst industrial disasters that had ever happened – perhaps the worst, if devastation and suffering should compete for levels of horror. Hundreds of thousands of real, already human people along with many animals and everything else were exposed to poison gas in what Sinha has fictionalized as Khaufpur, and what is Bhopal. The Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) had constructed a pesticide plant there in the 1970s, in a part of the city not zoned for hazardous industry, where hundreds of thousands of poor people lived. It was maintained with far lower safety standards than those at the corporation’s “sister” West Virginia, U.S. plant. That night, because of the failure of various points in the system, the facility let loose into the air over forty tons of deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) (Broughton). The gas killed 4,000-10,000 people within hours to days, an estimated 15,000- 20,000 in the years since, and injured over 550,000 people, according to the Indian government’s figures (Broughton; Sharma “Bhopal: 20 Years On”; “Union Carbide not liable…”).[1] UCC insists that the total number killed by the gas is 3000, with another 102,000 permanently disabled, and used these figures as part of their justification for a 1989 $470 million settlement, mediated by the Indian Supreme Court and meted out by the Indian government to claimants. This has been estimated to be an average of $2,200 for families of the dead, or, as Sinha points out in his interview at the end of the novel (quoting Outlook India) an average of $500 for “a lifetime of misery” to the surviving victims. This misery includes “charred lungs, poisoned kidneys and deformed foetuses” (Broughton; Sinha “A Conversation…”). The water and land at and around the site remain heavily polluted. A survey approximately two decades after the disaster reported that 91% of residents were drinking water contaminated by the abandoned factory’s toxins leaking into the aquifer (Sharma “Bhopal’s Contamination…”). That is one obviously and necessarily incomplete piece of the larger story in which Sinha’s novel exists.


Other pieces of this story extend out into a multitude of directions and interconnected issues. When I noted in the previous paragraph that the poison gas poured into Bhopal’s air that night “because of the failure of various points in the system,” I meant primarily that the mechanical devices and safety procedures had failed because of a chain of decisions and events, many of which were driven by the company’s efforts to cut down on plant costs. Two petrochemical engineers, utilizing UCC’s own March 1985 investigative report, have retraced in meticulous but generally graspable detail what happened that night and before that night, mechanically speaking, to allow the gas to escape. (Bloch & Jung). But “the system” might equally refer to not only the Indian or U.S. but global legal and economic system in which UCC and other corporations operate, a system which failed so many people in Bhopal that night and has failed them to such a massive extent since then. Moreover, it is a system which fails the vast majority of us all. Some examples of systemic failure connected to this disaster include the more specific series of steps linked to but beyond the purely mechanical which led to the release of the murderous gas that night; the choice to manufacture products containing MIC in any place; the construction of the pesticide plant in that Bhopal location without any reliable knowledge or democratic decision-making about its presence or operations by the people living around the site; and what it is about the corporate form that places it inherently at odds with living bodies.


What went wrong at Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal was set in motion long before that December night in 1984 by the market forces and logic of capitalism as they played out in that particular situation. As noted before, the facility was built in a highly populated neighborhood not zoned for hazardous manufacturing. This is in part because the plan was to import smaller amounts of MIC from the U.S. to then mix with other chemicals to manufacture the insecticide Sevin. But “pressure from competition in the chemical industry led UCIL [UCC’s subsidiary, Union Carbide India Limited] to implement … the manufacture of raw materials and intermediate products [including the highly toxic MIC] for formulation of the final product within one facility. This was inherently a more sophisticated and hazardous process” (Broughton). By July 1984, the company was losing money manufacturing Sevin at one-fourth production capacity because “[w]idespread crop failures and famine on the subcontinent in the 1980s led to increased indebtedness and decreased capital for farmers to invest in pesticides.” UC put the plant up for sale, but when it did not sell quickly, they began to scale way back on operations, including safety measures, in order to cut down on the costs of maintaining the plant. This in turn created the mechanical conditions which led to the poisonous gas leak (Broughton).


MIC, a key ingredient in Sevin, is highly toxic, dangerous at levels over 0.02 parts per million (Fortun 121). It is produced in just one place in the U.S. – the community of Institute, West Virginia in the Kanawha Valley, a place with far higher than average cancer rates [2] (Fortun 85-86). In May 2009, a West Virginia newspaper carried this commentary by former teacher Nancy Swan: “MIC Storage at Institute, WV: A Ticking Bomb.” Swan parallels the situation to Bhopal prior to the leak, noting that journalist Rajkumar Keswan repeatedly published warnings starting two years before Bhopal’s disaster. Swan herself, along with other teachers and students, suffered permanent damage from MIC poisoning in 1985 at a Mississippi school when the board let roofers spray MIC (with other chemicals) on foam roofing during the school day. A 2008 explosion at the Bayer plant in Kanawha Valley (with MIC onsite) led her to submit her piece. Perhaps the report released in April 2009 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the explosion further impelled her. The report “found that the August 2008 explosion at Bayer’s plant in Institute, West Virginia, ‘came dangerously close’ to igniting several tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC…” (Woellert). The news article provides a summation of the accident:

On Aug. 28, a pressurized waste tank containing Methomyl exploded, sending a fireball hundreds of feet into the air. One Bayer employee was killed instantly and another suffered third- degree burns and died more than a month later. Eight other people, including six emergency responders and two contract employees, reported symptoms of chemical exposure.

Communication repeatedly broke down during and after the explosion. Safety equipment and cameras had been removed or dismantled, and company officials falsely told emergency personnel that day that “no dangerous chemicals had been released.” Most alarmingly: “The explosion ruptured and threw a 2.5-ton steel tank through the plant. Had it struck the MIC container, ‘the subcommittee today might be examining a catastrophe rivaling the Bhopal disaster’” (Woellert). Producing, storing, and applying MIC and other lethal chemicals imperils workers and nearby community residents as well as the people, other living beings, and whole environments anywhere these products are made or used. When did we democratically choose this?


At the same time, the poor bear far more than their ‘share’ of the toxic burden. This is the case within the U.S., and is even worse – much worse – for the most destitute people around the world. Corporations and their powerful political allies undeniably use poor people’s lack of economic and political power along with the economic desperation created by capitalism (and the legacy or current manifestations of colonialism) to force dangerous facilities and toxic materials into places where they would never be freely chosen by a majority. Lawrence Summers’ infamous 1991 memo (while Chief Economist of the World Bank) arguing that the World Bank should be “encouraging MORE migration of dirty industries to the LDCs” (less developed countries) is a particularly glaring example. His argument is that they are “vastly UNDER-polluted” (euphoric caps in these excerpts all his) since statistically many of the people in the poorest countries are likely to die for other reasons before they would get the cancers which the added toxins would increase among them (Summers). Apparently, addressing the causes of these premature deaths is out of the equation for Summers and his colleagues. After the leaked memo caused an uproar in some circles, Summers then claimed that it was only meant sarcastically (“Furor on Memo at World Bank”), but the memo’s argument harmonizes with the neoliberal privatization and profit-above-all positions pushed by Summers and entities like the World Bank and IMF then and now. Furthermore, it squares with the continued enactment of just what he advises: dumping “dirty industries” disproportionately onto the poorest people. If only his memo’s expressed premises and practices were really all just a big joke that no one would ever really consider.


Focusing on the particularly horrific values or actions of one individual or one corporation matters, but it is important to also realize that these people and companies behave according to the standard logic and legal structures of capitalism and the corporation. Law professor and author Joel Bakan recounts some of his interview with iconic economist and champion of business and privatization Milton Friedman in which Friedman explains what a corporation is, in his view:


“A corporation is the property of its stockholders,” he told me. “Its interests are the interests of its stockholders. Now, beyond that, should it spend the stockholders’ money for purposes which it regards as socially responsible but which it cannot connect to its bottom line? The answer I would say is no.” There is but one “social responsibility” for corporate executives, Friedman believes: they must make as much money as possible for their shareholders. This is a moral imperative. Executives who choose social and environmental goals over profits – who try to act morally – are, in fact, immoral (34).

Bakan further explains the situation for corporations, as legal creations:

Law dictates what their directors and managers can do, what they cannot do, and what they must do. And, at least in the United States and other industrialized countries, the corporation, as created by law, most closely resembles Milton Friedman’s ideal model of the institution: it compels executives to prioritize the interests of their companies and shareholders above all others and forbids them from being socially responsible – at least genuinely so (35).

Cultural anthropology professor Kim Fortun describes them this way:

By law, corporations are persons enjoying the rights promised by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution. Corporate identity, legally defined, has many of the attributes of the Enlightenment subject: while constituted through multiple bilateral contracts with employees, vendors, customers, and others, the overarching responsibility of a corporation is singular – maximization of shareholder wealth. In other words, the multiplicity of social relations constitutive of the corporation is reduced to a single objective – profit maximization” (104).

This objective explains why those at Union Carbide chose to negotiate a crassly inadequate $470 million settlement when, as Edward Broughton notes: “Had compensation in Bhopal been paid at the same rate that asbestosis victims were being awarded in US courts by defendants including UCC … the liability would have been greater than the $10 billion the company was worth and insured for in 1984.” Paying as little as could be gotten away with was corporate ‘morality’ for its executives and shareholders. The system’s logic made UCC stock immediately rise $2 per share, or 7%, when the settlement was reached (Broughton; Fortun 34). The mentality wrought in this system speaks via a New York Times financial analyst who interpreted the settlement and its accompanying stock gains this way: “[P]sychologically, it’s terrific. Financially, it’s reasonable. This relieves the pressure on Union Carbide and the stigma” (qtd in Fortun 118). Psychologically terrific for whom? Financially reasonable for whom? Whose pressure is relieved? This normalized corporate profit obeisance explains why the UCC corporate website still lists the gas leak this way: “caused by an act of sabotage, results in tragic loss of life” (Union Carbide Corporation) when Bloch, Jung, and others have utilized UCC’s own reports to retrace what went wrong. Admitting blame interferes in the largest sense with corporate public relations tied to profit and may put companies at risk for further claims. This in turn explains the otherwise insane reasoning expressed by UCC’s CEO Warren Anderson in a 1990 company statement. Anderson asserts that from the beginning “we were willing to take moral responsibility for the tragedy and that we would do everything in our power to help,” including an offer of a “prompt and fair” $20 million settlement (Fortun 98-99). What can moral responsibility possibly mean here for CEOs who must define morality in Friedman’s terms? In what ways could this moral responsibility possibly manifest? Individuals within the company may privately ‘feel sorry’ about “the tragedy.” But despite the legal assertion that corporations are ‘persons,’ corporations are unable to respond ‘morally’ or feel anything.


Judith Butler asks, ““What is real? Whose lives are real?” She says that “[t]hose who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization.” And she asks, “Does violence take place on condition of that unreality?” (33 Precarious Life) With these questions, Butler taps into old, deep, common recognitions which have prompted many of us, even as children, to say things such as, “They act like those other people [or we ourselves] aren’t even real,” about groups of people who in some way harm other groups of people, by discrimination, imprisonment, bombings, forcibly taking and then withholding too much of the means of life or joy, and any of the situations which those with highly unequal levels of power would not impose on those who feel most “real” to them. We know, then – we know deeply – that safety and quality of life are somehow bound up with being seen as “real.”


This corporate- and capitalist-inverted system in which the unreal abstractions and placeholders of profit, money, and corporate interest are treated as real while actual people’s lives as well as whole ecosystems can be derealized into acronyms like LDCs (lesser-developed-countries) by corporate-occupied brains like Summers – this is the failure that allows a catastrophe like Bhopal to happen and then be responded to so poorly initially and in the long run. It is in this reality that Sinha writes his novel and faces Animal’s questions. “[M]any books have been written about this place, not one has changed anything for the better, how will yours be different?”


Other questions emerge from this one. What would this novel be different than? Even if it fails to be “different,” there is at least an ideal (almost Platonic) “different” which this points toward. But is difference itself what is needed? If so, what kind? There are presumed binaries built into Animal’s question. They are some of the myriad binaries which the novel interrogates. One may be the implied contrast between all that has been written about “this place” which has not “changed anything for the better” and the opposite: the book which would perhaps change everything (which Animal knows his story is unlikely to do). Yet this novel certainly does not leave readers concluding that nothing really makes a difference. Two binaries embedded in his questions in the opening passage, then, are: failure/success and same/different. The presence of Elli, the American doctor, in Khaufpur provides one example of the unusable nature of these binaries. If nothing ever written before has made any difference at all, what is Elli doing there? Hasn’t her decision to go set up a clinic there been motivated in at least some way by stories of some kind about what happened and the continued inability of so many to get adequate medical treatment? And it cannot be denied that Elli makes a difference in this story of Animal’s. Yet this story does not center on Elli; she is one character among many who matter. What is difficult to express about Sinha’s novel is the ways in which many common, sometimes cherished tropes are present – the ‘saving’ idealistic, naïve American helper in a poorer country; the charismatic, idealistic leader (Zafar); some rough, cynical characters with good hearts (Animal, Farouq); a sort of courtly, and not so courtly, love (Animal to Nisha); and more – yet Sinha does not invert our expectations. Or rather, he subverts them by not inverting what we expect to be inverted. The question becomes not whether the novel is predictable or unpredictable ; the question is whether that binary or any of them even work or matter. In what ways have these binaries themselves participated in propping up injustices as distractive false areas of focus? We might say that this is art interrogating the aesthetic rather than the ethical response – except that aesthetics are utterly bound up in this experience. Thus, all of these dichotomous ideas and categories become (as they should be) thoroughly entangled, unable to be artificially segregated.


Animal says to the Jarnalis – and Sinha may have said to himself: “You will bleat like all the others” (3). Like so many of Animal’s statements, it is a blunt, cynical assertion, a challenge to make it not true, and a carefully guarded hope for an outcome well beyond the limits of only bleating. But from this early moment, though Animal repeatedly insists elsewhere upon a distinction between humans and animals – and that he is an animal, not a human – we find the boundary already blurred. The journalist, Sinha, and all the rest who have written or will write or purport to make a difference will bleat like sheep, goats, calves, or children crying piteously or in fear of wolves – or will whine, or babble, or prate (“bleat” OED). Already, then, we speak and write as both animals and weak humans when we take on the predatory entities which continually gorge on lives, labor, and ecosystems to enlarge their profits and power, yet this acceptance of weakness and inadequacy is what paradoxically makes Animal and the others (as well as the rest of us) strong enough. This is part of what Zafar means later when, as the organized resistance leader who has just achieved a small but new and amazing victory against the Kampani in court, he says, “Having nothing we can never be defeated” (54).


To continue along this line, if we think about the strategy of ‘taking it back’ – that is, taking a derogatory term meant to disempower and degrade, and utilizing it to instead empower ourselves while draining the ability of others to use it against us – this is what Animal has done by insisting on his identity as an animal rather than a human being. And it is on a larger scale what Sinha is doing here. It has become a commonality to describe the dehumanization of groups of people by saying that they are considered and treated as animals. But the ability to play these categories against each other participates in these atrocities. (And who among us finds Descartes’ nailing of animal paws to walls and cutting them open in various ways while alive ‘not so bad’ because the victims were ‘only’ animals?) What Sinha has done by putting this protagonist Animal front and center in his novel – this person who blurs the boundaries between human and animal and who elicits from us our own realization of our own blurred boundaries (‘bleaters’ that we are) – is work to remove that categorization of animal as a means to disregard and destroy some groups of lives. Thus, when Nisha voices her anguish at trying to appeal to an inadequate and too often corrupt justice system by saying that “our government’s of no use, courts are of no use, appeals to humanity are no use, because these people are not human, they’re animals,” the inversion does not work. As readers will, especially under the desperate circumstances, Animal lets it go (having his own vital agenda at that moment – his marriage proposal), but nonetheless he (like readers) consciously realizes that he is “ignoring her insult to animals” (332).


At the same time, Animal’s character demonstrates that animal does not mean passive recipient of persecution; animal does not inherently mean victim. Animal’s name was bestowed upon him by the other orphanage kids when he fought back. A boy kneed him in the face; Animal was so angry at the pain that he bit the boy’s leg until he tasted blood and bit harder. The kids then yelled “Jaanvar, jungli jaanvar,” or “animal, wild animal” (16). What does it mean when we realize that this animal fights back and he speaks – that he is able to tell his story, which is another way of fighting back – while the human Jarnalis, like all the rest, bleats? Who is the animal; who is the human; and in what ways do these categories matter as we repeatedly encounter these mergings and blurrings over the course of Sinha’s novel?

What Animal resists from the beginning is being reduced to precisely what he, in one sense, is: just a story or a story character – whether for the Jarnalis or for the readers of Sinha’s novel. His questions work to shame those making him a means to their ends, when those ends do nothing for him and his people in his part of Khaufpur. He records himself, not in any divorced- from-real-life notion of ‘art for art’s sake,’ but rather, art for his sake, and gradually, art for all of their sakes, but for our sake as well if we have blurred and merged with Animal and his people somewhere along the way. This blurring and merging – this reading with – is more than just, in a general sense, ‘being on the same side’ of large, interconnected issues. An unfortunate example of the latter is Rob Nixon’s extended focus on Animal’s People in the first chapter of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon does not ‘read with’ the characters – a position which I believe is crucial to making Sinha’s novel poignant and powerful for readers. An example is Nixon’s own ‘gaze’ on Animal and his use of him as a literary trope. This is, of course, part of what literary scholars do, but at times, rather than deepening readers’ experience with and understanding of the novel, his interpretation feels like a performance for its own sake that sits apart from the novel’s emotional life, flexing its literary analysis muscles. Nixon writes that Animal’s “picaro is literally outlandish, his twisted body the physical manifestation of extraterritorial, offshore capitalist practices” (57). With his body read this way, Animal is stripped of his ‘realness’ and reduced to a symbolic object to embody a point, the very exploitation Animal interrogates and resists from the beginning.


In this assertion, I am certainly not arguing that Animal is in some sense sacred in an un-discussable victimhood which can only be pitied or spoken of in saintly terms. Clearly, that would be far from the novel’s presentation of his character. But let us contrast Nixon’s reading of Animal’s body with Animal’s song about himself and Elli’s response to it. Her response suggests the kind of attachment to Animal’s character which makes this novel capable of moving readers toward resistance. Animal sings:

I am an animal fierce and free
in all the world is none like me
crooked I’m, a nightmare child
fed on hunger, running wild,
no love and cuddles for this boy
live without hope, laugh without joy
but if you dare to pity me
I’ll shit in your shoe and piss in your tea

Elli laughs, “That is so sad.” Animal responds, “If it is so sad, why are you laughing?” “‘I don’t know,’ she says, wiping at her eyes. ‘Maybe because otherwise I would cry. The idea of living without hope, it’s terrifying’” (172). Elli here models a way for readers to engage with Animal – to laugh and cry with him, to enter into a relationship with him, to feel for him. Relationship is key in this novel, enacted in a multitude of ways among Animal and ‘his’ people. What Animal himself says in his song speaks to multiple layers of consciousness as well as multiple truths and fictions he tells himself and others, layers not easy to sort out. Almost every claim in this verse might be read as its opposite and be equally true and false. He must maneuver among these tensions, contradictions, and dualities – human and animal; particular and universal; ‘civilized’ and ‘free’; fear and bravery; hope and realism. These are some of the same constructed binaries and multiplicities with which any literature of protest must engage because they are vital issues we all must interrogate. New sorting into the binaries is not what is needed, however. Rather, the kinds of relationships we see in Animal’s People demonstrate that these binaries themselves are dangerous. Relationships with these characters blur the borders between the false binaries, including those of “us” and “them.”


Admittedly, this kind of reading will strike some as not what a critical, scholarly reading should be. Faye Halpern, for example, says that all readings ‘with the grain’ mean “being a ‘good’ reader,” which she finds problematic, arguing against scholarly readers becoming “over-involved” in texts (51, 52). For Halpern, critical readers should be unmaskers. Her article focuses on sentimental literature but does not limit these precepts to that genre. Halpern states that “how critics read” – period – is by remaining distant from texts (56). Her habits of reading, as a literary scholar, can, she says “block [her] access” to the emotions in a passage and thus to becoming a part of the narrative audience (59). Near the end of the article, she admits that something is given up in this kind of reading, and ends saying that perhaps there should be a “discussion” of the “benefits and costs” of this kind of reading practice. But these notions assume that readers cannot read immersively and critically at the same time and afterward as they continue to ponder a text. Halpern thus perpetuates at least two sets of false binaries here: reading immersively versus reading critically, and the literary scholar as reader versus the ‘regular person’ as reader. Although the practice of literary study enhances our abilities to read critically, this ability is certainly not unknown to the rest of humanity. The truth is that we all read, not only our books, but the totality of our world, including those close to us, both immersively and critically.

Again, the novel itself shatters these constructed divisions. Animal himself is an apt example of this, both as one reading his own ‘world’ and as a character whom we read. He continually, and rightfully, mingles skepticism with trust. For some time, that trust is primarily directed toward his dog Jara; his surrogate mother, Ma Franci; his best friend and (in his mind) love interest, Nisha; and the little girl, Aliya (with varying degrees exercised toward others). Discarding all critical skepticism would be stupid, and in any case, impossible, but Animal’s own well-being and growth depend on realizing, as Zafar tells him early on, when he stuns Animal by trusting him to deliver a large sum of money, that it is Animal who needs to learn to trust. Animal proves trustworthy with the money, yet says he “despised Zafar for trusting [him].” (39), because Animal cannot disentangle his complex feelings about this. Animal does not know if he can trust himself and does not want to feel whatever Zafar’s trust may elicit from him. At this point and at many points along the way, I believe readers find themselves simultaneously trusting Animal, and yet not always trusting his ‘reading’ or reactions to various people and events; and on his side without agreeing with everything he does (to put it mildly). And is this not what it means to live bound to others in this world? There is no formula for this, no safe separation which keeps us ‘critically distant’ unless we choose not to trust and love. Yet that would leave us in the least safe position of all – one of isolation – making our readings of our world , not ‘neutral’ (as if such a state might be reached), but grounded in whatever ideologies we have internalized minus a feeling for and merging with those we are ‘reading.’ Thus, like Zafar, we must trust, not because those we trust have definitively proven they can be trusted, but because no real growth is possible without this trust. We trust and keep trusting, even with or especially because of the flaws of those we trust. As Animal says, “If you want my story, you’ll have to put up with how I tell it” (2). And as Judith Butler puts it, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (20 Precarious Life).

This is the utter vulnerability of relationship. Yet it is not romanticized sentimentality. To be sure, it is thoroughly steeped in feeling, but this entangled mass of emotion, intelligence, critical ‘reading,’ and that ungraspable force we call ‘will’(those moments when we are moved from our previous ways, and we act) – all of this is inherently necessary to making common cause with each other. And making common cause is crucial to resisting the corporatized, violent status quo. We cannot wait for the perfect, fully trustworthy people to show up. With no guarantees, knowing that we may trust the wrong people and that the results may be painful or even dire if we do, we nonetheless decide to trust anyway. We must make do with each other, or at least enough of each other – the ones we decide to trust. From Zafar, among others in this story, we discover that far more people than we might realize can be trusted because being trusted so profoundly affects people.

Yet not everyone should be trusted. Trust moves people, but it does not move lifeless forms or their massive material manifestations, constructed with monetary profit as their aim. The corporate form shapes the behavior of the people serving them and served by them. As Zafar says, the people who do the bidding of the Kampani “look ordinary … [b]ecause they are ordinary. They are not especially evil or cruel, most of them, this is what makes them so terrifying. They don’t even realise the harm they are doing” (195). Frank is an exemplification of this. His way of seeing and understanding the world, even Elli, has been shaped by the work he does for the Kampani. He hovers between claiming that he cannot affect what they do, that he is only doing his job, and saying that he can “knock on some doors” back home or that he can delay the agreement about to be made between the courts and the Kampani lawyers – all of the time, looking for vulnerability in Elli as a way to personally ‘profit’ (322-324). Thus, just when we may be ready to shatter every binary in this reading of Animal’s People, we find that not even that simple binary works (binaries/no binaries). This is not a novel in which there are no ‘bad guys.’ The ‘bad guys’ are those who internalize the logic of corporate and capitalist ideology and deal with other people accordingly. Outside of their jobs, these people will not all be as crassly selfish as Frank; they may not be ‘bad’ or untrustworthy in their personal lives detached from their corporate roles. But it is this detachment itself – this normalized compartmentalization – that allows the derealized violence about which Butler writes. People acting as corporate agents cannot be trusted because the very nature of their role requires that they put company profit ahead of relationship with one person or even a multitude of people.

What is true for people is false for a corporation. Those maintaining the economic and legal corporate form and pushing the agendas of the specific companies for which they work believe or at least try to make others believe the very opposite. The chairman of one of the oldest corporate branding companies contends that “corporations, as brands … have … souls” which help them forge “intellectual and emotional bond[s]” with people. Another public relations firm CEO says, “It’s absolutely fundamental that a corporation today has as much of a human and personal characteristic as anything else” (Bakan 26). Judith Butler has written extensively about the inherently precarious condition of living bodies and the question of what it means to be responsive, as well as responsible, to one another as bodies. “[T]he body is a social phenomenon;” she writes, “it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition … It is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys, and responds to the exteriority of the world” (33 Frames of War). This, of course, is not the condition of the corporation. It cloaks itself in the very name ‘body,’ but as with slavery, it is a practice, allowed by economic rules and laws manifesting in devastating practices over actual lives. It does not suffer or enjoy as a living being and has only one kind of vulnerability – profit and loss.

In March 2012, MSN Money ran an article entitled, “Bhopal Tragedy Still Haunts Dow Chemical.” Dow had been “facing immense pressure from the Indian Olympic Association regarding its sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympics.” The article explains:

[Union Carbide’s] plant also dumped toxic waste, which contaminated the ground water in surrounding areas. Over 40,000 people depend on this ground water for drinking. The contamination continues today, endangering the health of the surrounding population. Countless children in the region are born with deformities and mental disabilities due to the effects of these poisons […]

Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemicals in 2000. Dow has refused to assume any liability for the tragedy, citing that it did not have any ownership stake in the company involved until 16 years after the incident.

What, however, is the primary concern in this article? Writing for those who place market profit at the center of their lives, the primary question for the writer and target audience of this article is: “How might this backlash impact the company's business and its stock price?” The answer?

While we don't expect anything to come of this issue, the market is still aware of Dow's possible vulnerability. In 2004, a prankster claiming to be a Dow representative told World News that Dow had agreed to clean up the site and compensate those harmed by liquidating Union Carbide for $12 billion. Immediately afterward, Dow's share price fell 4.2% in 23 minutes -- a loss of $2 billion in market value. (Trefis)

I want to emphasize two basic points from this article, which most of us know but perhaps do not often think about. Corporate well-being and the well-being of living beings are inversely proportional; what helps one harms the other. Secondly, the corporation which is defined by law as a person can, unlike a person, be bought and sold. Did Dow buy the “moral responsibility” which UCC’s CEO Warren Anderson claimed Union Carbide had for the catastrophe? Who is able and willing to respond? Did responsibility dissipate in the transaction? But there is no eerie mystery here. Clearly, the people involved in making this deal do everything in their power to help maintain the legal structure that makes such abdication of responsibility possible because it makes them massive amounts of money.

The distinction that actually matters, then, is not between what is human and what is animal; it is between what is real and what is false, and whether we are going to harm and kill real bodies, and make and inject real poisons into bodies or ecosystems on behalf of abstractions such as corporate forms and the placeholders we call money and profit. Whether Sinha’s novel or any other novel makes the difference that it should depends upon whether it brings its readers along to discover and keep discovering what is real and what is fiction; what is true and what is false. If it makes us only believe or wish something were true that is not, and if that believing or wishing becomes a substitute for acting in solidarity and in truth with those who are ‘true,’ then it fails. But each person determines this, each set of “eyes” to which Animal speaks over the course of the novel. At first, he hates the idea of “[t]housands staring at [him]” through the eyes of the Jarnalis. “Their curiosity feels like acid on my skin” (7). Too often, groups of destitute or persecuted people whose lives are highlighted for a short time are gazed upon this way, and this, too, is a kind of derealization. If we read Animal as a specimen in a story or a merely interesting protagonist who we think has little or nothing to do with us, we participate in the compartmentalizations that allow violence of so many kinds. We mistake what is real and unreal.

Animal’s People is, among other things, about trust and discernment, and believing that what we do can make a difference even when we do not think that we believe it. All along the way, Animal gradually enlarges his ability to trust, not only the other characters in the novel, but those to whom he is speaking. It is about the paradoxical step we take to trust even when we do not quite trust and do not quite have a reason to trust, as in early on, when he says:

I’m remembering the eyes that hide inside your eyes, you said I should ignore you and talk straight to those who’ll read these words, if I speak from my heart they’ll listen. So from this moment I am no longer speaking to my friend the Kakadu Jarnalis, name’s Phuoc, I am talking to the eyes that are reading these words. Now I am talking to you (12).

All of us who read this story are “Eyes.” At some point, we can become eyes which see from within Animal, rather than only from without, but this requires our own trust. As Animal learns, not simplistically, but carefully to trust the right people and remain cynical about those he should be cynical toward (the Kampani and its government cohorts), likewise we as readers of this world must try our very hardest to trust the right people. If Sinha wins us over and proves to us that Animal and his people are the right ones to trust, we become Animal’s people as well. What difference will Animal’s story make? Perhaps at the end, we, like Animal, will conclude: “Everything the same, yet everything changed” (364).

“Eyes, I’m done. Khuda hafez. Go well. Remember me. All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us.” Animal

Works Cited


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Bloch, K. and B. Jung. “The Bhopal Disaster.” Hydrocarbon Processing 91.6 (2012): 73-76. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Dec 2012.

Broughton, Edward. “The Bhopal disaster and its aftermath: a review.” Environ Health 4: 6. (2005) Web. 5 Dec 2012. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1142333/

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Print.

Fortun, Kim. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print. 

Halpern, Faye. “The Problem with Being a Good Reader of Sentimental Rhetoric.” Narrative 19.1 (2011): 51-71 Project Muse. Web. 29 Oct 2012

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.

Rees, William E. “Footprints to Sustainability.” UBC Reports. 52.4. (2006). 14 Dec 2012. http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2006/06apr06/footprints.html

Sharma, Dinesh. “Bhopal's Contamination Legacy Ongoing.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1.10 (2003): 515. JSTOR. Web. 23 Nov 2012.

Sharma, Dinesh. “Bhopal: 20 Years On.” The Lancet, 365. 9454 (2005): 111 – 112. Web. http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)17722-8/fulltext 12 Dec 2012.

Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.

Summers, Lawrence. “The Memo.” The Whirled Bank Group. Web. 14 Dec 2012. http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html

Swan, Nancy. "Commentary: MIC Storage at Institute, WV: A Ticking Bomb." Huntington News. 31 May 2009. Web. 15 Dec. 2012.

Trefis. "Bhopal Tragedy Still Haunts Dow Chemical." MSN Money. 27 March 2012. Web. Dec 15. 2012.

Woellert, Lorraine. "Bayer Explosion 'Dangerously Close' to Second Bhopal (Update 3)." Bloomberg. 21 April 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2012.

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“Union Carbide Not Liable for Bhopal Claims, Rules US judge.” TCE: The Chemical Engineer 854 (Aug 2012): 6-6. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Dec 2012.


[1] The higher numbers of estimated deaths come from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), based upon nine years of close follow-up with over 80,000 survivors (Sharma “Bhopal: 20 Years On”).


[2] Fortun points out that a number of other chemicals are produced there as well, so it is difficult to definitively determine which exposures might contribute to these higher rates.