Assessing the limitations of laughter in indra sinha’s animal’s people

Abstract

"In the opening pages of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), the fourfooted and schizophrenic narrator―aptly named Animal―foregrounds the potential for exoticist exploitation when an Australian journalist asks him to record his oral story on cassette tapes: “Somewhere a bad thing happens, tears like rain in the wind, and look, here you come, drawn by the smell of blood. You have turned us Khaufpuris into storytellers, but always of the same story. Ous raat, cette nuit, that night, always that fucking night” (Sinha, Animal’s 5). That “fucking night” corresponds in reality to the Bhopal Disaster, of which the novel is a thinly disguised fictionalization. In Bhopal, India on 3 December 1984 an accident at a pesticide factory owned and managed by the American Union Carbide company led to the release of a deadly gas (methyl isocyanate) into the atmosphere. More than 2000 people living in the slums near the factory were killed, and more than 50,000 suffered from permanent injuries and illnesses (Guha 569-70). Since the disaster, more than 100,000 people have developed chronic conditions as a result of the leak (Sinha, “Indra”). This is hardly the stuff of humour, and yet Animal’s People seems to want its readers to laugh. Attesting to its success in this regard, the novel’s critics describe it as “bawdy,” “irreverent” and, most notoriously in New York Magazine, as “scabrously funny” (“Hey”). The problem with these easy responses is that the novel draws attention precisely to the uneven relations of power that persist between postcolonial texts and their readers at a moment when culturally-diverse commodities circulate widely in global markets. By constructing the journalist he encounters and, by extension, his implied readers as vultures out to salvage the pitiable remains of the disaster, Animal points to the negative effects of transnational capital on nations consigned to the periphery and the economies of reading and interpretation that might translate him into an exotic object to be consumed."(pg 1)