3 Overexposed

Compounded Vulnerability and Continuing Liability in Fiction of Bhopal

Indeed, there may be different opinions of laws or on questions of policy or even on what may be considered wise or unwise; but when one speaks of justice and truth, these words mean the same thing to all men whose judgment is uncommitted.

Union Carbide Corporation v Union of India and Ors [1989] 1 SCR 730

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, law, justice. Those words sound the same in my mouth as in yours but they don’t mean the same.

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

When water inadvertently entered a tank storing forty-seven tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), the active ingredient in the pesticide Sevin, during routine pipe maintenance at a Union Carbide factory just after midnight on December 3, 1984, the reaction produced toxic gas clouds which, in the prevailing southerly winds, drifted directly over the semi-legal shanty-towns abutting the factory and housing the poorest residents and toward the railway station in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. Sluggish sales and the US parent company’s decision to close the plant soon meant that Sevin was not in production, and key safety features, including the cooling system and the tower flares (designed to burn off any escaping gas), had been turned off. Although an exact accounting of immediate and long-term casualties has long been disputed, thousands died of respiratory paralysis, pulmonary hemorrhages and edema, and cardiac arrest, and tens of thousands were severely injured that night, while hundreds of thousands suffer(ed) short- and long-term effects from gas exposure. Now decades after the initial explosion and its widespread media coverage, inadequate legal, political, economic, and medical actions and the ongoing toxicity of the environment continue to catalyze intergenerational campaigns for justice.

This chapter investigates “Bhopal” as a particularly egregious example of how those who are structurally disadvantaged are vulnerable to overexposure by both toxic chemicals and media representations. More specifically, I examine the ways in which human rights discourses that travel the circuits of neoliberal dominance may succeed in defining victims of the disaster without significantly advancing their claims. My reading of the human rights context of Union Carbide explosion and its continuing aftermath reveals a contested social imaginary, fought over by what Sheila Jasanoff terms various “civic epistemologies”¹—those professionalized discourses from epidemiology, law, and governmentality that define their objects of concern, unavoidably through the exclusion of their alternatives. In Bhopal, the effects of these bureaucratizing epistemologies have been particularly damaging to gas-affected Bhopalis who already forged a precarious existence in the shadow of the plant, without the basic literacy and medical records, among other factors, that would secure positive forms of legal personhood. I turn to three fictions of Bhopal—Meaghan Delahunt’s The Red Book (2008), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (1995 in English)—for the ways in which fiction engages the social imaginary, rendering its operations more transparent, if not always altering its outcomes.

The goals of, discourses around, and participation in legal proceedings and advocacy campaigns are determined by how vulnerability to toxic exposure is defined and who actively claims as well as who is claimed by exposure. Complicating efforts at solidarity across campaigns are both the competing interests of various stakeholders, as well as the compounded vulnerability of those directly affected by the gas. For instance, international activists mobilizing under the slogan “We All Live in Bhopal” press for broad corporate adherence to principles such as those defined in the UN Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights (2003), particularly in order to make compliance with such principles mandatory rather than voluntary, whereas local activists advocate for water-quality monitoring, medical care, financial settlements, vocational training, and their own free expression, among other aims. Depending on their interrelated embodied and structural vulnerabilities, gas-affected Bhopalis are variously situated in relation to these campaigns. Whereas factors such as wind direction at the time of the explosion or the unanswered question of the best antidote to its chemical poisoning inject Bhopal (as an event) with an aura of random suffering and unfathomable catastrophe, the activist campaigns draw competing circles of causality and responsibility around the disaster, thereby producing multiple claims for continuing liability that may or may not map onto the material existence of the gas-affected. What a reading of these shifting discourses and contexts disclose, are the ways in which Bhopalis’ toxic exposure emerges as an effect of precaritization through neoliberalism, which includes “not only destabilization through wage labor, but also a destabilization of ways of living and hence, bodies.”² In abstract terms, those compounded effects of neoliberalism include intercontextual forms of vulnerability and precarity tied to gender, literacy, religion, political affiliation, economic mobility, and nationhood—the ways in which specific subject positions, located at the intersection of multiple oppressions, differentially experience physical harm in conjunction with economic and political disenfranchisement. Compounded and imposed vulnerability were and are determining factors in levels of exposure to the heterogeneous temporal and geographic scales of the disaster—from the point of the water leak to the path of the poisonous gas cloud; from sufferers’ internal injuries to the still-standing, derelict plant; from the history of Union Carbide in India beginning in 1934 to contemporary campaigns for corporate liability of the now parent company, Dow Chemical. Traversing what is visible and invisible, corporeal and international, and traceable to both a moment and a history, these scales would seem to call for a robust human rights imaginary, one that is relevant to various registers of injury, suffering, and liability; however, Bhopalis have been denied justice precisely at the junction between rights and legal personhood. Indeed Bhopalis’ toxic exposure has been compounded and in many cases overexposed by mediatized, corporate, and legal representations that generate abjection or the negative personhood of expendability. These representations also often displace from the social imaginary alternative narratives propelled by the embodied, lived experience of precarity in its various forms.

In order to investigate a fuller range of subjects and their claims than those represented in dominant discourses, this chapter analyzes fiction in relation to the norms produced through legal cases and reportage of the 1984 Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, which is often cited as the most toxic industrial disaster in history. I examine fiction’s contributions to the social imaginary of the event in order to unpack claims for continuing liability by and on behalf of those whose toxic exposure was and is rooted in imposed, lasting, and compounded vulnerability. Whereas fiction does not function analogously to an epidemiological report or a legal judgment, I argue that fiction may make the operations of these different approaches available to scrutiny in particularly compelling ways. As opposed to a newspaper report’s immediacy or the linear temporality of the law, fiction provides an imaginative ground for the consideration of the competing, heterotemporal and heterospatial scales of the catastrophe. Those scales frame different civic epistemologies and the claims that arise from them, and thereby challenge dominant imaginaries of social justice as well as the limitations of some of the legal and medical models deployed in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. Legal, journalistic, and humanitarian discourses on Bhopal each generate their own subjects of biopolitical and geopolitical governmentality, and I turn to the literary fiction to explore the ways it works contradictorily to reinforce prevailing narratives of victimhood while also animating new forms of political subjectivization.

The danger and the potential of vulnerability theory emerge clearly in this context. Anna Grear argues that re-centering the vulnerable subject in human rights law can expose the fallacy or impossibility of the abstract, liberal subject and, in doing so, counter the corporatization of human rights through the corporate body’s claim to personhood as well as the development of “trade-related, market-friendly human rights.”³ Grear’s analysis begins with the distinction between legal subjectivity, on one hand, and legal personhood and personalities, on the other. Whereas legal subjectivity refers to “a unit (whether a plant, an animal, a human being, a spirit, or a group) regarded as important enough to merit juridical protection and thus the subject of legal rights,” legal personhood has multiple meanings.⁴ These include personhood as a synonym for legal subjectivity as well as personhood that includes traces of human embodiment as vestiges of natural law. These layered meanings co-exist and, indeed, coalesce in the idealized figure of the abstract liberal subject of the law. That abstracted ideal masks a normative masculinity in that the law’s rationality supercedes the affective and somatic conditions of embodied existence, according to the gendered Cartesian binary of mind and body. According to Grear, the vulnerable subject, whose vulnerability is both humanly embodied and structurally embedded in the institutions of family, religion, state, and so forth, allows for a fuller expression of human rights legal subjects and their claims. My readings demonstrate that although vulnerability theory opens up analytical frames of compounded vulnerability to heterotemporal and heterospatial representations, it remains difficult to recode vulnerability outside of the gendered normativity of the law. Gendered norms thus pose a particularly trenchant challenge to vulnerability as a more capacious grounding for the human rights subject.

The civic epistemologies that develop from this discursive web of human rights norms—produced by fiction, human rights reports, reportage, and legal arguments in relation to lived experience—inform the potential for what I call critical advocacy: a dynamic form of advocacy that reflects critically on its own analytical terms, attends actively to the differentiated material contexts of its subjects, and might generate various local, intra-national, and transnational affiliations in the campaign for justice. Critical advocacy, in the context of compounded vulnerability and toxic exposure, tests the proposition of the generalizability of rights discourse across what Upendra Baxi terms, “geographies of injustice”⁵—those different spheres in which parallels in structural vulnerability could yield new political affiliations. In addition, critical advocacy illuminates the challenge of generalizable rights discourse across different moments when and where that discourse remains untranslatable or inadequate. Critical advocacy, in other words, attempts to account for both the urgency and the limits of claims for continuing liability with regard to Bhopal, particularly by examining how such claims are or are not generalizable among diverse claimants.

I take this concept of the generalizable from Domna Stanton’s important theorization of it as “an attempt to think through non-violent negotiations and transactions of differences and contests, and to shift the focus from a top-down (e.g., from the ‘universal’ in the UDHR) to a bottom-up approach, rooted in various concrete localities, but not bound or limited by them, and moving potentially in ever wider circles of agreement and commonality.”⁶ The generalizable in this formulation is the careful, contingent, and on-going work of tracing elements of commonality and exclusion in the recognition of vulnerability as well as rights claims, and it attests to human rights discourse (and thus to the definition of those claims) as dynamic rather than as static. As opposed to universalism, the generalizable names an approach to the problem of translating rights discourses across different contexts, as well as of defining the scope of rights claims and responsibilities. Stanton emphasizes the importance of generalizability in mediating between the various human rights actors (national and international human rights instruments, the work of NGOs and national human rights institutions, as well as local and transnational organizations), thereby potentially producing a stronger framework for multi-faceted human rights work. Generalizability thus stems from the socio-economic and juridico-political objectives of local campaigns and potentially expands outward to generate new, contingent, and flexible solidarities. Those potential linkages, however, may remain structurally bound within the so-called human rights regime and its conceptual apparatus of liberal subjectivity and historical progress. Given the ongoing legal and advocacy work around “Bhopal,” and the ways in which normative discourses of human rights have failed those exposed to both it and the toxic gas, the question remains whether vulnerability theory can expand the generalizability of human rights. In addition, the analysis that follows addresses whether the kind of generalizability of human rights Stanton defines can contribute to what Upendra Baxi calls a “new jurisprudence of human solidarity in a runaway globalizing world.”⁷ To put it in terms of the kind of humanities-based approach offered here, this chapter explores whether reading a constellation of local and transnational human rights discourses (including fiction) can contribute to a social imaginary that does not merely amplify neoliberal dominance for an ostensibly secure humanitarian readership, but foster the imagination of new forms of political affiliation geared toward a more equitable future.

Although literary, political, and legal analysts have been justly critical of human rights’ geopolitical and biopolitical functions which impose the interests and conceptual apparatus of the Global North over the Global South, the difficulty of clearly delimiting a catastrophe like Bhopal poses a theoretical challenge to those critiques that generalizability and critical advocacy attempt to meet. The challenge is exacerbated by the impossibility of separating human rights from ecological concerns in the era of the Anthropocene, especially when neoliberal forces distribute toxic risks (and its indirect benefits) differentially across the globe and contribute to the growing corporatization of human rights. This chapter traces ways in which discourses of toxicity and compounded vulnerability (like toxicity itself), are marked by conventional geopolitical boundaries, but do not always abide by them. In that regard, this chapter does not attempt to fashion a Global South perspective (as if there could be any such thing) on Bhopal through a particular set of authentic, representative fictions. Rather, I examine three fictions that hail from different parts of the world, defy easy geographic categorization, and, taken together, highlight the stakes of transnational literary analyses of human rights concerns. Both the fiction and the normative human rights discourses reflect the tension between local and global representations of toxic exposure. Finally, the fictions disclose the necessity of gender and cultural difference as key analytics in distinguishing victimhood from imposed and exposed vulnerability.

Animal’s People, The Red Book, and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha imagine “Bhopal” as an event and synecdoche for “disaster capitalism.”⁸ All three narratives are built out of the tensions between fiction, documentary photography, and reportage, such that they implicitly explore what role, if any, fiction might have in shaping public discourse around the on-going pursuit of justice from the Bhopal disaster. If, as science and technology scholar Sheila Jasanoff argues, Animal’s People, “may have done more to revive international interest in Bhopal, and thus to touch the conscience of the world, than decades of medical or legal action,”⁹ then this chapter asks how literary fictions are poised between humanitarian gestures and legal and political recourse, as well as in relation to photo and print journalism. More pointedly, I analyze how the fiction participates in the toxic (over) exposure of Bhopalis and structures relationships between survivors, their allies, and the “conscience of the world,” or at least the consumers of certain forms of world literature.

Animal’s People takes up the concerns of locals, activists, foreign humanitarian workers and corporate executives in the aftermath of a Bhopal-inspired toxic gas leak in the imaginary Khaufpur (“city of terror”). Although Sinha has said the novel is “about people, not about issues” and was never intended as “a polemic,” Bhopal remains a clear referent.¹⁰ As activist and journalist Sathyu Sarangi wrote in a plug addressed to colleagues that was formerly on Sinha’s website for the book, “Khaufpur is as close or as far from Bhopal as you want it to be, but I am sure you will enjoy the retelling of the many campaigns that all of you have been a part of and recognize the intricacies and wickedness and resistance in a gassed city.”¹¹ The Union Carbide disaster and the crucial issue of its mediatized representation are also catalysts in Delahunt’s The Red Book and inform Devi’s novella Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. All three texts have garnered international success and wide readership: Animal’s People was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, The Red Book was a finalist for the Orange prize, and Devi’s international audience expanded significantly after Pterodactyl and two other stories were translated by Gayatri Spivak and published as Imaginary Maps. Although such market and critical success reanimates the event in the public imagination, it may do so through the patronizing terms of “literary humanitarianism.” As Joseph Slaughter writes, “In a world where privileges and rights, as well as literary technologies and juridico-institutional resources are unequally distributed, such cosmopolitan reading practices often serve to recenter the traditional subjects of benevolence, humanitarian interventionist sentimentality, and human rights—the literary agents of an international human rights imaginary.”¹² Such literary humanitarianism places the reader in the position of a potential (and perpetual, unrealized) humanitarian, whose sympathetic reading of distant suffering functions as a form of abstracted succor, if not justice, unto itself. This process, of course, relegates the subjects of the text to objects of the reader’s humanitarian concern. The literature, in such instances, serves not solely as a work of imagination, but more powerfully as a form of commodified testimony that conveys and compensates for suffering. Literary humanitarianism, according to Slaughter’s critique, reproduces the liberal subject of rights even as it displaces the political agency of those violated with the implied reader’s distribution of sympathy and concern.

The literary fictions under discussion in this chapter wrestle with these dangers: as works that are marketed to a global Anglophone audience, they may fit the model of literary humanitarianism for distant suffering, humanitarianism that also largely flows from the Global North to the Global South; however, they also frame the “eventness” and longue durée of the Bhopal catastrophe in complex chronotopes that refuse any singular geopolitical constituency and at least intimate the importance of intergenerational rights claims. “Eventness,” as Peter Hitchcock defines it, describes a “transnational chronotope [that] does not contend that time’s arrow, a dubious chronologism of ‘post’ as ‘after’ in postcolonialism, confirms the end of colonialism, but rather accentuates the distillation of specific coordinates in its moment.”¹³ “Eventness” aptly describes Bhopal in a constellation of contexts around the catastrophe of December 3, 1984. From its tangled roots in the history of American corporate involvement in India; to the cooperation between the US Ford Foundation and the State of India in sponsoring the Green Revolution; to the asymmetrical legal codes that allowed a plant to be built in Bhopal without the same levels of safety and citizen notification procedures required for the “sister-plant” in West Virginia; to the neoliberal shift in India just after the assassination of Indira Gandhi; to the local political and religious rivalries that designated certain areas of the city for certain groups, thereby distributing risk according to political patronage and religious belief, it is difficult to craft a single ontology of disaster. Similarly, after the leak occurred, there are multiple reference points for compounded catastrophe: the state’s refusal to authorize treatment for gas exposure with sodium thiosulphate (used to treat cyanide poisoning and found—before it was abruptly banned just days after the disaster—to be effective in treating exposure to MIC); the failure to requisition from Union Carbide medical records on the effects of the gas as well as documentation of its exact chemical composition; and the mobilization of bureaucratically-sanctioned truth-telling conventions to define and quantify victims and their claims (the Process of Injury Evaluations), to name a few. Access to the disputed settlement five years later depended upon the legibility of the subaltern (most victims and survivors were among the poorest, most disenfranchised Bhopalis who lived adjacent to the plant) within the very structures of governmentality through which they had been marginalized and, thus, exposed; and failure of redress rested at least in part on the procedures used to define the medical effects of toxicity for people with no medical records. The scope of Bhopal’s eventness is further complicated by lasting environmental degradation and the now intergenerational claims for medical assistance and environmental clean-up.

To explore the implications of hetereogeneous chronotopes in fiction of Bhopal, this chapter examines the texts’ portrayal of gas-affected Bhopalis’ compounded, imposed vulnerability, particularly in relation to the overexposed image of the Bhopali child’s burial photographed by Raghu Rai (Fig. 3.1). Rai’s photograph provides a defining image of Bhopal. It is an image both humanitarian campaigns and literary fictions engage, and its depiction of the child’s corpse demands a critical reading of representations of embodied vulnerability in the pursuit of liability claims. I develop a reading of critical advocacy in humanitarian and literary discourse in order to foreground the means through which the goals of continued liability and the regeneration of human rights culture in the face of its corporatization are imagined. Finally, this chapter considers the extent to which these discourses generate wider civic epistemologies at the expense of the local epistemologies and agency of the “Bhopal-violated”¹⁴ and through their over-exposure in normative, exclusionary fictions of personhood.

Continuing Liability and Legal Contexts of Bhopal

Writing on the occasion of the satirically titled “‘silver jubilee’ of the Bhopal catastrophe,” Baxi identifies six approaches to and three different stages of the event in order to argue for a “democratization of people’s knowledge” to continue to fuel a campaign by the violated against “the assassins of collective memory,” corporate and state impunity, and “hostile human rights.”¹⁵ The three temporalities of catastrophe he defines are the night of the explosion, the initial settlement of claims agreed to by the state for 470 million USD, and the lack of substantive state redress for the suffering of Bhopalis that continues. These different moments have yielded responses from advocates with various areas of expertise: disaster response, risk management, technological approaches to environmental management, corporate social responsibility, scientific and business case studies to teach lessons from Bhopal, and, finally, what Baxi terms “networks of biomedical, juridical and ethical social action communities.”¹⁶ It is in the last approach that the lived experiences and priorities of gas-affected Bhopalis can directly impact the means and goals of campaigns for justice, including determining the extent to which alliances may be forged with those outside the immediate site of the catastrophe and may be informed by scientific, medical, and legal expertise.

The circles of liability have been circumscribed in Bhopal’s legal contests by debates over jurisdiction and legal representation. A full accounting of the terms of international legal liability that could apply in the Bhopal case is outside the purview of this chapter; however, I offer a sketch below of some of the central debates relevant to representations of impunity and liability in the novels. Although important expansions to the conception of international legal liability have occurred in the ensuing decades in other cases, the priority of national sovereignty determined the initial scope of concern in Bhopal. In 1985, just months after the explosion, the Indian Government passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, making the Union of India the representative of all plaintiffs in suits for compensation. This act, which was designed to streamline the legal process, in effect denied Bhopalis the right to speak on their own behalf, transferring their legal standing to the national government (also a stakeholder in Union Carbide of India, Limited) that arguably had contributed to the precaritization of these same populations. In a separate key ruling the following year, Judge Keenan of the US District Court of New York agreed with Union Carbide’s motion to dismiss legal actions on behalf of claimants filed against it in the United States “on the grounds of forum non conveniens,” concluding “the public interest of India in this litigation far outweighs the public interest of the United States. This litigation offers a developing nation the opportunity to vindicate the suffering of its own people within the framework of a legitimate legal system.”¹⁷ Commenting on Judge Keenan’s argument on behalf of Indian national sovereignty and his judgment that the events of Bhopal were “local concerns,” in which the United States had “slight interest,” Baxi argues that “the decision is characterized by a morality of avoidance, rather than a concern for justice” (original emphasis) as well as a narrow interpretation of social responsibility.¹⁸ Judge Keenan invoked the rhetoric of India’s postcolonial autonomy to avoid the circumstances of US neoliberal responsibility. Significantly, even those discourses of autonomy and responsibility, cornerstones of liberal and neoliberal policies, are ascribed to states as opposed to persons. In this way, legal personhood of gas-affected Bhopalis was effectively erased (by the Bhopal Act) and then reconstituted as a symbolic material of exchange between nations in the ruling by Judge Keenan. Although the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and Union Carbide of India, Ltd (UCIL) agreed in 1989 to the settlement of 470 million USD (resulting in payments averaging 500 USD per victim (for those who could produce the necessary documentation)), neither UCC, UCIL, Dow Chemical (which purchased UCC in 1999), the State Government of Madhya Pradesh (which gave the building and operating permits for the plant), nor the Indian national government (whose Green Revolution called for the production of pesticides such as Sevin) have undertaken an environmental clean-up of the plant site and its surroundings, including the affected water supply, nor have any of these entities provided comprehensive medical care. A central challenge, then, in the decades-long pursuit of justice for Bhopal is the two-pronged problem of drawing figurative temporal and spatial boundaries around the disaster and tracing paths of political, legal, economic, and ethical responsibility within them. This challenge also illuminates the difference between rights and justice: Baxi emphasizes that for “Bhopal-violated activists […] rights-languages were not, for them, important in themselves but only important as a means to the ends of justice.”¹⁹ As the fiction suggests, rights are but one means of achieving the restorative and redistributive justice associated with vitality and “co-flourishing.”²⁰ Moreover, the complex network of activists and campaigns involved in this catastrophe refuse any singular discourse of advocacy.

The question of balancing campaigns in the name of rights with those for justice, as well as the challenge of imagining of multiple scales of the disaster—from immediate and individual suffering to the long reach of toxicity and continuing liability—arise in the discourse of local activists. As Kim Fortun writes in her ethnographic study, Advocacy after Bhopal:

Gas victims and those working alongside them have reached for ways to articulate what they want in the wake of the disaster. They want rehabilitation. They want legal judgment of wrongdoing. And they want measures taken that would prevent future Bhopals. Often these demands are articulated in seemingly simple terms—the phrase “We want justice” recurs in the street rallies, in pamphlets, and in the graffiti painted throughout Bhopal. The seeming simplicity of the call for justice is, however, deceptive. Gas victims and their allies seem to know this—often emphasizing their awareness that justice will always be deferred, that there is no way to fully rehabilitate Bhopal. Gas victims’ demand for “continuing liability” articulates this understanding.²¹

As Fortun’s analysis makes clear, Bhopal has both particular and generalizable meanings in these campaigns. In conjunction, continuing liability has legal and extra-legal dimensions that seemingly demand a responsive national government but also extend beyond the national jurisdiction to include instruments such as the UN Norms. Writing in the Radical History Review, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Takamitsu Ono, and Alka Roy identify key components of “continuing liability” pursued by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal under the umbrella slogan, “We all live in Bhopal”: “polluters must pay for the costs of environmental clean-ups and health care for affected communities; people must be informed of health and environmental risks in their communities; transnational corporations and their officers must be subject to the law in all the countries where they operate; and communities of indigenous people, people of color, and poor people must not be burdened by health and environmental risks not borne by privileged sectors of society.”²²

That broad scope of continuing liability, including the more equitable distribution of vulnerability, far exceeds existing legal judgments, yet it speaks to the need to transform frameworks within which human rights violations become legible, especially those that facilitate the corporatization of human rights. In place of a conventional definition of international human rights law, which defines the obligations of states to individuals and the rights of individuals vis-à-vis the state, and which holds states accountable to one another for any violations, continuing liability calls for the expanding role of non-state actors as key players in the distribution and protection of human rights. Continuing liability is particularly crucial to advocacy efforts in the context of toxicity, such as in Bhopal, where the parameters of eventness are not wholly commensurable with those of the state. Arguments for continuing liability can thus be seen as examples of the kind of grassroots-directed generalizability Stanton advocates or as invitations for the continued expansion of dominant human rights institutions’ role as “gatekeepers.”²³

John Dale locates the intersection of these competing interests (individual sufferers of violations, corporate and state actors, non-governmental advocacy organizations) in a transnational legal space, which is “a contested terrain of legal discourse.”²⁴ Upon this legal terrain, “the discourses [are] constructed at the interstices of existing state legal systems that identify institutional arrangements of legal mechanisms that present opportunities for making crimes or torts committed in one state actionable in the legal system of another state” (original emphasis).²⁵ More broadly, questions of who has legal standing in which courts and of liability are contested in these kinds of cases in relation to ever-shifting norms of discourse and social practice of state and non-state actors, particularly in bringing tort law to bear on human rights, as in Bhopal. The landmark case, Doe v. Unocal (2005), illustrates how, in the decades since Bhopal, the principle of liability for corporate disaster across national lines as well as the scope of human rights law continues to evolve. In Doe v. Unocal, peasants from Burma’s ethnic minorities, who had been conscripted by the military dictatorship to work on Unocal’s construction of a gas pipeline, brought suit against the corporation in the United States for human rights violations, including slavery, rape, torture, and murder. Dale analyzes how the Burmese plaintiffs, working with American attorneys and the Free Burma Movement, transformed the transnational legal space by using the US Alien Tort Claims Act [ATCA] (1789) to file their claim. Several of the case’s key characteristics are relevant to Bhopal: the right of the foreign plaintiffs to be heard in US court, the use of the ATCA to prosecute human rights violations, and the legal liability of a transnational corporation as a person before the law for violations committed in a foreign country. Unocal’s settlement of the case (to preempt a verdict) in 2005 underscored the efficacy of this legal strategy. As Dale notes, “had the court been left to decide the case, and had it ruled in favor of the peasants (an outcome that Unocal clearly thought was likely), it would have been the first time that foreigners had won a case against a transnational corporation in a US court for an injury that took place in another country.”²⁶

Without ignoring the different material circumstances and histories of Union Carbide in Bhopal and Unocal’s Yadana Project in Burma, the frames of justice bear some comparison. Whereas Judge Keenan argued in favor of Indian judicial sovereignty in his ruling, the court in Doe v. Unocal recognized the ATCA’s commitment to the “law of nations,” particularly the jus cogens or highest principles of that law from which no derogation is permitted by any state. These principles address such crimes as slavery, genocide, war crimes, and torture, as well as the “gross violation of internationally recognized human rights.”²⁷ In other words, whereas Judge Keenan made his crucial Bhopal ruling through the logic of competing national interests (which effectively displaced Bhopalis’ embodied suffering in favor of deferring to, and thus protecting, Indian legal sovereignty), the Unocal case activated the higher principle of the law of nations and universal human rights norms, although it did so through a mechanism or framework provided by US law. Unocal v. Doe is an example of the successful expansion of tort law for the pursuit of human rights as well as for the continuing liability of corporations as opposed to individuals or state actors. Indeed, one of the debates within the case took place over whether domestic or international standards of liability, “based on direct and active participation” in the crime or “on aiding and abetting abusive human rights practices,” respectively, should apply.²⁸ Despite the many parallels between the two cases, perhaps more challenging are their differences, specifically the legibility of the crime itself as a violation of the higher principles of jus cogens. The Unocal case focused primarily on the uncontroversial citation of the protection against slavery as a fundamental, non-derogatable human right. In Bhopal, activists and lawyers have faced the challenge of making the compounded, imposed vulnerabilities of those who lived in the shadow of the Union Carbide plant—including the socio-economic disparities at the heart of the catastrophe—comprehensible as gross violations of international human rights. This points to the larger problem of how development programs can produce vulnerable populations, often in the name of economic human rights (in this case, the right to development and food self-sufficiency through India’s Green Revolution, a revolution that also facilitated the expansion of the corporate, legal and political interests of agribusiness over small farmers).

Although the outcome of Doe v. Unocal signified a victory for the principle of continuing liability, it did not set an unassailable precedent. More recently, in a case concerning alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by Royal Dutch Petroleum in Nigeria, the US Supreme Court decided unanimously in its review of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell) in 2013 to limit the scope of the ATCA, notwithstanding the clarity of violations of jus cogens. As reported by The Economist, the court’s ruling “holds that the ATS [Alien Tort Statute] does not apply to actions committed by foreign companies, and noted a strong presumption against applying American law outside the United States. ‘There is no indication,’ wrote John Roberts, the chief justice, ‘that the ATS was passed to make the United States a uniquely hospitable forum for the enforcement of international norms.’”²⁹ Chief Justice Roberts’s phrasing replaces the extra-national commitment to jus cogens with hospitality, and his ruling favors the interests of the state over international norms. The Center for Constitutional Rights also notes, citing the decision, that the presumption against applying the ATS “can be overcome when the matter ‘touches and concerns’ the United States with ‘sufficient force.’”³⁰ The decision leaves open the process of developing legal norms that will define the scope of legal liability of future cases; however, it also suggests that the development of those norms will be shaped first and foremost by national interest as opposed to continuing liability rooted in broader concepts of shared vulnerability or social responsibility and liability. Chief Justice Roberts’ decision discloses the human rights potential of the ATCA as an instrument of strategic governance wielded at the discretion and to serve the interests of the powerful.

The Mediatization of Bhopal

Developing norms to inform ethical imperatives of intergenerational justice and transnational corporate responsibility—the kinds of imperatives called for in the case of Bhopal—depends upon complex forms of advocacy within both law and culture. These concerns bring to mind Nancy Fraser’s three-part theory of justice, expanded in Scales of Justice, which she summarizes in terms of recognition, representation, and redistribution.³¹ Fraser’s title captures the double meaning of the classical depiction of Justice balancing her scales and of contemporary challenges of adjudicating among varying “competing frames for organizing, and resolving, justice conflicts.”³² My focus is on Fraser’s second category, representation, as a contested domain whose possible framing is determined by biopolitical and geopolitical logics. For people living outside of Bhopal, representation of the disaster occurred first through national and international news media, and the reportage of the explosion tended to confirm existing civic epistemologies rather than to challenge them.

Pablo Mukherjee details the coverage by the Indian media, noting it “reported the dizzying numbers of casualties, and then the structural failures of Union Carbide that had led to the disaster.”³³ This kind of reporting produces narratives of corporate malfeasance; however, it elides the role of the national government as a Union Carbide of India (UCIL) stakeholder and limits critical discussion of the Green Revolution in the context of Indian national development. In contrast, according to the study by Lee Wilkins of US television, print media, and news wire coverage of Bhopal from 3 December 1984 to 3 February 1985, American reporting, although not uniform, tended to treat the disaster as an inexplicable, decontextualized event that reinforced the unknowability of both techno-science and of the undifferentiated mass of victims.³⁴ Delimited “event-centered” reporting elided “long-range questions of, first, planning and resource allocation which play a significant role in mitigating the impact of both natural and technological hazards” and, second, of medical and environmental health.³⁵ From US media perspectives, gas exposure and poisoning seemed to be a matter of chance or happenstance, as opposed to being products distributed by the very economic, political, and scientific-technological forces that contributed to the disaster itself. Notably, photographs of children’s corpses, such as those discussed below which were published in India and internationally, elicited an emotional reaction in part because they confirmed the seemingly random distribution of suffering. The photographs worked in conjunction with the tone of US news reporting, which largely portrayed “people as victims rather than sources of information, institutions as the powerful actors in the event, not only in terms of possessing information but also in terms of their ability to influence events, and a dominance of underlying themes of helplessness.”³⁶ When evidence of catastrophic suffering registers as evidence of complete helplessness, the agency of the subjects dissolves in favor of that of the safely-anchored gaze or the experts to whom the camera or reporter turns. Such reporting reinforces normative human rights that “operate as a technology of governmentality […] via experts” (original emphasis), as Bal Sokhi-Bolley has argued, rather than via claimants themselves.³⁷ It empties rights claims of political agency for the claimants and seeks humanitarian assistance in its place. This shaping of the civic sphere, Wilkins notes, is “profoundly undemocratic for it removes citizens from those questions which have an immense capacity to influence their lives and the lives of their children.”³⁸ In other words, the reporting by US media generally defined a narrow civic sphere of Bhopalis’ toxic exposure, a sphere in which suffering the effects of the gas appeared to be anonymous, distant, and unrelatable except through channels of pity as “grand emotion.”³⁹ Potential transnational currents of responsibility and liability and a larger civic sphere were also foreclosed by the US media’s focus on American political reactions and the effects of the disaster on Union Carbide’s corporate health, rather than media investigations into a more complicated history of shared risk and technological and economic gain.

On December 3, 1994, the tenth anniversary of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, the London Guardian and Observer ran a double-page spread that initiated the Bhopal Medical Appeal. Indra Sinha, who was then an award-winning advertising copywriter, developed the appeal, which featured the iconic photograph of the Bhopali child’s burial (Fig. 3.1) alongside extensive text. With subsequent appeals, the campaign raised enough funds to create the Sambhavan Trust and its Sambhavna [Medical] Clinic in Bhopal. Opened in 1996, the clinic describes its efforts to offer increased and enhanced medical care for gas-affected Bhopalis: it provides free allopathic and ayurvedic medical and psychiatric care to gas victims, conducts research on the lasting effects of chemical gas poisoning, and, according to its website (www.bhopal.org), has treated more than 30,000 patients and is now in its second, expanded facility. Its international funding has also made it controversial, with some activist groups campaigning against its use on the grounds that it further absolves the state from its fundamental responsibilities toward its citizens. The Bhopal Medical Appeal itself, notable for both its photographs and the full page of text that accompanied each image, is lauded as one of the most successful humanitarian appeals ever in print-media. The appeal also serves as the nexus between Sinha’s work in advertising and his subsequent career as a novelist, most notably as the author of Animal’s People.

Animal’s People, The Red Book, and Pterodactyl share a common root in Rai’s photograph of the Bhopali child’s burial. Best known for his work in lush, large-format books such as Dreams of India, Indira Gandhi: A Living Legacy, and, more recently, Raghu Rai’s India: Reflections in Colour, Rai was among the first photographers to document the gas leak in Bhopal, and his work has circulated widely in news media and in subsequent human rights campaigns. The image in Fig. 3.1 may be the single-most recognized image of Bhopal.

Figure 3.1 Burial of an unknown child. INDIA. Bhopal. 1984. ©Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos. Reprinted by permission.

The Bhopali child’s burial, as Rob Godden of the Rights Exposure Project writes, works “through a classic witnessing approach—the presenting of evidence through black and white images using a documentary-style aesthetic.”⁴⁰ Read in the context of either news reports of the disaster or humanitarian appeals such as Sinha’s, the photo underscores the tragedy of the disaster through the portrayal of one of its most defenseless victims, one whose plight seems to persist even in death in the gravel grave. The caressing hand at the top of the child’s head bespeaks loss and mourning, yet also provides a point of identification for the viewer as a synecdoche for humanitarian assistance. At the same time, the circumstances of that gesture limit the role of assistance to grieving: it points to what has been lost rather than to the possibility of future action.

The circulation of two other similar images, by Pablo Bartholomew and Suara Sam of the Delhi Forum, attest to the emotive power of the burial while also adding to the sense that these are, in Ann Larabee’s analysis of disaster imagery, “carefully composed totemic image[s], a death mask, rising from the earth as if from an archeological dig.”⁴¹ Pablo Bartholomew’s 1995 World Press Award photograph varies slightly from Rai’s. Increasing the viewer’s proximity to the child’s corpse, the angle is sidelong, only the top of the small form is pictured, and the hand is pointing rather than caressing. These changes amplify the photos’ function as shorthand for anonymous suffering in that the image is almost completely decontextualized and the perspective works against identification: the message is violation without explication. As Larabee writes, “This level of abstraction from the living context […] give[s] an illusion of intimacy while placing any suffering at a safe and controllable distance.”⁴² Both images suggest poverty and the need for a hasty burial, a social crisis that can turn an ostensibly private moment into a public spectacle, and the presence of adults as witnesses (through the adult hand in the photographs and the implicit presence of the photographer and then the viewer) with an ill-defined relationship toward the small subject. Although the disfigured eyes suggest that this was not a “natural” death, nothing else in the photo endows the body with individuality, locale, or cause of death. Out of context, both photographs can only serve—through an emotional appeal based on a shared assumption of the idealized innocence of the victim—extremely limited evidentiary functions of the unnatural, and therefore unjust, suffering and loss of a child. In place of contextual referents to define a political scope of the catastrophe, the photographs alone offer evidence and an appeal based upon an ostensibly universal feeling of sorrow for the death of the child. In juxtaposition to a news story, the child then stands in for gas-affected Bhopalis more generally, thereby reproducing colonial ideologies of the Western gaze upon its infantilized “third world” objects.

In the Bhopal Medical Appeal series in the London papers, photojournalistic images proffered the human face of disaster, accompanied by strong, pseudo-journalistic storylines in a humanitarian campaign that ultimately transformed its copywriter into a novelist. The first appeal begins with the description of the famous photograph on the facing page:

A man is burying a child. He has laid the tiny body in a shallow grave and begun to cover it.

Then, unable to bear the thought that he will never see her again, he brushes the earth from his child’s face for one last look.

The photographer, Raghu Rai of Magnum, cried as he took the picture.

Note the transition from the father to the photographer in modeling the reader’s proper reaction, while the added information about the victim’s gender reconfirms the paternalistic coding of the gaze. The text continues with examples of the suffering of Bhopalis, an indictment of the failure of corporate and state responsibility for victims’ care over the past decade, and a direct appeal to the reader for aid. Momentum builds toward a moral argument for responsibility based upon the principle of shared, yet differentiated humanity. The narrative moves from the third-person description of distant suffering to a direct address of increasing urgency—from “If you have ever been to India” to “But what if you don’t have medical records?” to “Maybe you believe that, morally, it is Union Carbide that should pay for the medical care.” And it concludes with the moral claim of a common humanity that nonetheless retains the distinctions between safe versus vulnerable worlds, between would-be donors and victims. This is particularly evident in the slide in the interpellations and invitations of that “you”: first addressed as a tourist, then in an invitation for identification, and finally as a humanitarian whose generosity compensates for corporate greed. The appeal ends with the promise of the solidarity of good feelings, produced through self-congratulatory humanitarianism: “If after reading their story we turn the page, we will demonstrate that there is no humanity either. We must help them because no one else will.”⁴³ The rhetoric reasserts a moral universalism based upon “the articulation of justice with pity”⁴⁴ to reward compassion that itself depends upon a fractured humanity: the continuation of structural inequalities between the privileged “we” of the address and “they” who suffer. Morality itself belongs to the privileged “we” who can choose whether or not to bestow beneficence upon those who are incapable of such choice on their own behalf, much less that of others. The notably successful address of the Bhopal Medical Appeal is made possible by the blurring of genres, the contextualization of photo-realism within humanitarian rhetoric.⁴⁵ Most importantly, the force of the appeal depends upon an image of the rights-lessness of Bhopalis, powerfully represented by the dead child who signifies the truncated history, feminization and racial othering, and moral and political incapacity of the dispossessed.

Critical Advocacy and Compounded Vulnerability in Fiction

The defining image of the Bhopali child’s burial, in the reportage, humanitarian appeals, and as a common link among all three works of fiction, as discussed below, can also introduce the problematic of corpus delicti: “this ‘body or substance of a crime which ordinarily includes two elements: the act and the criminal agency of the act.’”⁴⁶ Thomas Laqueur points out that “the corpus became a corpus delicti, an articulate witness to a crime in the context of human rights, only when crimes against humanity or genocide became crimes,” a process aided by the mass circulation of photographic evidence.⁴⁷ This historical connection between cultural and legal developments remains important as both the human rights regime and the novel as literary standard-bearer continue to evolve (particularly under pressures from transnational circuits of capital, law, and letters).⁴⁸ Perhaps the best-known contemporary novel to take up the challenge of corpus delicti, of transforming the corpse into witness to launch a human rights narrative, is Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000). In the novel, the dangerous work of piecing together a history for a corpse unearthed in a government-controlled area during Sri Lanka’s long civil war builds the narrative tension to support the claim that “[t]o give him a name would name the rest.”⁴⁹ Uncovering and composing, as forensic and narrative acts, are difficult to separate in the novel, and both strain under the weight borne by a singular identity to serve both the pursuit of justice and what Laqueur calls “the interests of memory, of narrative closure, of healing, of reconciliation.”⁵⁰ Ondaatje presents the pursuit of justice and the fruits of mourning by gradually building evidence of the corpse Sailor’s history and identity (the novel contextualizes Sailor in the fictional world of the novel as well as among names of Sri Lankan civil war dead culled from actual Amnesty International lists). At the same time, Sailor’s identity is central to achieving closure for the central characters, who are otherwise unrelated to him: the UN investigator and Sri Lankan expatriate Anil, the local forensic archeologist Sarath, his physician brother Gamini, and the local sculptor Ananda. Although the novel does not call into question the frame that Anil, Sarath, and Ananda construct around Sailor out of artistic, medical, and archeological evidence, it does highlight ways in which other interpretative professions such as religious ritual may derive meaning from historical frames that are longer than the more immediate history of the civil war. For Laqueur, it is the tension between the different temporalities of two discourses—the rhetoric of justice and the rhetoric of memory—that is cause for concern, as the trope of corpus delicti makes it possible for narrative closure and memorialization to substitute for continued legal action to prosecute criminal agency.

Critics of Anil’s Ghost’s pronounced aesthetics—as a betrayal of postcolonial (i.e., oppositional political) sensibilities—echo Laqueur’s argument about the privatization of suffering through the rhetorics of memory and mourning. As critical debate about the novel’s political intentions has reflected, the construction of a literary corpus delicti, especially through a lyrical narrative style, has implications beyond the expression of universal human rights or the cultivation of humanitarian sentiment (in the vein of Richard Rorty or Martha Nussbaum). Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps summarize how scholarly criticism of Anil’s Ghost brings into sharp relief the larger debate over key tenets of postcolonial studies—“that postcolonial literature must deal with the politics of identity defined in terms of ethnicity, race, and nation; that novels should tell the truth about their referent and their origin, even mimetically so”—as well as the problematic assumptions that inform these directives.⁵¹ Within studies of human rights and literature in a postcolonial context, the “problem” of representational authenticity as necessary for political change is clearly at odds with both poststructuralist and materialist underpinnings of the field.

Although the fictions under consideration here complicate the category of postcolonial literature, they wrestle with the same issue of how narrative style might convey, foreclose, or reframe questions of criminal and social liability in a the context of transnational corporate power and the postcolonial state that is embracing neoliberal policies. When the evidentiary components of the Bhopal Medical Appeal (the documentary photograph, the journalistic report) cathect fiction of Bhopal, they operate in two distinct ways: In the narrative realism of The Red Book, photography becomes a source of libidinal investment that encourages a reader’s identification with the characters and their suffering. In the case of mythic and magical realism in Pterodactyl and Animal’s People, respectively, photographic and journalistic interventions illuminate the politics of representation and the incommensurables of translation, as opposed to authentic cultural identities. Rai’s photograph shadows all three works, each time raising the question of what the child was vulnerable to and how the now over-exposed image transmits vulnerability into other contexts. When the child it features is framed to be the victim of an incomprehensible, unlocatable disaster, rather than the witness to a crime, the image is severed from conditions of precarity that attended the death and becomes a free-floating metaphor for the suffering of others. The literary fiction references that suffering in different ways. Whereas The Red Book employs the image to spur readerly humanitarianism and the personal growth of the primary characters, Pterodactyl and Animal’s People ask readers to take a more critical stance toward the foundational assumptions of their own humanitarian sensibilities.

At stake in all three literary texts is the struggle between civic epistemologies as those “shared understandings of what credible claims should look like, and how they ought to be articulated, represented, and defended in public domains.”⁵² These competing claims continue to structure campaigns for social justice, legal compensation, and medical care for Bhopalis as well as mechanisms for (voluntary) corporate responsibility. How might fiction shape civic epistemologies, particularly in as contested a context as Bhopal? How do the authors portray historical entanglements (in Mbembe’s sense) as well as the expansion of capitalist modernity in the context of one of its most horrific by-products? How might the “singular and unverifiable” pull of fiction open up the possibilities of critical advocacy, of staging claims for continuing liability to a broad audience while reflecting critically, metatextually, that audience’s relationship to the violations?⁵³ Who might be interpellated by the texts into the civic sphere—a sphere marked by differentiations of participants’ vulnerability to one another? These questions become all the more powerful and poignant in the face of decades of labyrinthine legal maneuvering, political action and inaction tied to local and national party politics, street protests, strikes, and long-distance marches, and of course the on-going social, medical and environmental effects of the catastrophe.

One might expect that the answers depend on a combination of evidentiary details, deep character development, and tropes of sentimentality that activate a reader’s desire to care about the suffering of an (imaginary) other. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues on behalf of the literary imagination’s contribution to public deliberation through “the ability to imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstance, be oneself or one of one’s loved ones” as well as the development of “moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.”⁵⁴ Sinha and Devi, by focusing on local people, create characters where there were isolated illnesses, pasts in the absence of medical records against which to verify one’s pre-exposure health, and myths that provide a counterpoint to the rhetorics of science and governmentality which have so obviously failed those affected by the gas; however, both texts actively resist the kind of sympathetic and identificatory reading Nussbaum describes. The thick, local description depicts particularities of compounded, imposed vulnerability, and it does so in order to make available for scrutiny, rather than to naturalize, the terms through which vulnerability becomes legible. Delahunt takes a different approach, invoking Bhopal less in its local particularities than as a catalyst for the intersecting, affective lives of a Scottish traveler, Australian photographer, and Tibetan orphan.

The circuitry of transnational representation and consumption which activates the fiction risks recharging global inequalities, ignoring local micro-politics in favor of the aesthetic preferences of distant consumers, and eliding the fact that a humanitarian appeal may be made to the very populations who benefit directly or indirectly from the legal and economic asymmetries that factored into the disaster in Bhopal and its legal outcomes. Humanitarian identification with a character who has suffered wrongs, or with the character who bestows assistance, may also substitute for the more radical re-imagination of what constitutes human rights and who can claim them as well as who bears responsibility for their violation. Reading for critical advocacy provides an alternative interpretative process that continually reflects back on the selective constitution of the subjects of and liabilities for human rights violations.

Rob Nixon has written of Animal’s People, “Sinha’s approach […] throws into relief a political violence both intimate and distant, unfolding over time and space on a variety of scales, from the cellular to the transnational, the corporeal to the global corporate.”⁵⁵ How the three texts represent these scaling chronotopes illuminates the seductions of liberal subjectivity within human rights discourses, as well as alternatives grounded in vulnerability. Following Kim Fortun’s definition of advocacy “as a performance of ethics in anticipation of a future,” the remainder of this chapter examines how literary fiction constructs civic epistemologies and the persons who populate them in relation to discourses of reportage, science, and legal expertise. Critical advocacy in literary fiction of Bhopal places the evidentiary work of the reporter and photographer in conversation with overtly imaginative writing. In this way, neither the evidence nor its emotional and political effects can be read as self-evident. The various literary techniques do not invalidate the evidence of human suffering and wrongdoing by equating it with the “merely” fictional or render suffering itself fantastical; rather these techniques underscore the ways in which human rights discourses of all forms produce fictions of personhood that are mediated and may become mediatized. What emerges from this conversation is the key role of gender and cultural difference in framing representations of either victimhood or precarity that can be mobilized. In addition, tracing these fictions reveals the perhaps surprising potential of non-realist literature in particular to generate an ethos in support of continuing liability.

Imagining the possibility of continuing liability “calls upon us to question the order of things […] to rethink how the past should be built into the future,” as Fortun describes advocacy. Critical advocacy builds on this “project that is interminably recursive, running back over history again and again, reaching for new ways to figure the future differently;”⁵⁶ and it analyzes the tug between the impulses to document and to imagine that drives all three narratives, as well as the terms through which these impulses are realized. Critical advocacy thus provides an approach to reading overlapping fictions of Bhopal without reproducing humanitarianism predicated on the same imbalances implicit in the disaster itself.

The Limits of Compassion in The Red Book

Rai’s photograph of the child’s burial launches the plot of The Red Book. “It began with a photograph. The sound and the feel of it. Raghu Rai’s photo of the child in the dirt. This is what led me to India,” begins Françoise, an Australian photographer. The image, which “hints at your future,”⁵⁷ is inspirational: it provides the catalyst for her journey, her photography, and the relationships she builds twenty years after the disaster. As in Animal’s People, the impetus to document the after-effects of the Bhopal catastrophe structures the story, with chapters as the subtext to an imaginary photo album that gives The Red Book its title. The novel-as-album keeps the story of Bhopal alive to perform the recursive work of advocacy Fortun describes. As the epigraph states, “To touch an album is to put it back into motion; to turn the pages is an ongoing story.” However, advocacy is relegated to the private sphere when the photography and narrative of the long reach of the Bhopal disaster are made the domestic inheritance of Françoise’s unborn daughter. Françoise is the main focalizer of the narrative, and she, along with the two other narrators, Naga (a Tibetan Buddhist monk) and Arkay (a Scottish traveler, sometime Buddhist monk, and heroin addict), are far removed from ordinary Bhopalis. In a novel composed of their three alternating voices and driven by character development and interiority, “Bhopal” can seem like a metonym for suffering in general. As the events of December 3, 1984 in Bhopal ripple outward to shape the lives of seemingly unconnected strangers, the reader’s attention remains focused on the individual growth of the peripatetic Françoise. The novel concludes with her promise to give the photo album she has assembled as “the stories of how you came to be” to the daughter she is carrying from her liaison with Arkay.⁵⁸

Although the novel offers a rich set of references to Bhopal, the narrative trajectory from the Bhopali child’s burial to the birth of the Australian photographer’s daughter is troubling. Painstaking analogies connect the darkroom, “a womb-black space [,] a place of high expectation and high disappointment,” with Françoise’s own motherhood, and with her “weeping for all mothers” in ways that further erase the specific context of Rai’s photograph.⁵⁹ The photograph itself is not included in the novel, so as a referent it depends upon the reader’s familiarity with or imagination of the image. In either case, the narrative aligns the reader’s perspective initially with Françoise’s through the first-person narration of her sections as well as the trope of the album containing Rai’s and then her photographs.

The direct address of Françoise’s sections of the novel also propels the address into the presumptive future, in which the reader’s perspective shifts to that of the daughter, who together look back to Bhopal to understand their now-aligned, present conditions. On one level, if the novel provides the captions to the album in the logic of the text, then the context of Rai’s photograph shifts from the public media representation of a disaster of global importance to a personal and highly aestheticized beginning to Françoise’s story of “how I met your dad.” The novel-as-album ostensibly bridges the distance between the character and reader on one hand and the Bhopal catastrophe on the other. However, if the photograph’s lack of particularity grounds the imagination of the future anterior, then the novel suggests “Bhopal” provides an empty frame within which to construct or to recognize one’s own reflection.

The importance of the Bhopali child’s burial photograph as the narrative spark in The Red Book shifts attention away from the material context of the image and toward its power as a free-floating signifier of loss which may be easily appropriated. Attention in the novel is galvanized by the child’s corpse and then quickly refocuses on the ways in which often exoticized images of India impact Françoise. Even the photographer’s power to shape events and to create narratives dissipates as she emphasizes her intuition, instinctive reach for the camera, desire for subjects “to be the narrators of their own lives,” and her “surrender [of] control” in her own work.⁶⁰ This description of Françoise’s work naturalizes Rai’s photograph as well, masking imposed and compounded vulnerability with a representation of the subject’s absolute victimhood and incapacity.

In “Humanitarian Reading,” Joseph Slaughter offers an alternative to the reader’s identification with those who bear human rights abuses either directly or secondarily as witnesses in favor of “a kind of grammatical empathy that invites us to project ourselves […] into the position of the humanitarian, the subject position of one who already recognizes the human dignity of the wounded and attempts to relieve their suffering.”⁶¹ Wary of humanitarian concern that depends upon the continuation of structural inequalities in a “donor-recipient” model, Slaughter reads J. Henry Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino (a foundational text of the International Committee for the Red Cross) for the way in which “the affective structure of the humanitarian triangle implicitly recognizes the philosophical and practical limits of our generous imaginings,” and in its conclusion asks readers to identify not with the soldiers dying on the battlefield but with the horse who picks its way gingerly around the bodies, regardless of their nationality, to do no harm.⁶²

The Red Book also conveys a theme of undifferentiating compassion, although compassion renders continuing liability a private rather than public concern (devoid of the spirit of political mobility embedded in advocacy). In addition, idealized motherhood, both concrete and abstracted, becomes a substitute for humanitarian action in a civic sphere. Without any recognition of “the philosophical and practical limits of our generous imaginings,” this substitution is in keeping with the novel’s Buddhist-inspired message of compassion, often articulated in classic Buddhist texts through the projection of a mother-child relationship onto all who suffer, through eons of rebirths.⁶³ For instance, the “Thirty-Seven Practices of the Bodhissatva” (a compassionate person who foregoes nirvana, or escape from the endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death, in order to help others; also sometimes used colloquially to refer to a selfless humanitarian) by Ngulchu Thogme Zangpo, contains two key verses (translated by Garchen Rinpoche):

When mothers who have been kind to one since beginningless time are suffering, what’s the use of one’s own happiness? Therefore, generating the mind of enlightenment in order to liberate limitless sentient beings is the Bodhisattvas’ practice. (Verse 10)

Even if someone for whom one has cared as lovingly as one’s own child regards one as an enemy, to cherish that person as dearly as a mother does an ailing child is the Bodhisattvas’ practice. (Verse 16)

Ethical reasoning consistent with this model of compassion develops in the novel in response to the Bhopal disaster. It brings Naga, whose family perished in the Union Carbide explosion, to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery as a boy; he then teaches Arkay and eventually Françoise to practice through meditation and mindfulness in daily life. At the center of the book, Naga, who returned immediately after the disaster from Delhi (where he worked as a young domestic) to Bhopal to search for his family, collapses on the steps of a Buddhist monastery and dreams a story for Rai’s Bhopali child’s burial. The passage concludes in the imaginary voice of the newborn, coming now from the grave and mourning the death of its mother: “There is no one left to claim me.”⁶⁴ (132). The dream endows the Bhopali child with a capacity to witness; however, instead of disclosing a crime in the terms of corpus delicti, witnessing yields only private grief and maternal failure. Within the narrative trajectory of the novel, however, Naga claims the child in his own awakening to Tibetan Buddhism in which he can occupy first the child and then the mother’s role that is lost to the body in the photograph. When Naga awakens on the steps of the monastery, after failing to locate his family among the victims, and tells the monks his dream, the monks nurture and raise him. Later as a monk himself, he can offer the same unstinting care to others whom he meets, including tending to his sister as she dies from uterine cancer linked to the gas, and to Arkay in his death from addiction. The narrative traces Naga’s transformation from child domestic servant to Buddhist monk and maternal agent and is in keeping with the novel’s theme of “modern” Buddhism as a universalized response to suffering, or as spiritual rather than religious practice; however, the redistribution of maternal agency takes place largely at the expense of both Tibetan and Indian women—in the logic of the plot, their erasure is necessary to provide a catalyst for the monk’s maternal agency. This trajectory further detracts from the specificities of Bhopal. The intimate tableau creates, as Indra Sinha writes in a blurb for The Red Book’s back cover, “a compassionate, gracefully observed and moving story of three exiles whose meeting far from home brings a kind of healing to all of them.” At the same time, questions of justice and advocacy remain outside of the purview of “the Bodhissatva’s practice,” especially after Arkay dies and the photo album becomes the inheritance of his daughter. Compassion, rather than human rights, is generalizable in the novel, while the rightslessness of Bhopalis renders them invisible behind the totalizing image of Rai’s photograph. In the other two works, Sinha and Devi keep a skeptical distance from humanitarianism as either charity or maternal compassion. In doing so, they assiduously avoid the sentimental, as well as the consistent lure of realism. These literary choices make available for greater scrutiny the politics of representation through which the texts’ civil epistemologies are constructed.

Embodied, Compounded Vulnerability and Toxic Exposure in Animal’s People

The organizing trope of Animal’s People is its eponymous protagonist’s dictation of his story into a tape recorder left him by an enterprising Australian journalist, who has already signed a book deal based on Animal’s story. Animal, whose name suggests his social position as well as his twisted spine caused by exposure to the toxic gas, provides a street-level perspective on the town’s least privileged residents, local campaigns for legal justice, and the arrival of an American doctor who opens a free medical clinic to the great suspicion of residents of Khaufpur. The journalist serves as the necessary conduit of the subaltern’s story to a potentially humanitarian readership, though Animal himself mocks future readers’ “hunger” for his story⁶⁵ and the spectacularization of suffering in conventional mediatized portrayals. The journalistic frame at once authorizes the text and masks Sinha’s own hand (although, to be sure, some reviewers have found it clumsy). At the same time, Animal’s voice continually draws attention to those structures through his insistence on telling the story on his own terms and through direct addresses to the journalist/reader as an interlocutor.

In keeping with the Bhopal Medical Appeal’s combination of fictional and evidentiary discourses, the novel also slyly references Rai’s work and other documentary sources. In 2001, Rai was invited by Greenpeace to return to Bhopal to photograph evidence of the persisting effects of the gas leak, in preparation for a rights campaign on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster. His photos from this trip maintain a documentary approach, though the aesthetic of suffering in his images has changed. These photos provide greater context for each focal point. Perspective and chronotopes are longer and wider in images of the abandoned factory, people at gravesites, family members, and rallies—all of which convey the message of continuing liability in more communal and materially grounded terms. The debilitating effects of toxicity are made visible in social relationships and social institutions, as opposed to the isolated and abstracted view of suffering and death in his earlier photo. This second set of images also contains a photograph of fetuses spontaneously aborted by women who were exposed to the gas leak. Rai’s caption notes that the fetuses were “preserved by Dr. Satpathy, a forensic expert at the State Government’s Hamida Hospital, to establish the exact cause of death.”⁶⁶

No doubt among the most shocking of Rai’s photographs, the image, which has appeared on humanitarian websites for Bhopal-related causes and referentially in Animal’s People, uses the city of Bhopal as the backdrop for the jars, which are lined up on what appears to be a rooftop or terrace wall. Despite the larger geographical context provided, compared to the image of the child’s body in Rai’s earlier photo, the message seems to be one of outrage or horror intended to galvanize the viewer, rather than of investigation meant to provide evidence for rights or other claims. The visual relationality between foreground and background do not translate easily into an explanation of why the jars are positioned so dramatically before and above the postcard view of the city’s mosque and skyline (which reinforces the viewers’ reassuring sense of distance from the image), as well as far from the scientific purpose for which they were kept. Fiction intercedes in these spaces, too (spaces which, in the photograph’s original context, the Greenpeace campaign could bridge in supplying a narrative of corporate liability).

This later photograph haunts the novel in Animal’s regular conversations with his imaginary friend or khã, a two-headed fetus in a jar he saw as a child in the doctor’s office. Invoking past, present, and a foreclosed future, Animal’s khã also references the on-going reports from Bhopal of higher than average rates of miscarriages and birth defects attributed by many to chemical exposure and ground water contamination. The spontaneously aborted fetus as a character implies the necessity of reading human rights violations in the context of the longue durée of environmental toxicity. However, as opposed to the depiction of feminized, violated innocence in Rai’s first photograph, Animal’s khã is masculinized, uncouth, unnatural, and monstrous. It disrupts the colonizing gaze of pity and humanitarianism by calling out the reader’s (and initially Animal’s) desire to avert one’s eyes, but it also calls for the end of its own specularity. Animal’s khã repeatedly asks to be destroyed on the grounds that it has no future and serves only to distract viewers from what should matter. In Animal’s People, the shock value of Animal’s khã is mediated by the explanation that it is a psychic residue from Animal’s traumatic childhood trip to the doctor, where he saw the preserved fetuses and was told that he could not be cured of his spinal deformity. The khã signals one pole of the binary between deformity, spectacle, and abandonment—versus the proper, restored body that the American physician Elli promises surgery will provide, a body that comes closer to the ideal of the liberal subject of the law. It is only when Animal accidently drops the jar—and the khã becomes just matter—that he can imagine an alternative to those two, false choices of positive versus negative personhood.

Whereas The Red Book focuses on the emotional vulnerability of its main characters against the background of the physical vulnerability of victims of Bhopal, Animal’s People generates multiple meanings of embodied vulnerability. In Pablo Mukherjee’s reading, Animal “embodies exaggerated human and nonhuman qualities” that position him outside rights discourse. In its place, Mukherjee describes a non-anthropomorphic “politics of transpersonality and collectivity in response to the toxic degradation of a postcolonial environment” (original emphasis): “we begin to hear the drums of an uprising.”⁶⁷ In contrast, I find a perhaps less radical, more ambivalent politics at work, in that the novel remains deeply engaged in the local and transnational campaigns for justice in the language of rights in Bhopal. In concert with Rob Nixon’s argument, I am concerned about how justice can be pursued through non-anthropomorphic terms, except on the most abstract level, and instead seek to uncover human rights imaginaries that incorporate the multiple scalings of human rights as such.⁶⁸ Animal’s dehumanization is all too wedded to corporate exploitation rather than to his affiliation with the animal kingdom, although a transpecies analysis can of course magnify the categories through which humans are differentially valued.

The potential of humanly embodied vulnerability to shape the political terrain around Bhopal is limited by the tension between its meanings in the text. On one level, Animal’s exceptional embodiment provides a metaphor for what Jasbir Puar theorizes as debility: a characteristic of those “targeted [by neoliberalism] for premature or slow death.” Animal thus figures as one of those “bodies [which] are made to pay ‘for progress,’” in Puar’s words, according to careful calculations of the distributions of risk and probability.⁶⁹ Along this line of reading, Animal’s debility is an unfortunate though tolerable casualty of India’s embrace of neoliberal development policies, on one hand, and an argument for (perhaps voluntary) continuing liability on the other. From another perspective, as the epigraph of this chapter illustrates, Animal’s street-level view mocks top-down human rights discourse in a profane, often obscene, and irreverent voice that wards against pity and sympathy. Irony, sarcasm, cursing, and sexist rhetoric constitute a language—polyglot and irreducible to a single nationality—of resistance against the cooptation of Animal’s story. His language also emphasizes that dehumanization (as a product of neoliberalism’s distribution of debility and embodied vulnerability) can take many forms: poverty, “disaster capitalism,” state over citizens’ rights, the spectacularization of suffering, disability, and the coalescence of physical and social debility that one might find, for instance, among residents of Bhopal’s Gas Affected Widow’s Colony.⁷⁰ Moreover, Animal’s language is, at once, idiosyncratic and individualized as well as overtly constructed, drawing attention again and again to politics of any readerly desire for identification. In all of these ways, Animal embodies and articulates a sharp critique of normative human rights claimable in full only by the liberal subject as “a competent social actor capable of playing multiple and concurrent adult (formerly all-male) societal roles: the employee, the employer, the spouse, the parent, the consumer, the manufacturer, the citizen, the taxpayer, and so on.”⁷¹ At the same time, the book insists on the importance of keeping embodied suffering and embodied action at the center of rights claims. For instance, the body also figures prominently in the political protests in the novel. The chief local activist, Zafar, leads an effective fast to protest the government’s upcoming meeting with the “Kompani’s” lawyers (including Elli’s ex-husband); however, when the fast ends, the two parties secretly agree to reach a settlement before local organizations get a promised court hearing. Elli, disguised in a burqa, disrupts the meeting by “empt[ying] a bottle of stink bomb juice into the air conditioner” (361), a serious parody of the gas attack that creates a panic in the room and stops the meeting.

Animal’s People initially conforms to the fictions of liberal subjectivity within human rights by establishing an opposition between what is irrational, improper, deformed, illegible, and unviable (symbolized by Animal’s khã) and the promise of full personhood that is coded in terms of literacy, rationality, physical and moral uprightness, and an orientation to the future and, equally importantly, is presented as a choice the protagonist must make. Notably in the context of Bhopal and of the novel’s transnational Anglophone readership, those fictions append easily to neoliberal and neocolonial forms of governmentality that can include human rights. According to these logics, rights belong to the rational individual whose embodied and embedded existence, in Grear’s sense of these terms, is incidental to the choices and personal responsibility he properly demonstrates. The end of the novel dismantles this false binary between animality and personhood, the object of either pity or disgust and the subject of rights. First, by ascribing negative personhood to an argumentative khã, as opposed to the silent news photograph, Sinha invokes the greater degree of contextualization in Rai’s later work and initiates a conversation on how fictions of personhood are constructed. Second, when the khã tells Animal, “Bugger off if you can’t stop staring,” it reminds the reader that embodiment matters in relation to imposed precarity rather than in terms of its image alone.⁷² The turn back to precarity, demanded by a character without life or future, reanimates the negotiation of claims rooted in different temporalities that can open up ways of imagining the future or, stated slightly differently, of negotiating the future anterior.⁷³

Despite these examples, the scripting of embodiment in conventional gendered terms ultimately limits the potential of embodied vulnerability, debility, and precarity to ground an alternative claim to rights from that of the liberal subject. Animal may not be a taxpayer, manufacturer, or employer, but he does yearn for the empowered masculinity of the liberal subject and the hero of the Bildungsroman. On this level, Animal’s physical form marks him as unique, rather than representative, contributes to his objectification and sexualization of women, and drives a narrative subplot concerning his desire for surgery to correct his bent spine. The tension between these two representations of embodied vulnerability is resolved when Animal foregoes Elli’s humanitarian offer of restorative surgery in the United States, choosing instead to “[s]tay four-foot, I’m the one and only Animal.”⁷⁴ Although this conclusion refuses the humanitarian gesture from afar and the false ideal of the properly embodied liberal subject, it reinforces Animal’s singularity as well as novelistic convention. His singularity is also enhanced by an apparent lack of embeddedness, or a spatial social mobility, that masculinity seems to make possible. Despite his structural disadvantages, his daily existence in the alleys of Khaufpur, in other words, his masculinity grants him access to the homes of elite citizens, to various public spaces, to the derelict factory, and to the medical clinic with a freedom guaranteed by gender privilege. The sense of closure provided by the return to literary realism (ending Animal’s magical realist conversations with his khã), Animal’s acceptance of his physical state, and effective public protests is underscored in classic Bildungsroman tradition by no less than three presumed marriages among central characters at the story’s end. At the same time, the novel clearly does not turn to formal convention to ratify existing human rights norms, as one might expect given Slaughter’s compelling argument about the Bildungsroman and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as mutually enabling fictions.⁷⁵ Rather the classic Bildungsroman conclusion underscores the limits of universality as envisioned within the UDHR, such that novel and declaration become mutually destabilizing fictions. Neither can meet the expectations of the other in circumstances of such extreme socio-economic disparity and toxic exposure.

Discourses of Toxicity and the Challenge of Cultural Incommensurability in Pterodactyl

Although Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha does not directly reference Rai’s photograph, the novella takes up the problem of effective reportage versus the spectacularization of suffering, particularly across local and national lines, and implicitly posits the work of fiction as an alternative. The journalist Puran returns to the state of Madhya Pradesh to investigate a more recent “unearthly terror” in terms unavoidably linked to the legacy of Bhopal.⁷⁶ One of Puran’s informants “had made a film about the Bhopal poison gas disaster, opened a health center for the afflicted, and demonstrated against the oppressive tactics of the state government,” providing a context for the figure of the activist-journalist as well as a history of tangled state and corporate interests.⁷⁷ Distrust of the government and the media is pervasive in the novella’s context. While “the Chief Minister of the state, who built himself a luxurious residence after the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster, is certainly not about to declare Pirtha a ‘famine state,’” the journalist follows a tip from a low-level government bureaucrat to uncover the roots of Pirtha’s crisis.⁷⁸ Puran mediates between the Adivasis (unscheduled castes or tribals) he is covering and his readership, while Devi (and her translator, Gayatri Spivak) mediate between the Adivasis in the story and a transnational readership. Devi builds the story around the question of Puran’s ability to understand the people and history he covers enough to “make it known that the true tribals in Pirtha are dying of man-made starvation and to explain why this will not be called ‘famine’ […] and to bring relief quickly to Pirtha.”⁷⁹ The problem of advocacy, in other words, is one of crafting a shared civic epistemology without doing epistemic violence. This also poses vexing questions of whether Puran’s reporting will benefit the people of Pirtha and how to balance demands for humanitarian assistance and political agency. In place of the controversial images of the Bhopali child’s burial and the spontaneously aborted fetuses, and in contradistinction to media images of the on-going famine within the novella—also figured as inexplicable and attributable to nature rather than to governmentality—Devi offers the mythic cave drawing of the pterodactyl as a locus of identity that cannot be co-opted on behalf of either selfish or humanitarian interests but that nonetheless presages the extinction of the Adivasis. Although Puran witnesses both the drawing and its secret burial, and chooses not to report on them, the funereal event suggests that indigenous identities and ways of life perish in the inevitable clashes with the modern state.

Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha is even more skeptical than Animal’s People about the possibility of rights’ generalizability across cultural contexts and through the channels of fiction and reportage. This problem is exacerbated by overlapping challenges facing Pirtha: the more immediate crisis is the drought and the locals’ inadvertent poisoning of their own wells in a protest against a well-meaning government official’s crackdown on illegal sales of pesticides (such that toxicity is itself a product of mistranslation between cultures); however, the story also highlights the problem of the very survival of the tribals in the modern nation-state. The villagers whom Puran visits in an attempt to publicize the famine do want government relief, yet know well the exploitative power of the media:

The clearest truth was told by the tribals of Rawagarhi. Their communal chief spat and sat silent. An elder said, “Go away. A reporter came here two months ago as well. You’ll take our pictures? You’ll write about us? What’s going to happen with that? Will the government give water, land, food? Look at that girl.”

A young woman sat looking at the sky. She would have grown comely in a month if she had enough to eat.

She sold one of her twins, and the other one died. Want to take her picture?⁸⁰

The scene captures the tension between exposure and overexposure (the latter always signifying vulnerability), and between figures who are subjects and objects, within human rights discourse. The novella remains ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of crafting a civic epistemology through reportage that can encompass the worldview of the tribals as well as of a diverse readership. What the tribals realize long before Puran is that in order for aid and changes in policy to be effective in both alleviating famine and securing legal personhood, the reporting would need not just to document suffering of another for a potentially humanitarian readership, but to translate between them, to delineate a civic sphere in which the tribals were fully citizen-subjects as opposed to objects of national concern. It raises the difficult question, which Kate Nash poses to Nancy Fraser, of whether “framing itself [can] be made democratic.”⁸¹ If democratic framing were possible, the tribals would presumably represent themselves with a civic sphere they help to delineate and within which they would craft their own evidence, though the form and content of that representation might not fit within conventional parameters of the legal person or epistemologies of harm by failing to reflect the professionalized discourses of human rights. The novella insists such translation through reportage cannot take place; however, its work as fiction allows the incommensurables to co-exist and makes them visible to the reader.

Unlike news media reports that are produced for immediate consumption, fiction circulates more slowly and across the transnational currents among both its authors and readers; thus, it potentially invokes a wider and temporally flexible civic sphere. The content of that sphere depends largely on the politics and mechanisms of translation. Pterodactyl demands attention to the claims and epistemologies of indigenous peoples, not just in theorizing post-colonial national identity but also in terms of indigenous peoples’ interactions with the combined forces of transnational corporations and state actors. Devi presents this problem in the form of a linguistic crisis: “There are no words in their language to express the daily life of the tribal in today’s India.”⁸² The normative terms of human rights in either state or international discursive spheres leave no space for the tribals’ own articulation of their claims: the evidence they would produce in their own language would be illegible to others; meanwhile the dominant human rights discourse fails to address their needs or renders them overexposed and depoliticized. The politics of language as a postcolonial effect with material consequences also emerges through Sinha’s playful use of Marathi, Hindi, Hinglish, French, and Urdu in Animal’s People⁸³ as well as in the visual and verbal tensions between Devi’s Bengali and Spivak’s English evident on the page of the novella. In both cases, the authors emphasize the difficulty of translating rights into different local contexts, not to reassert a rather tired debate between universalism and particularism, but rather to show that the literary evidence and imagination of what is possible depend upon structural and cultural conditions. Particularly in Pterodactyl, linguistic and cultural differences correspond directly to the unequal distribution of rights within the modern nation-state. Regarding how the state sets its priorities, Devi writes, with italicized words in English in the original:

No ratio has ever been calculated from the position of people like Bikhia [who is the protector of the image of the pterodactyl]. The position from which computer, information ministry, and media see the situation depends on the will of the current social and state systems. And it is by the will of this system that the educated person is unwilling to think. […] But the first obligation is to calculate the ratio from the position of people like Bikhia. Without that effort Independence has grown to be forty years old.⁸⁴

Thus, the story documents the ways in which the state’s modernization priorities have excluded the negotiatory participation of India’s non-scheduled groups, and equal protection from its harms for those on the economic and political margins. And indeed, as Devi’s lines assert, there is no movement, no “progress,” without such negotiation. Independence just keeps on being independence, never becoming “post”—as in postcolonial, a time of reorganization and any liberatory potential. A forty-year old independence in this context only signals stagnated oppressions, oppressions delivered under a different name or by a different force, oppressions that people like Bikhia, in Devi’s formulation, are prevented even from naming for others, let alone transcending.

Civic Epistemologies and Toxic Exposure in Pterodactyl and Animal’s People

The challenges of translating imposed vulnerability across cultures are compounded by, yet all the more necessary because of, the effects of toxicity, in that toxicity itself exposes the porosity of corporeal and socio-political boundaries. Lawrence Buell’s foundational model of toxic discourse contributes toward the goal here of a reading of human and environmental justice as inseparable in the contexts of Bhopal, Khaufpur, and Pirtha, one in keeping with the co-development of so-called “third generation” rights in both categories. Within environmental criticism, a third-generation approach stresses the role of economic globalization in environmental processes and advocacy (as opposed to conservationist and moralistic environmentalisms); as an emerging category of human rights, third generation rights include the claims of indigenous peoples and impoverished peoples and for environmental health and intergenerational justice. Embodied, shared vulnerability demonstrates that these two approaches are inevitably implicated in one another. By making manifest these dimensions of vulnerability, critical advocacy in the texts is directed toward continuing liability. Perhaps most significantly, the combination of human and environmental toxicity crystallizes the paradox that, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley write, “ecology does not always work within the frames of human time and political interest,”⁸⁵ although the discourse of rights remains tied to both. Embodied, shared vulnerability provides one means of expanding the chronotopes of political interest.

In Buell’s definition, toxic discourse offers a framework for reading transnational environmental concerns (dislodging US-centric environmental criticism) through five main themes: pastoral betrayal, a world without refuge from toxicity, moral arguments against corporate greed, a sense of local self-identification intensified in opposition to outside threats and interests, and an aesthetic that tends toward the gothic.⁸⁶ Animal’s People and Pterodactyl challenge this framework through their incorporation of human rights, use of hybrid aesthetic registers, and imagination of heterotemporal and spatial scales of toxicity. Buell provides a reading of Devi’s Pterodactyl as “one of the most trenchant and challenging fictions of environmental justice ever written,” yet does so in a chapter dedicated to “Nonanthropocentric Ethics versus Environmental Justice” rather than toxic discourse.⁸⁷ Within the definition of toxic discourse Buell provides, Pterodactyl addresses the issue of local self-identification; however, that process takes place in relation to both internal and external threats and is represented without nostalgia or romanticization. Animal’s People has been described as both third-generation environmental fiction⁸⁸ and, in Nixon’s fine analysis, the picaresque. Although the novel makes a moral argument in favor of corporate liability and against corporate greed, it avoids being either sanctimonious or gothic in tone and style. To extend Waseem Anwar’s argument regarding Pterodactyl, both texts “map out the bestialities built around multilayered power lines of global capitalism, tracing its effects on the poverty lines of subservient nationalities or groups.”⁸⁹ Toxicity as a human rights violation makes visible the interconnections between embodied vulnerability, governmentality, neoliberalism, and the environment. Critical advocacy in the context of toxic exposure focuses attention on the terms through which these connections are made, who defines them, and how they circulate.

A cloud of poisonous gas does not differentiate between ostensibly secure legal persons and vulnerable subjects, heed national borders, or conform to a conventional news cycle, but rather than representing it as an unnatural and therefore otherworldly event, Sinha and Devi depict its eventness in overlapping chronotopes. These encompass the de-territorialization and extended temporalization of risk and responsibility within global systems of rights, economic ties, and cultural flows on the one hand, and the rootedness of acute and chronic effects of chemical poisoning on humans and the environment on the other. These different chronotopes develop from how the stories are framed, their circulations, and their various aesthetic registers that range from realist to magical realist to mythological. Such shifting aesthetics challenge a singular, authoritative voice of doom, offering instead more complicated conflicts between worldviews, conflicts that themselves lead to disastrous effects.⁹⁰ The harm suffered by local populations in the texts from toxic exposure (whether the Bhopal/Khaufpur leak or the poisoned wells of Pirtha) is compounded by the incommensurable world-views of those with and without institutional power (including the power to wield normative human rights discourses and to produce the evidence they demand).

Literary techniques and devices such as the magical realism of the talking khã in Animal’s People or the powerful, mythological presence of the pterodactyl in Devi’s novella may seem irrelevant to the evidentiary claims made through reportage; however, those attributes also enhance the potential of critical advocacy to disclose how authorized versions of events have failed those in need. At the same time, the literary representations of differentiation and incommensurables point to the need for more complex accounting of continuing liability in the construction of intergenerational human rights claims, as opposed to the kind of “homogeneous, empty time” of the present through which news reporting conjures the modern nation.⁹¹ Just as the newspaper functions through a shared, national civic epistemology in Benedict Anderson’s model, these fictions circulate within a larger, if more sparsely populated, transnational civic sphere. Magical realism and mythological writing introduce alternative temporalities and subjectivities into that sphere, asking readers to consider the claims of those who would otherwise be relegated to what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as the “waiting-room” of History-as-political-modernity.⁹²

In Animal’s People, the seduction of otherworldly discourse to describe catastrophe is evident Animal’s characterization of it as the “apokalis.” However the apokalis quickly gains worldy footing when Sinha frames the construction of the modern nation through industrialization with images of a fiery “HELL HOLE” that connects the work of Elli’s father in a Pennsylvania steel mill with Khaufpur’s gas leak. Although Elli’s father proudly declares, “We built Amrika. […] We made the steel for the Walt Whitman Bridge and the World Trade Center,” one of his colleagues informs Elli that her father’s job of checking the steel plates, “glowing red as the devil’s eye” in the furnace pit, was so dangerous that “[o]ne slip, you’re history.”⁹³ That history is, of course, the expendable one upon which a dominant history of the exuberant growth of the United States as global economic power during the early post–World War II era was built, when plans for the bridge and World Trade Center began (they opened in 1957, a decade after India’s independence, and 1973, respectively). Post-war US industrialism is linked metaphorically to Bhopal through apocalyptic language and materially in the distribution of the risks of development among the poor and laboring classes. The period of US economic growth demarcated by Elli’s father’s work also roughly corresponds to the Green Revolution in India, when national policies, developed in partnership with the Ford Foundation during the 1950s, aimed to make India self-sufficient in food production. Although scholars such as Vandana Shiva have written trenchant critiques of how this goal resulted in environmental degradation, the growth of agribusiness at the expense of local farms and farming communities,⁹⁴ and the rise in political influence of land and business owners at the expense of the poor, Animal’s People highlights how synchronized corporate and state legal interests, both in India and the United States, pass the most disastrous costs of the Green Revolution on to the poor of Khaufpur. These transnational and multigenerational correspondences in the novel also impact its transnational address, especially as the civic epistemology in this example draws from both nations.⁹⁵ The novel rewrites the “apokalis” to encompass the dangers faced by industrial workers worldwide, the explosion in the chemical plant and its legacy of toxicity, and a fiery local protest against a proposed settlement between the “Kompani” and the local government (with no direct participation by the gas-affected). There is no divine revelation promised in the future. As Animal tells the reader: “All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us.”⁹⁶ Although Animal’s articulation of solidarity across Baxi’s “geographies of injustice” provides an effective novelistic conclusion, it is less satisfying politically. The slogan of the united poor also masks the structural differences between Animal and Elli’s father in both socio-economic and larger geopolitical terms.

The danger also exists in this conclusion and in discourses of toxicity and exposure more generally that the moral outrage and distance from scientific, technical, or legal evidence that inform a fictional text will catalyze “the liability of discourse to become its own sanctuary,” in Buell’s words⁹⁷ just as literary humanitarian readings may substitute sympathy and mis-identification from political action. Aside from its conclusion, Animal’s People pays close attention to this danger. Animal directs his story to the conflated subject-position of the “jarrnalis” and the reader as Eyes (referencing at once the ocular damage people suffered during the gas leak, the overexposure of decontextualized suffering, and the reader-as-Subject). This layered address is in keeping with the verbal play and irony Sinha displays throughout the text; however, it also destabilizes the distance between reader and content, always posing the question of how one is reading. The result is less the kind of identification Nussbaum argues that fiction makes possible—the reader is not likely to “lose herself” reading this novel or Pterodactyl—than a critical awareness of the privileges and losses that form the foundation of any perspective. Sinha makes this difference explicit when Animal sees his neighborhood through Elli’s eyes (the counterpoint, ostensibly, to an outside reader’s perspective through Animal’s eyes). Touring what Animal calls “Paradise Alley, the heart of the Nutcracker, a place I’d known all my life,” Elli exclaims critically, “this whole district looks like it was flung up by an earthquake.” When he hears the word “earthquake,” Paradise Alley becomes:

a wreckage of baked earth mounds and piles of planks on which hang gunny sacks, plastic sheets, dried palm leaves. Like drunks with arms round each other’s necks, the houses of the Nutcracker lurch along this lane which, now that I look, isn’t really even a road, just a long gap left by chance between the dwellings. Everywhere’s covered in shit and plastic. Truly I see how poor and disgusting are our lives.⁹⁸

The novel as a whole legitimates neither Elli’s objectifying view nor the performative power of her speech, but it does demonstrate the difficult process of crafting a shared, if contested, civic epistemology through a willingness to entertain and to examine critically the perspective of an other. Sinha underscores the embodied and environmental contours of that perspective in the multiple meanings of “Animal’s people” that the novel supports.

In Pterodactyl, Devi is markedly more pessimistic about the possibility of either a shared epistemology or community of concern regarding the famine of Pirtha, although the story of Puran’s understanding and the meta-context of Spivak’s translation of Devi for an Anglophone readership create fictional and literary civic spheres where Puran’s reportage necessarily fails. Thematically, as Buell and others have noted, Devi shows in painstaking detail disjunctions between the minutiae of the modern state’s bureaucratic workings and the myth-shaped world of the Adivasis that the state administers. The paintings, rituals, maps, and stories of the pterodactyl offer an interruptive, eco-social, alternative to the unilinear march of political modernity (as “the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise,” which also, of course, provides the framework for human rights).⁹⁹ Those ethical, temporal, and spatial disjunctions between the Adivasis and Puran (and, presumably, the reader) mark differences in how one sees oneself in the world that remain unbridgeable historically and politically, even when neoliberalism trespasses the boundaries between them. The gaps are spatio-temporal and ideological, and they impact the distribution of vulnerability in the form of environmental degradation, access to the fiction of legal personhood and the rights that would attend it, and the eventual destruction of tribal communities whom the state sees as “inaccessible” to its means.¹⁰⁰ The position of the Adivasis in the text is secured by ethnic, socio-cultural, economic, and linguistic difference which makes them both illegible to others and unable to represent their own condition: “Do the tribals, whose life is nothing but exploitation, nothing but deprivation, have a synonym for ‘exploitation’ in any of their languages?” Puran asks rhetorically.¹⁰¹

In its formal structure, however, the novella conveys a weak optimism in the possibilities of representation of incommensurable cultural differentiation, if not the differences themselves. This possibility manifests in the novella’s juxtaposition of incompatible discourses within a single narrative frame and character’s perspective. As Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde point out, Devi “articulates this problem [of representing the subaltern] as a ‘moral question’ centered on Puran.”¹⁰² Even though Puran recognizes his inevitable failure, Devi describes his discovery in hyperbolically romanticized language tied to Puran’s own, new-found myth of Indian ontology which requires “saving” the tribals. At the same time, Puran’s self-aggrandizing conclusions need not completely negate the other discourses within the novella. His self-referentiality frames several distinct approaches to uncovering the immediate plight of Pirtha within its larger historical and mythological context: within Puran’s story, the novella details his investigative reporting of bureaucrats and villagers, the history of the “Indian Austric,” educated tribals’ discussion of their own cultural histories, legislative directives, Bikhia’s drawing of the pterodactyl, anthropological research, and Puran’s journalistic report, “Dateline Pirtha.”¹⁰³ Despite his awareness of the situation and its causes in Pirtha after his visit, Puran can neither adequately convey it to a national readership nor separate the wrongs they suffer from his own desire for a positive national identity seamlessly derived from pre-colonial, colonial, and Independence histories: “If written by a third person, Puran would have got a perspective on the whole thing. There is no one to write.”¹⁰⁴ Devi’s ironic statements denote the failure of the journalist to step beyond his own norms, and the impossibility of any unadulterated perspective from which to write, while it also opens a space for the critical work of the novelist, translator, and reader.

Conclusion: Missing Persons

Devi never resolves the “problem of translation” of the “incommensurables” of subaltern history into “the problem of capitalist modernity,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words,¹⁰⁵ because to do so would collapse the “unverifiable” of fiction into a single interpretation, and diverse truth and legal claims into “single judgments.”¹⁰⁶ Such a conclusion, or lack of conclusion, instead holds the multiple chronotopes and civic epistemologies of toxic exposure in productive tension. That tension foregrounds questions concerning the forms redistributive justice might take and for whom, the discursive conditions for effective advocacy, and the possibility of claims grounded in non-normative epistemologies to become legible. These are the kinds of questions that require continual negotiation among participants to generate the goals and conditions of ongoing advocacy efforts. Fortun writes:

The future inhabits the present, yet it also has not yet come—rather like the way toxics inhabit the bodies of those exposed, setting up the future, but not yet manifest as disease, or even as an origin from which a specific and known disease will come. Toxics, like the future anterior, call upon us to think about determinism, but without the straightforward directives of teleology.¹⁰⁷

At best, reading the literary fiction in terms of critical advocacy disrupts a universalizing narrative of history that tells and retells the story of the liberal subject and its others. In The Red Book, a Buddhist-inspired, transnational compassion forges family and community out of suffering, although it does so ultimately at the expense of suffering’s particular and political contexts. In contrast, Animal’s People and Pterodactyl, in distinct ways, illuminate how neoliberalism and governmentality produce the structural vulnerabilities of specific populations. Notwithstanding their formal and stylistic differences, all three texts explicitly engage with the question of what it means to expose those vulnerabilities, and the epistemic systems within which they are lived, to diverse audiences.

In foregrounding the terms through which the stories above are told—their languages, literary devices, and structures, critical advocacy also raises the question of stories that remain illegible, unimagined, or heretofore untold. The problem of cultural translation in Pterodactyl is one example of productive inconclusivity: Devi offers a sustained analysis of the politics of representation of the Adivasis without resolving it through tropes of cultural authenticity. Among the missing subjects or referents of these three fictions, however, are the Bhopali women for whom toxic exposure has led to political mobility. Instead, when it comes to gender as an analytic of vulnerability and critical advocacy, the literature is constrained by dominant gendered norms. The specific ways in which exposure to and toxicity from the explosion were gendered manifests in the literature through tropes of failed motherhood (e.g., orphans such as Animal and Naga, the aborted fetus of Animal’s khã, and the mother who sold one child and saw another die in Pterodactyl). The prevalence of this trope supports Dianne Otto’s argument that international human rights law tends to produce three female subjectivities: the wife and mother, equal person, or victim.¹⁰⁸ And the depiction of maternal failure illustrates how easily the first and third of Otto’s subjectivities are conflated.

In response and to conclude, I turn to the recent research undertaken through oral ethnographies of women activists of Bhopal. This scholarship does not posit oral interviews as transparent representations of authentic subjects, and is not meant to privilege testimony above all other discourses. However, it does point to the need to be mindful of the ways in which gendered norms operate across genres to collapse the categories of women and victims. When that happens, the productive capacity of vulnerability theory to activate new norms of legal personhood is circumscribed and the inherent masculinization of liberal subjectivity re-emerges. In its place, the recent research tracks the development of counter-epistemologies rooted in embodied vulnerability as a source of political mobility and theory. Recognizing the less than 20 percent female literacy rate in Bhopal as well as the gendered norms that reduced the socio-political visibility of women at the time of the disaster, Suroopa Mukherjee, Eurig Scandrett, Tarunima Sen, and Dharmesh Shah conducted oral interviews with contemporary Bhopal activists in their domestic spaces. Earlier celebrations of female activists such as Rashida Bee and Chandra Devi Shukla, winners of the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize for their advocacy work, were notable for their narratives of gendered exceptionality. That rhetoric, combined with the international exposure the two women garnered, also generated controversy among local movements that remain wary of international cooptation of what for them are resolutely local concerns. Mukherjee et al’s research, by contrast, focuses on the how Bhopali women’s “engagement in the struggle for justice has been a vehicle for developing analytical skills cultivated through oratory, oral debate and physical embodiment.”¹⁰⁹ These developments stem from the articulation of gender within a wide range of tactics and organizational units, including hunger strikes, union organizing, public protests, and neighborhood groups:

We found a number of potential themes, but running through them as a central motif was the role played by women’s activism in “scripting” the fight for justice in Bhopal. In a sense gender was the nodal issue. The very nature of women’s exclusion and dispossession in the context of an industrial disaster made them twice victimized. Already marginalized in a patriarchal society, the disaster killed and maimed male earning members of the family, thus making women dependent on state-sponsored welfare schemes that were not gender sensitive. Women are conspicuously absent from official documents, both legal and medical that were used for classification of injuries for determining the quantum of compensation to be paid as part of the settlement, and the research to be done by the Indian Council of Medical Research for medical rehabilitation of the victims. […] In an important sense women have carved out their relevant position within the movement by reinstating gender as an important component of the discursive practice of the social movement.¹¹⁰

This brief citation underscores the necessity of gendered readings of embodied vulnerability, in conjunction with political mobilization, in crafting civic epistemologies of Bhopal for the future. Without close attention to gender, in its local articulations, as an analytic, the vulnerable subject too easily replicates the gendered divisions upon which liberal subjectivity is based. When that occurs, representations of vulnerable subjects become generalizable through gendered norms as opposed to political affiliation. The epistemologies of the Adivasis in Devi’s novella and the Bhopali women cited in the studies above also point to the difficulty in forging generalizability across different civic spheres. The difficulty is in part attributable to the challenge of cultural translation, as discussed above, but also to the ways in which the epistemologies that ground these diverse subjects are themselves contingent and changing, developing through and against participation in human rights struggles.

Notes

1. Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” 679–92.

2. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.”

3. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, 234.

4. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity, 48.

5. Baxi, “Geographies of Injustice: Human Rights at the Altar of Convenience,” 197–212.

6. Stanton, “Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Horizontally: Resignifying the Universal in Human Rights Discourse,” 77.

7. Baxi, “Writing About Impunity and Environment: The ‘Silver Jubilee’ of the Bhopal Catastrophe,” 44.

8. I borrow the term from Naomi Klein. See also Moore, “‘Disaster Capitalism’ and Human Rights: Embodiment and Subalternity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” I use catastrophe and disaster interchangeably in this chapter, although from disaster- or catastrophe-management perspectives the terms trigger different responses.

9. Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” 692.

10. “Q&A with Indra Sinha, author of the Booker shortlisted ‘Animal’s People,’” By Sandhya, Sepia Mutiny (blog), 13 March 2008. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005088.html.

11. Sathyu Sarangi, http://www.indrasinha.com/animal.html.

12. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 314. For another strong argument against literary humanitarianism, Jennifer Rickel argues that Animal’s People disabuses the reader of this tendency and issues a posthumanist critique of human rights (“‘The Poor Remain’: A Posthumanist Rethinking of Literary Humanitarianism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People”). Although I agree with the critique of literary humanitarianism, its extension to human rights as a field of justice fails to offer an alternative.

13. Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form, 4.

14. Baxi uses this term to avoid the language of victimhood in “Writing About Impunity and Environment,” 24.

15. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity and Environment,” 43, 44.

16. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity and Environment,” 29.

17. For the full text of the decision as well as Baxi’s critical introduction, see Upendra Baxi and the Indian Law Institute, Inconvenient Forum and Convenient Catastrophe: The Bhopal Case.

18. Baxi, Inconvenient Forum and Convenient Catastrophe, 4, 10.

19. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity and Environment,” 33–34.

20. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57.

21. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders, 352.

22. Fletcher, Ono, and Roy, “Justice for Bhopal,” 10.

23. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 172.

24. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma: Human Rights and Discursive Ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act,” 94. Dale provides an excellent analysis of the particularities of the case as well as its broader implications in this essay.

25. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma,” 294.

26. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma,” 293.

27. Dale notes that identifying these norms “can be controversial,” and he cites the Vienna Convention of the Law on Treaties (1969), quoted above, for their prevailing authority. Dale also cites a 1987 US statute that lists “the following jus cogens norms: genocide; slavery or slave trade; summary execution or causing the disappearance of individuals; torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; prolonged arbitrary detention; systematic racial discrimination; and a consistent pattern or gross violation of internationally recognized human rights” (Dale, 301n12).

28. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma,” 303.

29. “The Shell game ends,” The Economist, 20 April 2013: 34.

30. Center for Constitutional Rights, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/kiobel.

31. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 3.

32. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 2.

33. Mukherjee, “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us’: Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal’s People,” 218.

34. I am not aware of a comparable study of reporting of the disaster within India, though many sources note local journalist Rajkumar Keswani’s four articles for the Hindi-language Rapat Weekly in 1982, two years before the explosion, that reported on leaks and safety lapses and warned of an impending disaster at the plant. The literary non-fiction account of the gas leak, Lapierre and Moro’s Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster (2002) pays special attention to Keswani’s work in Chapter 26.

35. Wilkins, Shared Vulnerability: The Media and American Perceptions of the Bhopal Disaster, xii, 51.

36. Wilkins, Shared Vulnerability, 111.

37. Sokhi-Bulley, “Government(ality) by Experts: Human Rights as Governance,” 252.

38. Wilkins, Shared Vulnerability, 114–15.

39. Chouliaraki, “Post-humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication Beyond the Politics of Pity,” 109.

40. Godden, “‘We have no right to walk into another’s suffering’—Raghu Rai on Bhopal, the demise of ‘Truth,’ and the future of the photojournalistic aesthetic in campaigning.”

41. Larabee, Decade of Disaster, 120.

42. Larabee, Decade of Disaster, 120.

43. “Bhopal Medical Appeal,” The Guardian (London), 3 December 1994: 10–11.

44. Chouliaraki, “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication beyond a Politics of Pity,” 108.

45. Rob Nixon describes how this blurring of genres extends to media in the website Sinha, founded to extend the fictional world of the book into the public sphere: “Sinha’s 2007 fiction can be read as an experiment in linking the protest novel to digitally networked dissent. Indeed, the public life of Animal’s People as a novel has been powerfully shaped by Sinha’s mobile, multimedia approach: on his blog and Web site, for example, he mixes non-fictional testimony from Bhopal survivors with a sardonic visual-and-verbal fantasia of a poisoned city trying to rebrand itself as a tourist paradise” (Nixon 2011, 43–44).

46. From Henry Campbell Black, Law Dictionary (1990), quoted in Laqueur, “The Dead Body and Human Rights,” 75, 76.

47. Laqueur, “The Dead Body and Human Rights,” 77, 79.

48. For a broader overview of the shared history of human rights and literature, see Peters, “‘Literature,’ the ‘Rights of Man,’ and Narratives of Atrocity: Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony”; and, for an incisive look at the mutual imbrications of the Bildungsroman and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from a postcolonial perspective, see Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law.

49. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 56.

50. Laqueur, “The Dead Body and Human Rights,” 81.

51. Higgins and Leps, “The Politics of Life after Death: Ondaatje’s Ghost,” 201.

52. Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” 688.

53. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses this phrase repeatedly to denote fiction’s distinct characteristic from which we may learn and to argue for readings that resist closure. See, for example, Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 174–75 and 242–3n70; “Terror: A Speech After 9/11,” 109; and “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” 23. In “Ethics and Politics,” she argues, “Literary reading teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. It is not that literary reading does not generalize. It is just that those generalizations are not on evidentiary ground” (23). Because fiction asks the reader to imagine what is possible and, in the terms of a given text, probable, it lends itself to the work of advocacy in Fortun’s definition. Both Fortun’s concept of advocacy and Spivak’s concept of the power of literary readings resist the temptation to seek closure, advocating instead one’s continual reassessment of the terms of engagement with his/her civic spheres.

54. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 5, 12.

55. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 46.

56. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 350, 352–53.

57. Delahunt, The Red Book, 4.

58. Delahunt, The Red Book, 291.

59. Delahunt, The Red Book, 290, 283.

60. Delahunt, The Red Book, 14, 144.

61. Slaughter, “Humanitarian Reading,” 94.

62. Slaughter, “Humanitarian Reading,” 102, 106.

63. Interestingly, in light of its exploration of Buddhism’s capacity to alleviate suffering across identitarian lines, the novel does not include the potential role of engaged Buddhism as a movement dedicated to social activism.

64. Delahunt, The Red Book, 132.

65. Sinha, Animal’s People, 4.

66. Rai, http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage&VBID=2K1HZS2W7TVK&IT=ZoomImage01_VForm&IID=2TYRYDZA869L&PN=12&CT=Search.

67. Mukherjee, “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us,’” 227, 228, 230.

68. Nixon, “Slow Violence Revisited: A Response to Mary Louise Pratt and Stephanie LeMenager,” 305–7.

69. Puar, “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better,” 153.

70. Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal disaster 20 Years on, 69.

71. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 17.

72. Sinha, Animal’s People, 58.

73. Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 354.

74. Sinha, Animal’s People, 366.

75. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law.

76. Devi, Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, 101.

77. Devi, Pterodactyl, 109.

78. Devi, Pterodactyl, 98.

79. Devi, Pterodactyl, 189.

80. Devi, Pterodactyl, 191.

81. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 153.

82. Devi, Pterodactyl, 118.

83. For a reverential overview of Sinha’s linguistic inventiveness, see Sharma’s “Britain’s Hegemony India’s May Be: Indra Sinha: Identity through language in Animal’s People.”

84. Devi, Pterodactyl, 161–62.

85. DeLoughrey and Handley, “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” 4.

86. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond, 35–43.

87. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 230.

88. Mahlstedt, Review of Animal’s People, 663.

89. Anwar, “Transcribing Resistance: Cartographies of Struggling Bodies and Minds in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps,” 85.

90. Rob Nixon’s analysis of Animal’s People in terms of the picaresque and Andrew Carrigan’s reading of the novel within the genre of crime fiction lead to similar conclusions. See Carrigan, “‘Justice is on our side? Animal’s People, generic hybridity, and eco-crime,” 159–74.

91. Benedict Anderson’s well-known description of the modern nation as an imagined community is argued in part through the role of newspapers in creating the narratives to fill the perpetual present of “homogenous, empty time”—providing the stories that define the horizontal, progression of days for a common group of (national) readers (Anderson, Imagined Communities).

92. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 9.

93. Sinha, Animal’s People, 201.

94. See, for example, Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics.

95. Carrigan argues similarly that the novel speaks less for local (Nixon) or transpersonal (Mukherjee) politics than it “functions more as a crisis for its readers in respect to the criminal perpetuation of environmental violence” (“‘Justice is on Our Side?’” 168).

96. Devi, Animal’s People, 366.

97. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 50.

98. Sinha, Animal’s People, 106.

99. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4.

100. Devi, Pterodactyl, 110.

101. Devi, Pterodactyl, 118.

102. Pickering and Kehde, “Reading de Certeau through Devi—and Vice Versa,” 346.

103. Devi, Pterodactyl, 186.

104. Devi, Pterodactyl, 159.

105. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17.

106. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 350.

107. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 354.

108. Otto, “Lost in Translation: Rescripting the Sexed Subjects of International Human Rights Law,” 318–56.

109. Mukherjee et al., “Generating Theory in the Bhopal Survivors’ Movement,” 151.

110. Mukherjee et al., “Generating Theory in the Bhopal Survivors’ Movement,” 165. See also Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster.