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IJELLH ISSN-2321-7065

*S. ANANTHAN
PH.D RESEARCH SCHOLAR
ANANTHBHU@GAMIL.COM

**DR. R. SARAVANA SELVAN,

PROFESSOR AND HEAD,
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
BHARATHIAR UNIVERSITY, COIMBATORE.TAMIL NADU, INDIA.

IMPACT ON GLOBALIZATION DEPICTED AS SLOW VIOLENCE AND

THE ENVIRONMENTALISM OF THE POOR IN INDHRA SINHA’S
NOVEL THE ANIMAL’S PEOPLE

ABSTRACT

Globalization is a process that increasing the international trade and organization. There
are number of definitions are there for globalization but we can’t define exactly what it is, initially
the term has been used in the field of economics and world trade, but after the 90s, Growth of the
globalization has been multiplied, and development of globalization has been increased
enormously. Globalization placed a vital role in all the discipline. When we talk about this term in
literature, which is different from others and also it is maintaining some unique place.
Environmental globalization which is increases the global uniformity and connectedness in the
language, regulations and practices of environmental management. It is one of many dimensions
of globalization, the most well known of which is economic globalization (Gills 2004). This article
focuses on environmental impact which is portrayed in the view of globalization.

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Key Words: Post Globalization, Environmental Effects, Industrialization and Westernization.

In this world, people to live peacefully every human needed environment, saving the
environment is very essential; alternatively, we are spoiling the environment by the way of
globalization and industrialization. The growth of the Globalization has been increased in western
countries, but here the growth of globalization overcomes the western countries, globalization may
give advantages, at the same time the effect of the globalization plays major role which may be
equal or beyond that. These all the major roles depicted in Indhra Sinha’s The Animal’s People.
Who is well known Indian writer, the novel was published in the year of 2007 and got many literary
prizes for his prestigious work, this novel is based on real life incident and fictionalized the 1984,
Union Carbide Gas disaster in Bhopal, India. This novel clearly explains about the industrialization
and globalization by which, what are the impacts faced.

This novel starts with narrator whose name called ‘Animal’ because, his spine twisted
forward by the chemical toxin spills. Actually we will call a human only those who have two legs
and walk by them. Apart from that we don’t consider as a human being. Likewise the narrator
‘Animal’ who also human being, but who walks by four because the environment spoiled him and
by the business dwellers for the purpose of wealth. The narrator recalls his pathetic incident like
he was “six when the pains began, … [a] burning in my neck and across the shoulders” (2007, 14)
The “pain gripped my neck and forced it down,” as if “a devil… with red hot tongs” was molding
his spinal column into a permanent bow, he recalls: “Further, further forward I was bent” and
“when the smelting in my spine stopped the bones had twisted like a hairpin, the highest part of
me was my arse” (15)

Animal’s body is twisted by the leakage of industrial heat into living bodies, a metallurgical
fever that softens and recasts the vertebrae’s structure from the inside out. This posture represents
a new kind of ‘factory life’: it is not a matter of long hours of repetitive labor producing a ‘burning
in the muscles’ but of the factory living as a chemical prosthetic, traveling within Animal, touching
and burning his hidden interior, neurological, and genetic self.

The metamorphic discharge of chemical heat from factories to bodies described in

Animal’s People is not merely metaphorical. Sinha’s novel is, after all, a finely fictionalized
account of a very real and ongoing thirty year old industrial disaster in Bhopal, India. From

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December 1984 until today, a pesticide factory owned by Union Carbide and Dow Chemical (US-
based multinational petrochemical and biotech companies) has leaked into that city tons of toxic
chemicals. Between 3,000 and 6,000 people suffocated from the initial airborne exposure to
Methyl Iso-Cyanate (MIC), and the people of Bhopal also continue to experience
disproportionately high rates of ‘birth defects’, cleft palates, all manner of tumorous growths,
severe eye pain, respiratory problems, and neurological disorders. Including 25,000 subsequent
deaths, most of the 100,000 to 200,000 people suffering from serious ongoing ailments have
become sick due to a massive seepage of MIC from the unsecured factory into the city’s
groundwater. Union Carbide, the Indian government, and Dow Chemical have all refused to
recognize the presence or health effects of MIC in Bhopal’s water supply, despite a wealth of
evidence. Key elements of what was once considered a mutually beneficial project for economic
development, the factory, the chemicals, and the people of Bhopal have now been abandoned by
their corporate benefactors, their national government, and the legal systems in India and the
United States. Even though the factory is closed, this abandonment makes it no less operational
within the terrain and bodies of Bhopal. And yet, troublingly, as Rob Nixon points out in Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, “in an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow
violence (like the ongoing spill in Bhopal) is deficient in … recognizable special effects” (2011,
6). Where “chemical and radiological slow violence is driven inward, somatized into cellular
dramas of mutation,” it is difficult to reproduce that familiar “narrative containment, imposed by
the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat.” Indeed, Animal is keenly aware of his readers’ desire
to understand the spill as a familiar narrative, as Dow and the Indian government have, to visualize
it as a completed event that took place on a single, tragic night. “So strangers in far off countries
can marvel,” Animal argues, “you have turned us Khaufpuris into storytellers, but always the same
story … that night, always that fucking night”(5). Throughout the novel, then, Animal negotiates
with the demands for spectacle placed on him by his international readership. Addressing that
readership, Animal states, “I will call you Eyes. My job is to talk, yours is to listen” (14). Calling
for ‘Eyes’ to listen, Animal interrupts the visual logic that would take his narration as the ‘same
story’ of ‘that night’, as his framing constructs a synesthetic readership whose textual sensorium
must be rewired. If the slow violence of the chemical spill cannot be seen through the image of a
single explosion on a single night, then the ongoing diffusion of chemicals into living bodies the

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neurological metamorphosis produced by chemical violence must be conveyed as a confusion of

the senses.

In this negotiation with his audience, Animal presents his own non-normative body as a
complex visual cue for the slow violence affecting his community. Knowing that his narration
“becomes a picture and (that his audience’s) eyes settle on it like flies,” Animal directs his own
gaze inward

I’m looking right now at my feet, which are near the hearth, twisted they are, a little
bent to one side. Inside of left foot, out of right, where they scrape the ground the
skin’s thick and cracked. In gone times I’ve felt such hunger, I’d break off lumps
of the dry skin and chew it. Want to see? Okay watch, I am Bing down to my heel,
feeling for horny edges, I’m sliding the thumbnail under. There, see this lump of
skin, hard as a pebble, how easily it breaks off, mmm, chewy as a nut. (13)

As Animal’s feet enter the visual frame, they appear turned over, ‘twisted’, ‘bent’, ‘inside
… out’, ‘scraped’, ‘cracked’, ‘lumpy’, ‘dry’, ‘horny’, ‘hard’, and ‘chewy’. in fact, Animal’s highly
embodied description of his feet involves not only how they look but also how they feel and taste,
and his relationship to his feet is directly connected to his bent spine, which brings his feet into
close contact with his nose, mouth, and eyes. Establishing a kind of intimacy, Animal asks readers
if they “want to see” him eat a piece of his heel; he directs the viewers’ eyes to “see this lump of
skin” that he holds out like a “pebble.” As the visual field narrows to this focal point, Animal
promptly swallows the pebble, and the Eyes are forced to follow the lump of skin into the darkness
of Animal’s digestive tract, “mmm.” While Animal’s posture clearly manifests the invisible
chemicals that have smelted his community together he stands out from and also stands in for the
toxicity that has pervaded the community he also keenly directs his audience’s gaze toward the
inside of his body, where the cellular drama rages on.

Animal’s posture provides an approach to the Bhopal disaster from a different line of sight,
one ordinary and overturned. The “world of humans is meant to be viewed from eye-level,” he
points out, but “lift my head I’m staring into someone’s crotch” (2). Animal “knows which one
hasn’t washed his balls, (and) can smell pissy gussets and shitty backsides whose faint stenches
don’t carry to your nose”. Even as his posture helps represent the physical afflictions of overlooked

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Bhopalies, it also gives Animal access to the smells of abject materiality that cannot be viewed
from eye level or from the perspective of the “human world.” Animal’s synesthetic descriptions
accentuate the bodily processes of digestion and genital sexuality, but in so doing he knocks up
against the “world of humans” as it is “meant to be seen.” In other words, the visual logic that
frames the chemical spill as “the same story” of “that night” is held in place by a “world of humans”
that can only see, and be seen, from “eye-level.” The size, shape, and meaning of material violence
is thus circumscribed by a “world” system that prescribes what is “meant to be seen” as human,
and what is meant to be ignored as nonhuman. Thus we can see the impact on environmental
globalization through the voice of the narrator. all the new inventions and technologies for the
benefit of people. If it does not to spoil the common people, it would be very grateful. So the
impact on environmental globalization is the muffled voices of the Bhopal people.

REFERENCES

Sinha, Indra. 2007. Animal’s People. London: Simon and Schuster.

Eckerman, Ingrid. 2005. The Bhopal Saga: Causes and Consequences of the World’s Largest
Industrial Disaster. Hyderguda, India: Universities Press.

Everest, Larry. 1986. Behind the Poison Cloud: Union Carbide’s Bhopal Massacre. Chicago:
Banner.

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

Snell, Heather. 2008. “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.”
Postcolonial Text 4, no. 4: 1–15.

Sinha, Indra. 2009. “Katie Price vs. Animal Spice.” Khaufpur: City of Promise, April 16,

www.khaufpur.com/katiepricevsanimalspice.html.

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