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September 25, 2007
Review of Animal's People in Frontline
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA, Frontline magazine, Volume 24 - Issue 19 :: Sep. 22-Oct. 05, 2007
A human story
Indra Sinha’s new novel, which is on the Booker shortlist, pays tribute to Bhopal gas leak survivors, who are still seeking justice.
SOME time before dawn on December 3, 1984, a cloud of toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of a tank in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, killing thousands of people and leaving thousands of others with lasting illnesses. Among those presumed dead that day was a 13-year-old boy named Sunil. Although Sunil survived, most of his family, including his parents, had died. Doggedly, the boy sought out his two remaining younger siblings, and together they struggled to overco me the tragedy. Some time later, Sunil began to hear voices in his head. Even after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, he continued to work as an activist and volunteer at the Sambhavna Clinic for the survivors of the gas tragedy. One day in July 2006, wearing a T-shirt that said “No More Bhopals”, Sunil hanged himself from a ceiling fan. He was 34 years old.
Indra Sinha’s second novel, Animal’s People, is dedicated to Sunil. On his website – www.indrasinha.com – Sinha remembers this “mad Bhopali child”: “Animal’s ability to live on 4 rupees a day, and his sense of humour were certainly inherited from Sunil. Sunil went about the city on foot and once accused me of being ‘an auto-riding superstar’ just as Animal later accuses Elli doctress. He also once ran away to the jungle to live like a wild creature.” While Animal’s story is fictional, with only a few elements drawn from Sunil’s life, the novel pays tribute to Sunil’s spirit and to the spirit of the survivors who still seek justice.
How did Sinha, a successful advertising professional based in England, get involved with the Bhopal medical appeal? Sinha had grown up in India, where his father was a naval officer and his mother a writer. During his successful stint in advertising, he wrote several well-known campaigns, including one for Amnesty International. After publishing a translation of Kama Sutra and a book on Tantra, he quit his advertising career, burned his portfolio and took up writing full time. He published The Cyber-Gypsies, a memoir of the prehistory of the Internet, in 1999; his first novel, The Death of Mr Love, based on the Nanavati murder case, appeared in 2002.
Meanwhile, back in 1993, having heard of Sinha’s work for Amnesty, Bhopal community worker Sathyu Sarangi had gone to him seeking help to raise a fund for the gas tragedy survivors. Even for Sinha, it was a difficult project: “For months, Raghu Rai’s famous picture of a baby’s burial stared at me from my office wall. I was unable to find words to go with it. Finally, with the 10th anniversary of the disaster approaching, I wrote a double page ad and took it to Carolyn McCall at The Guardian, explaining that we hadn’t a penny, but the appeal was so important she had to publish it. It ran on a personal guarantee to stump up if it failed.” The appeal was a success. Thus began Sinha’s involvement with the Bhopal Medical Appeal and the free Sambhavna Clinic. Part of the proceeds from sales of Animal’s People on the Amazon site will go to this cause.
The novel began in 1996 as a series of sketches for a screenplay. After hearing about a man who walked on all fours, and an old French nun in a nursing home, Sinha decided to write it as a novel. Published in March, Animal’s People has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007.
Khaufpur, where the novel is set (see the website www.khaufpur.com) is a fictionalised version of Bhopal where “the Kampani” chose to set up their pesticide factory. Gentle and progressive, with a heritage of poetry and music, Khaufpur was once a haven for refugees. Now it is the site of an epic struggle for this group of people who have nothing – and therefore nothing to lose. Sinha’s novel is not so much about the gas tragedy itself as about the long struggle of its survivors in the decades that followed, and the determination and endurance of the people of Khaufpur, Animal’s people.
Animal was a few days old when he was orphaned on the night of the gas leak. When the novel opens, he is 19 years old. He walks on all fours – the result of a spinal disorder caused by the effects of the gas – which is how he has acquired the name Jaanvar, or Animal. The novel begins with this startling disclosure: “I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.”
Animal lives in an old ruined tower on the outskirts of the factory premises, with only an adopted stray dog, Jara, and an aged, senile French nun, Ma Franci, for company. On that fateful night, while others lost their lives, families, health, and even their sanity, Ma Franci lost the ability to speak Khaufpuri. She now speaks only in French as she raves to Animal about the Apocalypse to come.
The character of Animal is one of the achievements of the novel. Surrounded by slums and desperate poverty, the young narrator, Animal, manages to get by with some clever little scams, a savage wit, a “jamispond” swagger, and much attitude. The two dozen brisk chapters that make up the novel are presented as “tapes” made by Animal speaking directly into a tape recorder left for him by a foreign “jarnalis” (journalist). Characteristically, the boy has persuaded the journalist to leave him his shorts and Zippo lighter as well.
“If you want my story, you’ll have to put up with how I tell it,” he declares at the beginning of his narration. Animal’s voice is cautious, clever, and often wildly funny – a marvellous mix of dispassionate statement, boyish emotion, voices in his head, magic realist moments, and even stray bits of poetry. He speaks a mixture of Inglis (English), Hindi and French, a language that he has picked up from Ma Franci’s ravings. His narration is rich in detail and texture, taking us deep into the back-and-forth of Khaufpur’s bazaars, slums and alleys, filled with “bhutt-bhutt pigs”, raunchy jokes, cheerful abuse and shayari (poetry). He is unsentimental and has no patience with the sanctimonious pieties of most visiting journalists: “You told me that sometimes the stories of small people in this world can achieve big things, this is the way you buggers always talk.” At the same time, although his syntax is confused, even broken at times, it manages to be fresh, urgent and rich in feeling. “Never will I forget this moment, filled with dread I’m, it’s like my four feet have grown roots,” he says towards the hallucinatory finale of the novel just before his separation from Ma Franci and Jara.
Other characters are Zafar, who has been leading a tired, dreary struggle for justice from hearing to hearing and from judge to judge; Farouq, his foulmouthed but staunch deputy; Nisha, Zafar’s girlfriend and fellow activist, who brings Animal into their group; Somraj Punekar, Nisha’s father and the onetime “Voice of Khaufpur”, who lost not only his wife and a child but also his singing voice in the gas tragedy, and who now hears music in the smallest whispers of nature; and Elli Barber, an American doctor who comes to the town to open a free medical centre for the victims. Not least of all, the ancient, hospitable Huriya Bi, her husband Hanif, and their eight-year-old granddaughter Aliya.
This is the other great achievement of the novel: Sinha’s ability to depict, with accuracy and compassion, the everyday lives of people whose lives are so far removed from his own. Sinha’s decision to fictionalise the story of the Bhopal survivors is ambitious, but surely not surprising in someone who regards Saadat Hasan Manto, the great chronicler of Partition, as the greatest short story writer ever. Manto’s stories, about ordinary men and women caught in the raging fires of the Partition riots, burn with anger and tear our hearts with despair.
Despite Animal’s savagely funny narration, Animal’s People is a tragic novel. It does not seek to memorialise the tragedy with romance and cliche: at one point in the novel, a character derides an attempt to “reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second rate poem”. Animal’s People is not about the shape or colour of the moon, but about the very real and enduring aftermath of the gas disaster, and what it did to the lives and relationships of people over the years: the suffering of the have-nots; the power and callousness of the haves; the abandoned factory rusting into the ground; and people who have to tie pieces of cloth around their children’s bellies to fight pangs of hunger. Most of all, the extraordinary camaraderie, resilience, cussedness and – there is no other word for it – love shown by this community of the marginalised in its fight for justice. Nowhere else is this more apparent than in the blazing heart of the novel, during the Naupada, the hottest days of the year, when Zafar decides to lead a hunger strike. Because they have so few days before the next court hearing, the strikers will not even drink water during their fast. Elli warns the strikers of the terrible risk they are taking: “You’re now in the same situation as people who get lost in a desert without food or water, except that you’ve put yourself there, you are making your own desert.”
But Animal, who is watching the scene unfold, knows how the Khaufpuris will respond to Elli’s words: “‘What is Khaufpur but a desert?’ replies one of the women, someone says ‘wah wah’. All inside the tent nod. I can see Elli’s expression, I know what’s in her mind, which is that they’ll soon learn how hard it is to survive on rhetoric. Despite living among us and speaking our language, she knows next to nothing about us Khaufpuris.” But Animal knows them well, because they are his people. A raw, funny, occasionally heartbreaking and always, despite the name Animal chooses to call himself, a very human story.
Posted by tim at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2007
Chronicle of a Death Retold
Salil Tripathi, Tehelka, 22 September, 2007
SALIL TRIPATHI on Indra Sinha who gave up ad copywriting for storytelling and is probably entitled to think that he did the right thing
The works of Indra Sinha, the latest addition to the pantheon of writers of Indian origin to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, have flirted with fact and fiction, blending the two, leaving it unclear where fantasy ends and reality begins. In Animal’s People, Sinha has become the amanuensis for Animal, “who was human once,” and who, after an illness ruined his spine, now crawls on all fours. His deformity is the result of a chemical leak at a multinational plant in a town called Khaufpur. The world forgot the town’s agony and Animal wants it to be remembered.
Khaufpur’s real life parallel with the Bhopal disaster is self-evident. But if critics have warmed to the novel, and judges have acknowledged its brilliance, it is because Sinha has made the victims leap out of the pages and haunt us.
Sinha is used to compelling readers’ attention: for twenty years he was a renowned copywriter still spoken of with awe in international advertising circles. His ad for London’s Metropolitan Police shows a skinhead spitting at a bobby with a caption that boldly asks: “Can you turn the other cheek?” It is considered one of the greatest recruitment ads of all time.
Sinha has also written a novel about the sensational Ahuja- Nanavati case of 1959, which led to the abolition of jury trial in India. He was also an early chronicler of cyberspace in Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier a book about that vanished world when the Internet wasn’t just about commerce.
And yet there is more to Sinha than the sum of these parts, for at heart, he is a master storyteller. In Animal’s People, he sees a monumental event through the eyes of a marginal character, who, quite literally, adults cannot see, because he only comes up to their knees. Though enfeebled, he has normal dreams.
And that is at the heart of the struggle of Bhopal: its victims want to regain their dignity and respect, both denied by a government that appropriated their right to sue, and by corporate lawyers forever shifting blame. Animal stands up for what he believes in, even if he can’t stand up. Indeed, by making its protagonist unable to stand erect, the novel forces us to imagine a world seen from below, becoming a metaphor for a city whose back is broken. The world has moved on from Bhopal, but Animal does not want you to move on: he paints a vivid and gloomy picture of a town ravaged by a cloud of gas, of a people whose hopes are raised often and sent crashing just as often.
Critics have noted his language, too, and in this, Sinha joins another illustrious list of writers who have exploited the flexibility of English. Sinha injects into the language the urgency of the streets of the Hindi heartland. Indeed, Boyd Tonkin of The Independent says: “This barnstorming monologue ranks among the strongest of the many bids to bend English into an Indian shape since Desani’s lost 1948 classic All About H. Hatterr.”
For much of the last 15 years, Bhopal has been Sinha’s consuming passion. While Khaufpur is based on Bhopal, the novel would not have worked if it only sought the reader’s compassion. “If Animal’s People were simply propaganda it would not work as a novel,” says Sinha. “My primary concern was to write the best novel I could. The characters are everything, it is a story about people, and the catastrophe that had overtaken the city is very much in the background, where it belongs.”
Sinha was born in Bombay and came to Britain at 17. He spent two decades in advertising, and by 1994, when he decided to turn to writing full time, he was widely acknowledged as a legend. He found the advertising world full of “clever, amusing people” and his was a light-hearted and extravagantly paid job. “I was rather successful at it, perhaps because I couldn’t do slogans to save my life. I used to tell stories. No one else did this, so I suppose they stood out,” he adds.
Ram Kapoor, executive creative director at Y&R ,Vietnam, says: “To any Indian copywriter two decades ago, Indra Sinha was a hero. He was one of the most famous copywriters in London. His campaigns were also very human, compassionate and at times shocking. With fact-based, graphically-descriptive prose which forces the reader to imagine the victims’ pain, A master of the long narrative, Sinha’s ads are reminiscent of David Ogilvy, who exhorted copywriters to write longer copy, capture the attention of the readers, and not to treat consumers as morons.
Sinha won many awards, but his Damascene moment came when in the late 1980s he wrote advertising for the Kurdish Refugee Appeal and Amnesty International. He described the destruction of Halabja by Iraq’s chemical weapons attack with remarkable emotive power. Advertising executives often quote an adage ascribed to Sinha: “The written word is the deepest dagger you can drive into a man’s soul.”
“I realised that there was really important work in the world that no one was doing,” he says. When he turned 45, he told his wife, Vickie, that he wanted to quit his job. She told him: “You’re unhappy. This is right. Do it. We’ll manage somehow.” They moved to France, with books and memories, surrounded by wine country.
His attention turned to Bhopal after a meeting with Satinath Sarangi, who has worked for Bhopal’s victims for over two decades. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the survivors must have been compensated, provided with proper health care etc, so it came as an absolute shock to learn when I met Sathyu that none of these things had happened,” he says.
He hopes that people will now rediscover the truth about Bhopal, but he does not have any illusions. “Personally, I don’t insist that writers have a duty to change things. Animal does because he’s a Khaufpuri. I ask no more of a novel than it should be a good story told well. If it can also have a power for good in the world, so much the better,” he says.
In his earlier work on the cyberworld, Sinha argued that there was no difference between fact and fiction, because all experience was subjective. “Fictional characters are often more real than living people,” he says. “Elizabeth Bennett is more vivid to me than the woman who lives down the street. This is what I used to say, but I was wrong, there is a difference. In the real world, people suffer and feel physical pain. They die in various horrible ways, while fictional characters are immortal. Fiction is a way of telling truths that cannot be conveyed by facts.”
Sinha’s life has turned busy after the Booker nomination but he expects the interest to subside. Many consider Ian McEwan a surefire winner, and other contenders, including Pakistan’s Mohsin Hamid are formidable. Sinha is calm about the reception so far, but then many novels have a fairy-tale ending, and in Sinha’s world, it is increasingly difficult to make out what’s real and what is not.
Posted by tim at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2007
Guardian review of Animal's People
The Guardian, September 15, 2007
Behind the clouds
Kamila Shamsie is moved by Indra Sinha's clever reworking of the Bhopal disaster, Animal's People
How do you write a novel about a world in which unspeakable horror is not the climax, but the air which each character must breathe on every page? The answer, provided by Indra Sinha in his Booker-shortlisted Animal's People, is to write it using a narrator who has never breathed any other kind of air, and who is by turns cynical and romantic, bawdy and philosophical. His narrator guides us between the worlds of political activists, determined to find justice 20 years after a crime, and his own personal world in which it often seems that the greatest crime of the "Kampani" responsible for his town's suffering is that it left him crippled and, therefore, undesirable to women despite the great size of his penis.
The Kampani, never named, is Union Carbide, whose pesticide plant released 40 tonnes of lethal gas into the city of Bhopal in 1984, killing thousands (both immediately and in the years that followed), and contaminating drinking water which remains toxic. In Animal's People, Bhopal's name is changed to Khaufpur - the City of Fear.
One of the early delights of the novel is the website to which it directs readers (www.khaufpur.com) which could easily lead one to believe Khaufpur exists. It details the centuries old history of Khaufpur (which is, in fact, the history of Bhopal) and as you enter its matrimonial and classified sections you find characters from the novel. This is not just the playfulness of a writer of fiction trying to make his world appear convincing. Sinha (who, on the website, appears as a female journalist named Indira Sinha) has a sharp political purpose in telling the story of Bhopal's victims and drawing attention to the fact that it is a story which should, in a world of any conscience, remain within the realm of fiction.
Our narrator's name is Animal - he claims it is his nature, too. Twenty years old, he was born the year of the industrial accident which killed his parents and left him with a spine so twisted that he has to walk on all fours, his backside raised higher than his head. He is brought up by Ma Franci, a French nun who was struck by a form of aphasia when the gas leak occurred: she immediately forgot all her Hindi and English, and only retained French; consequently, she believes the factory's gases turned everyone except herself into gibbering creatures without the power of speech. Animal, alone, can speak to her in the French she understands.
Desire, rather than politics, leads Animal into the company of activists, spearheaded by Zafar, who has come to Khaufpur to campaign against the Kampani - which still hasn't accepted its culpability, or offered meaningful redress for the victims. Animal is less interested in Zafar's moral fervour than in his passion for Nisha, the woman Animal loves. Soon he is plotting to poison Zafar to keep him away from Nisha.
Into this world steps Elli, an American doctor who wants to open a free clinic for the people of Khaufpur. Zafar believes she is there on behalf of the Kampani, collecting data which she will then twist to claim that the Kampani is in no way responsible for the suffering of Khaufpur's people. Zafar sends Animal to spy on Elli - a task he's more than eager to carry out on account of the jeans Elli wears, which are so tight her legs appeared to be dyed blue.
There is a point in the novel when it begins to meander - too many characters introduced, and little narrative tension beyond the question of how many sentences can pass before we have to hear of Animal's next arousal. But this is a dip, rather than a serious flaw, and compensated for by the last 100 pages, which have a gathering tension and power that are quite extraordinary. At its best, Sinha's writing is a blade gleaming in the moonlight. And the novel, for all its pain, is a work of profound humanity.
· Kamila Shamsie's most recent novel is Broken Verses (Bloomsbury)
Posted by tim at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2007
Indian novelist Indra Sinha shortlisted for Man Booker Prize
London, Sept 06: Indian novelist Indra Sinha is among six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious award for fiction.
Sinha has been selected for his novel 'Animal's People' which is based on the Bhopal chemical disaster. The novel by Sinha, who set up a clinic in 1996 to help survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, is a fictionalised story of a victim of the industrial disaster.
Other writers in the contest for the prestigious 50,000-pound literary award are Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach), Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip) and Nicola Barker (Darkmans), Anne Enright (The Gathering)cand Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist).
The winner will be named on 16 October. Last year's winner was India-born Keran Desai for her book "The Inheritance of Loss".
"Animal's People" is the second novel of Indra Sinha, the first being "The Death of Mr Love", published in September 2002.
According to Sinha, "Animal's People" is dedicated to his friend and Bhopal gas victim Sunil Kumar, who died in July 2006, aged 34.
Some of the stories Sunil told the author about his life found their way into the novel. However, the character of Animal is entirely fictional, as are his antics, the author said.
Sunil's whole life was shaped - and blighted - by what Bhopalis still refer to simply as 'that night', when poison gas leaked from Union Carbide's factory and killed thousands in the most hideous ways.
Sunil lost all but the two youngest members of his large and loving family. Aged 12, he became the family breadwinner and until his death his first thoughts were always for his sister and brother.
He was kind to other children too, helped form an organization of orphans and threw himself into the survivors' struggle for justice, becoming one of its best-known characters.
After Sunil died, his friends vowed that never again would anyone suffering from mental problems get as little help as he had. Although there was no budget for it, a psychiatric department was opened at the free Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal.
Sambhavna is funded by the Bhopal Medical Appeal, which provides medical care to victims of the gas disaster. All consultations, medicines, treatment and therapies are completely free.
Posted by tim at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)