The Claims of Bodies: Practices of Citizenship After Bhopal in Survivor Testimony and Indra Sinha's Animal's People

Abstract

This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and the state in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas explosion of 2–3 December 1984. While not discounting the transnational dimensions of environmental problems across the Global South, nor postcolonial fatigue with the nation-state, it argues survivors remain invested in the state for redress and continue to engage with it through forms of claim-making that center on the injured body. It does so by examining the rhetoric of survivor testimony and legal documents about the 1989 settlement, as well as Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007). I argue survivor testimonies mobilize bodily pain to both hail and revise promises of government welfare enshrined in legal documents surrounding the Bhopal case, while the novel moves beyond the revision of welfare as a shared category of political legibility. Animal’s People posits that post-disaster terms of political relation arise from the citizenry themselves as they articulate the unruliness of their toxified bodies, specifically characterized as non-human assemblages. This essay argues these accounts reenvision the role of the state in toxic redress and environmental harm, and turn citizen strategies of survival into suggestions for better forms of postcolonial governance.