Here’s Indra!

I enjoyed the beginning of Animal’s People, Indra Sinha’s thinly-masked message novel about the Union Carbide disaster. Jaanvar (Animal), a toxic gas victim with a twisted spine who gets around on four legs, is given an original, sharply-drawn voice and a serrated tongue. But as the book wears on, the character becomes too precious as Sinha struggles with writing in the voice of someone uneducated.

Jaanvar is far more articulate than an average Indian villager, which is a concession to readers — having to suffer through Hasina in Brick Lane put me off to that kind of verité forever. But sometimes you just have to resort to third person, or you’re stuck explaining how your character might have learned of some sub rosa event or two-dollar word. And there’s far too much of that weasely exposition in this book.

Sinha’s trick of making Jaanvar acerbic and non-self-pitying makes the novel more incisive, less whine. But all the cussing, sexual fantasy and masturbation gets old after awhile because there’s little else to the character. This brand of misanthropy is only entertaining until the second beer, then it’s just boorish. We’re told Jaanvar hopes to open a woman until his shaft is stroking her heart. He jacks off outside a woman’s window as she showers, wondering idly whether he’ll end a moth’s life with his man-juice. At the end he hallucinates and throttles his purple-helmeted love Nazi, squirting galaxies into the sky.

Around halfway through, it becomes clear that this Booker-nominated novel’s plot isn’t going anywhere. Jaanvar roams round and round in the same small town. Like Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses, there’s little narrative drive and little sense of real danger. This is literature as bumper cars.

Dr. Elli Barber is basically Madhuri in Aaja Nachle, a firangi babe who comes in to save the village from itself. She’s a cardboard character, a Magical Caucasian plunked down as a deus ex babe-ina in fictional Khaufpur. Zafar the saintly activist is like Kay Kay Menon in Hazaaron Khawaishein Aisi, his consort Nisha the jholiwali a lazily-written JNU sketch-in. You’ve seen Somraj the classical ustad in a thousand Bollywood movies.

The most interesting, non-stock character is actually the Khã-in-a-jar, a mutant embryo in preservative fluid which speaks like the children in Saleem Sinai’s head. Sinha’s running theme of rhyming ditties evokes Rushdie’s jingles; both authors were advertising copywriters in the UK.

Up til the end, the book is moderately interesting. But the closing passages turn sloppily melodramatic. Jaanvar develops into a drama queen, spelling things out in caps. A hallucination sequence comes off as the poor man’s Sundarbans sequence from Midnight’s Children. It’s incoherent and self-indulgent. And the plot wraps up too neatly. This would have been a far more interesting work if it didn’t cop out with a feel-good ending.

The politics of language in this book are bizarre. There’s some novelty in making Jaanvar’s mentor, Ma Francis, a French nun. But how does this book, a howl against neocolonial injustice, get away with a Hindi glossary while refusing to translate the French? And throughout the novel, Sinha translates Hindi semi-literally, putting the verb at the end even in English. An odd pattern, it’s. Far too stilted, sounds. Yoda’s tic, was. At least the edition I read comes in a jewel-like body font.

Nilanjana praised the intent more than the execution:

In 2006, [Bhopal survivor] Sunil Kumar put on a T-shirt that said, “No More Bhopals”, and hanged himself from the ceiling fan… Despite the occasional clunkiness of the language and a tendency to be over-lyrical, Sinha’s writing is powerful and Jaanvar’s story is deeply moving. This may the closest to the non-stereotypical Bhopal novel that we’re going to get for a while. [Link]