journalist ’ s sentimentality and thirst for tragedy , he scrutinises the West ’ s violent dehumanisation of the subaltern . " You have turned us Kaufpuris into a story , but always the same story " ( Sinha , p . 6 ), he chides . This accusation exposes how Western discourse around the subaltern assumes that the entirety of their personality must be rooted in sorrow , as though having to endure trauma means that trauma is now Animal ’ s defining characteristic . Just as Emecheta uses Nnu Ego and Ato ’ s joy to challenge Western depictions of African women as in need of white feminist empowerment , Animal consciously uses humour to actively resist being labeled as nothing more complex than a victim . The significance of joy as a response to such violent condescension , a joy expressed here in the manner of crude teasing , is that it explodes stereotypes of the subaltern as meek and grateful for Western compassion .
Where the joy in The Joys of Motherhood is communal and depends on networks of friendship , a local version of global sisterhood , at the beginning of Animal ' s People , Animal revels in his own solitary joy , because it allows him to independently express his individual voice . By doing this , he inverts the power dynamic of subject and object and prevents himself being judged as part of a homogenous group with the rest of the Kampani victims , impressing the diversity of the subaltern . His mockery means that the Western subject becomes the object of ridicule whilst the subaltern gleefully monopolises the demand for his voice by refusing to conform . Nnu Ego needs prompting to find her joy within herself , suggesting that she has repressed unorthodox desires . Animal , on the other hand already feels so excluded from his society because of his physical condition that he is freely vocal about less socially acceptable urges , happily swearing and singing about sex . These more superficial desires are projected to conceal his deeper desire which is to no longer feel ostracised because of his physical condition . As well as deeming it rebellious , Freud called humour " a liberating element [...] it insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world , in fact , that these are merely occasions for affording it pleasure " ( Freud in The Theory of Laughter quoted in Holoch , ‘ Profanity and the Grotesque in Indra Sinha ' s Animal ' s People ’, 2016 , p . 142 ). The outside world in this case is the world outside of Kaufpur , the world of the journalist , a world that has instigated but not been injured by the violence of the Kampani tragedy .
Tragedies like the Bhopal disaster are the result of what Nixon calls ‘ absentee corporate colonialism whereby transnational companies internalise profits and externalise risks , particularly in impoverished regions of the Global South ( Nixon , ‘ Slow Violence , Neoliberalism , and the Environmental Picaresque ’, 2011 , p . 69 ). The fact that Kaufpur is a fictional place means that it can be read as an analogy of not just Bhopal but the global South in general . Sinha states that large-scale tragedies such as Bhopal ’ s are not exclusive to India , similar tragedies have occurred in many countries . He states that ‘ the book could have been set anywhere where the chemical industry has destroyed people ’ s lives . I had considered calling the city Receio and setting it in Brazil ’ ( Sinha quoted by Holoch , p . 129 ). Thus the explosion symbolises the wider international violence of neo-colonialism . Whilst corporations such as Union Carbide are responsible for the disasters themselves , Western discourse adds injury to those already afflicted by allowing its hunger for sensation to misrepresent them . Animal highlights such hunger through his use of predatory language to describe the journalist and his Western readership . " I could feel your hunger . You ’ d devour everything ," ( Sinha , p . 4 ) he
KAYA PURCHASE
83