The Lesson of Khaufpur and Morichjhãpi: Temporal Finitude and the Urgency of Environmental Justice in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Abstract

This essay examines how two contemporary novels written by Indian authors, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), elucidate the temporal dimension of environmental justice—through both the incremental aspect of environmental degradation and the urgency of trying to remedy such processes of slow violence. The novels use two environmental atrocities—the Morichjhãpi massacre (1979) and the Bhopal gas disaster (1984)—as backdrops for illuminating how the rights of poor people have traditionally been neglected, in effect making these people “disposable.” Following Rob Nixon’s theorization of “slow violence,” I argue that both Ghosh and Sinha illuminate injustices which are not simply immediate and spectacular, but instead incremental and relatively invisible. Such injustices include the hundreds of fishermen who are killed by tigers every year in the Sundarbans region and the long-term medical problems from which more than half a million inhabitants of Bhopal have suffered. By insisting on the temporal dimension of justice, I draw a connection between Nixon’s theorization of slow violence and Jacques Derrida’s argument that temporal finitude is an ineradicable condition of possibility for justice. More specifically, I argue that Ghosh’s and Sinha’s explorations of slow violence result in a fundamental emphasis on the urgency of justice. They thereby foreground what Zafar calls “the lesson of Khaufpur,” which is “that you don’t wait to be harmed before you take action to protect.”