hrvatski

Heterotopija bidonvila i heterokronija apokalipse u posthumanističkom romanu "Animalovi ljudi" Indre Sinhe

As is well known, the Indian English novel Animal's People was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize: Best Book From Europe & South Asia. In many details the novel corresponds with the real event known as the 1984 Bhopal disaster or Bhopal Gas Tragedy. This essay approaches Animal's People as an example of a posthumanistic novel, in particular as it questions the relations between the human and the nonhuman (contained already in the title) and between the rational and the irrational (by giving up narration to an irrational voice). The notion of posthumanism is derived from postmodernist critics such as François Lyotard, Stuart Sim and Terry Eagleton, who generally speaking share a conviction that we live in a post-humanistic world, where humanistic ideals are not acceptable any more. Besides they are sceptical about human virtues, expressing doubts particularly about the power of reason, and emphasizing above all ethical disadvantages of rationality. In addition to that, the idea of "heterotopias" presented in Michel Foucault's article "Of Other Spaces" (1967) is the starting point of interpretation of space and time in Sinha's novel. In distinction from utopias and dystopias which are fundamentally unreal spaces, Foucault considers heterotopias as real places, as counter-sites in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented and inverted. In this essay the concept of heterotopia is linked with Indian slums or bidonvilles referred in the Sinha's novel as "The Kingdom of the Poor" in Khaufpur (meaning "Horror Town" in Hindi), where people live in extreme poverty suffering from after-effects of the poison caused by the chemical factory's fallout. The slums constitute heterotopias in the sense that they figure as discriminated monstrous zones where society removes and hides its abhorrent poverty, creating enclosed and isolated places. Those discriminated zones function simultaneously as "inner pockets" of resistance and as a mirror- image of the society which has created it. Since heterotopia is linked with time, it signals an absolute break from traditional time, thus creating heterochrony. In that sense, as a kind of heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time, we also find heterochrony in Khaufpuri slums where, as an afterlife, time ceases to have meaning turning into an eternal "now". After "that night" had happened, the catastrophe cancelled time and created an eternity of suffering and agony. The signs of apocalyptical time in Sinha's novel are punctuated by frequent quotations from the Book of Revelation, but also with allusions on Ḳayāmat as the Hinduistic idea of the annihilation. To that chain of apocalyptical subtexts of the novel, one should add Dante's Inferno and the concept of the nine circles of Hell represented by two events, both connected with fire, fever, mortification and mental agony – "Nautapa" (nine days of extreme heat) and "Ashara Mubarak" (the night of the fire walk, after nine days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar). Since hybridity of the apocalyptic religious signs correlates with the hybrid language of the novel, at the end of this essay the issue of such a mixed language describing is addressed labelling it as hinglish (mixture of Hindi and English), hinçais (mixture of Hindi and French), and franglais (mixture of French and English), respectively.

posthumanistički rooman; heterotopija; hetrokronija

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