Animal's People
 |
|
| Author | Indra Sinha |
|---|---|
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
|
Publication date
|
2007 (1st edition) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 374 (paperback, 1st edition) |
| ISBN | (paperback, 1st edition) |
Animal's People is a novel by Indra Sinha. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book From Europe & South Asia. Sinha's narrator is a 19-year-old orphan of Khaufpur, born a few days before the 1984 Bhopal disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Ever since he can remember, he has gone on all fours. Known to every-one simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. He lives with a crazy old French nun called Ma Franci, and his dog Jara. Also, he falls in love with a local musician's daughter, Nisha.
The story was recorded in Hindi on a series of tapes by Animal himself and it has been translated to English as well. The author uses Animal's odd mixture of Hindi, French and Indianised English such as "kampani" (company), "jarnalis" (journalist) and "jamisponding" (spying, like James Bond).
The title Animal’s People offers interesting insight into the novel, as it gives us a view of the way the people of Khaufpur identified themselves. The chorus of the children copying Elli, after stating she doesn’t understand Animal’s People, shows this unification of the people of Khaufpur. “We can hear the chorus of small voices gradually falling behind, ‘Hey Animal’s People!’” Unification of people usually takes place during a disaster, which occurs during and after the crisis in Khaufpur. The title of the novel is used to help identify this unification of people and also to foreshadow the difficulty Elli will face when trying to open the clinic. Elli will have to try to break down the tough barriers which exist in Khaufpur, to help the people move past what they fear the most, change. The comfort they seek is always being able to blame the kampani for what happened to them, and assuming every outsider is there because the kampani sent them. The relation to the title is that Animal is a prime example of the hatred, with his foul mouth and negative attitude towards everything.
The title “Animal’s People” also refers to the difference in behaviors and attitudes between the citizens of Kaufpur and the American doctor, Elli. This becomes apparent on page 183 when Elli is frustrated about everyone’s attitude toward her clinic, and yells “HEY ANIMAL’S PEOPLE! I DON’T [...] UNDERSTAND YOU!” She came to Kaufpur with only a mere idea of how the people had suffered. She knew that people were ill and her duty would be to nourish them back to health, but that was the extent of her connection to them. Due to her more fortunate circumstances, she could never fully grasp the trauma and the aftermath of the gas leak or the chronic poverty which plagued the city. Furthermore, she was oblivious to the reasons why the citizens were so untrustworthy toward outsiders. Without experiencing it for herself, Elli the doctress was an outcast among the rest of the city of Kaufpur—Animal’s People.
...
Wikipedia