ABSTRACT
Moraes, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, says of his fused hand that “civilization is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves. Moraes’s body is repeatedly subjected to violent medical intervention, and the violence of medicine takes on symbolic weight. As in many Anglophone works of fiction, clinical medicine becomes a metonym or corollary for imposed power structures, including patriarchy, colonialism, and neocolonialism. “The Indian nation-state as we know it today,” Gopal reminds us, is “a consequence of historical accidents and political transformations that took place over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. The greatest solidarity is perhaps that of Bim, who is subject to misunderstanding and abuse as she takes responsibility for her brother’s care. Animal’s People is set in a fictional city modelled upon the city of Bhopal, which was affected by an explosion and pesticide leak in a Union Carbide plant in 1984.
