ABSTRACT
ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 2-3, 1984, A GAS LEAK FROM A FACTORY owned by the Union Carbide Company killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India.2 For those who survived, the disaster has during the past fourteen years metamorphosed from a sudden calamity to a chronic cancer. According to some estimates, about half a million people continue to suffer today and remain in conditions of acute vulnerability (Kumar 1993; Mukerjee 1995; Dhara 1992; Cullinan et al. 1996).3 This unrelenting social suffering, has, however, largely receded from public attention.4 Barring the ritualistic reports datelined Bhopal in the first week of December every year, the potent malignancy of the chronic disaster is ignored by almost everyone but the survivors. The remembered Bhopal disaster is the gas leak from a pesticide factory run by a multinational company, not the day-to-day misery of half a million survivors. A state of affairs that should seem distastefully pathological, therefore, somehow appears normal, routine, and for the most part invisible.
