Mohammad Athar & Shadan Jafri
Volume-XV, Issue-I, October 2026
Volume-XV, Issue-I, October 2026 | ||
Received: 08.10. 2026 | Accepted: 28.10.2026 | |||
Published Online: 31.10.2026 | Page No: | |||
DOI: 10.64031/pratidhwanitheecho.vol.15.issue.01W. | ||||
The Kampani Left, the Poison Stayed: Why Bhopal Looks Different in a Novel and a Netflix Series Mohammad Athar, Research Scholar, Dept. of English, Agra College, Agra, India Shadan Jafri, Professor, Department of English, Agra College, Agra, India | |
This paper examines how the formal choices made by authors of two separate works based on the 1984 Bhopal Gas Leak, namely, Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007) and Shiv Rawail's Netflix series The Railway Men (2023), create formally distinct relationships with respect to holding corporations accountable for their actions. While both works address the same historical event, each author made different formal choices regarding who they selected as their protagonist, the time period in which they framed their stories, how they structured their narratives, and how they treated bodies that had been injured or disabled due to the gas leak. Using T.S. Eliot's "Objective Correlative," Rob Nixon's "slow violence," Mitchell & Snyder's "narrative prosthesis," and environmental justice literature relating to "sacrifice zones," this paper argues that literary fiction's accumulative, first-person internal monologue provides an accusatory representational format that the episodic structure and heroic genre conventions of commercial streaming television preclude. In Animal's People, the disabled survivor's body and the poisoned landscape of Khaufpur provide empirical evidence of continuing corporate criminal behavior, what the study provisionally refers to as the "Political Correlative”. Unlike Eliot's "Objective Correlative," where the environment directs the reader inward to understand a character's psychology, the Political Correlative directs the reader outward to assign named political accountability. Conversely, in The Railway Men, the disabled survivor's body functions as a narrative prosthesis, and the poisoned landscape is used as atmospheric setting rather than an accusatory record. Because of the demands of the genre, the series is able to achieve closure. However, Sinha's novel cannot achieve closure because the crime being committed is ongoing. As streaming media becomes the dominant means through which global audiences learn about past injustices, the formal constraints imposed by streaming media will increasingly dictate which types of injustices can be represented, and which types of injustices cannot be represented. | |
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