Expanding Our Conversations of Justice

The Perfectionist Invitations of Indra Sinha’s 'Animal’s People'

Abstract

Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People offers a “voice” notably different from the canonical British, European, and American texts repeatedly drawn into conversation by Stanley Cavell. It is narrated by a profane, amoral, trickster figure, and it focuses on the disenfranchised poor residents of a fictional city modelled after Bhopal, India, the site of Union Carbide’s devastating chemical disaster in 1984.

Yet as I strive to show in this essay, Sinha’s novel shares core features of the “outlook or dimension of thought” that Cavell calls moral (or Emersonian) perfectionism. Moreover, its outlook and voice—which combine playfulness, confrontation, political outrage and hope—may be read as instigating an aversive, perfectionist conversation with its reader and with criticism undertaken in a Cavellian spirit. By drawing this novel into the endlessly developing “conversation” about perfectionism—and its links to justice—that Cavell teaches us to hear amongst admired books, I propose that Animal’s People can contribute to perfectionist “literary-philosophical criticism” by challenging us to imagine a further, higher state of our own work.