Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster (review)

In December of 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal was the site of an industrial catastrophe, a gas leak of enormous proportions resulting in the deaths of thousands of area residents and an untold number of related illnesses in subsequent years. Suroopa Mukherjee’s Surviving Bhopal examines this ongoing disaster from the perspective of affected individuals, especially women. As she states in her introduction, Mukherjee’s larger aims are “highlighting the ways in which the Bhopal disaster has been ‘constructed’ in the popular imagination by a process that simultaneously commemorates and erases the tragedy” (3), and “understand[ing] the development model from the perspective of those who do not stand to gain by it” in the context of globalized corporate growth (9). To these ends, she incorporates oral histories of survivors to counter official histories produced in large part by the Indian and U.S. governments, often in collusion with, or at least in the best interests of, the offending corporations.

The book is organized into seven chapters, all of which include varying quantities of direct quotations from survivors, contextualized by Mukherjee’s analysis of official documents and combined with extensive research into the relevant political, legal, and medical domains. The first chapter sets the scene, relating the events leading up to and immediately following the disaster itself, including previous incidents in the same facility and the first responses of Union Carbide and the Indian government, ultimately demonstrating that “[t]he Bhopal disaster was not an accident but the inevitable result of a series of corporate decisions” (38). The second chapter focuses intensively on oral testimonials, from both archival sources and interviews by the author. These interview excerpts cover the same time period addressed in chapter 1 but provide a haunting illustration drawn from the memories of those who lived through the assault of toxic gas on their bodies and homes. They also anticipate the succeeding chapters, which turn to the ongoing nature of the trauma, by explaining, in the words of one survivor, that the Bhopal gas disaster “is not about one night. It is never ending” (51).

Chapter 3 examines the legal fallout wherein quick and ultimately ineffective settlements have been given preference over justice for victims and long-term systemic changes. Mukherjee describes Union Carbide’s transition to ownership by Dow Chemical Company as a “vanishing act,” which effectively removes them from the culpability equation (63), and reiterates the book’s stance that “development-as-growth is upheld without really going into the question of development for whom” (75). Chapters 4 and 5 combine oral histories with analysis of economic aid provided to survivors by the government, in order to show how “rehabilitation programs were not gender sensitive” (11). Chapter 5 also begins the transition, continued throughout the remaining chapters, to focusing on women’s activism as it grew out of survivors’ groups. In chapter 6, the emphasis shifts from economic to medical rehabilitation, and here again the failure to attend to gender differences is foregrounded in the author’s selections from oral histories. Perhaps most chillingly, Mukherjee cites evidence from both medical professionals and female victims, indicating that “in a blatant display of sexism in medical science the reproductive effects of exposure was neglected” (134), and furthermore that medical research on gas victims “had been terminated not for purely administrative reasons,” as government sources insisted, but rather “when conclusive evidence of second-generation damage had begun to emerge” (152). Finally, chapter 7 picks up the growing thread of women’s protest and activism after the Bhopal disaster. Mukherjee examines how “the nature of demands that women themselves garnered from their experience became the rallying point of collective mobilization at the local level,” and how local needs-based movements have become “incorporated into wider issues of human rights and corporate liability in the context of globalization” (16).

The author...