heterotopian studies

As is well known, the Indian English novel "Animal's People" was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize: Best Book From Europe & South Asia. In many details the novel corresponds with the real event known as the 1984 Bhopal disaster or Bhopal Gas Tragedy.
This essay approaches Animal's People as an example of a posthumanistic novel, in particular as it questions the relations between the human and the nonhuman (contained already in the title) and between the rational and the irrational (by giving up narration to an irrational voice). The notion of posthumanism is derived from postmodernist critics such as François Lyotard, Stuart Sim and Terry Eagleton, who generally speaking share a conviction that we live in a post-humanistic world, where humanistic ideals are not acceptable any more. Besides they are sceptical about human virtues, expressing doubts particularly about the power of reason, and emphasizing above all ethical disadvantages of rationality.
In addition to that, the idea of "heterotopias" presented in Michel Foucault's article "Of Other Spaces" (1967) is the starting point of interpretation of space and time in Sinha's novel. In distinction from utopias and dystopias which are fundamentally unreal spaces, Foucault considers heterotopias as real places, as counter-sites in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented and inverted. In this essay the concept of heterotopia is linked with Indian slums or bidonvilles referred in the Sinha's novel as "The Kingdom of the Poor" in Khaufpur (meaning "Horror Town" in Hindi), where people live in extreme poverty suffering from after-effects of the poison caused by the chemical factory's fallout. The slums constitute heterotopias in the sense that they figure as discriminated monstrous zones where society removes and hides its abhorrent poverty, creating enclosed and isolated places. Those discriminated zones function simultaneously as "inner pockets" of resistance and as a mirror- image of the society which has created it. Since heterotopia is linked with time, it signals an absolute break from traditional time, thus creating heterochrony. In that sense, as a kind of heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time, we also find heterochrony in Khaufpuri slums where, as an afterlife, time ceases to have meaning turning into an eternal "now". After "that night" had happened, the catastrophe cancelled time and created an eternity of suffering and agony. The signs of apocalyptical time in Sinha's novel are punctuated by frequent quotations from the Book of Revelation, but also with allusions on Ḳayāmat as the Hinduistic idea of the annihilation. To that chain of apocalyptical subtexts of the novel, one should add Dante's Inferno and the concept of the nine circles of  Hell represented by two events, both connected with fire, fever, mortification and mental agony – "Nautapa" (nine days of extreme heat) and "Ashara Mubarak" (the night of the fire walk, after nine days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar). 
Since hybridity of the apocalyptic religious signs correlates with the hybrid language of the novel, at the end of this essay the issue of such a mixed language describing is addressed labelling it as "hinglish" (mixture of Hindi and English), "hinçais" (mixture of Hindi and French), and "franglais" (mixture of French and English), respectively.

The term heterotopia (literally means other places), pointed to different places that interrupt the apparent normality of everyday places. In better words, a heterotopia juxtaposes several emplacements in a single real place that are incompatible. In this sense, the production of heterotopia is a political reaction to the dominant praxis. Urban imaginary, historical memories, and collective imaginations led the monumental architecture to achieve its political status. To activate the collective memory embedded within the urban context, some special public spaces of Tehran provide the primary place of gathering.
The memory of past political events gives inspirations to those revolutionaries seeking to create a new state. In the case of Tehran, the production of insurgent urbanism as the result of utopian urbanism achieves its political status through semantic association depends on a historical memory within the collective imagination. In this way, Azadi Square appropriated based on new ideological interpretative. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Enqelab Street, and Azadi Square provided the main geography of protest. Azadi Square’s ambivalent nature and the co-existence of nearly incompatible realities made of this square a ‘heterotopia’. Moreover, to connect people with the larger population and to activate the collective memory embedded within the urban context, the previous geographies of protest in Tehran provided the primary space to connect people with the larger population.  This research aims to represent the idea of Protest Square as a contemporary global phenomenon, which came to stand as a hopeful process of revolutionary changes from the Middle East to Europe with its distinctive urban characters during the political revolutions and social movements.