“Dancing in the Streets”: Protest, Celebration, and Modes of Self-Expression

Abstract

As the title of this chapter indicates, I address the issues of personality development, identity formation, and self-learning that accompanied the struggle for justice in Bhopal. This brings me to the concluding analysis of oral history, which focuses on the much less documented aspect of historical experience, the subjective domain and individual growth that brings in the cultural facets of the social movement. At the same time, we are analyzing a people’s movement in the context of an industrial disaster. The personal plays a functional role in the understanding of larger social/economic/political forces that are operative in society. How was the knowledge base created? More importantly, how did survivor groups use the knowledge? Organizations came up with their own mechanisms for sharing information. Since most of the women survivors lacked education and were barely literate, they had to come up with innovative tools to understand their own role and identity as activists in relation to campaign issues. Activism brought in major changes in the way of looking and doing things. As we listen to the testimonials, we see how women moved away from reliving the experience of suffering to the cognitive understanding of larger issues, particularly the role of government as both protector of its people and ally of corporations, and the question of who ultimately has to take responsibility for rehabilitation. An important question that gets raised again and again is whether grassroots organizations should take the path of confrontation or work in alignment with the state. The testimonials do not offer simple answers, for a great deal of this knowledge is generated within the particular context of the need for mobilization and alliances, and it is specific to the struggle.

The sort of people whose names are usually unknown to anyone except their families and neighbours … some played a role on small or local public scenes, the village, the chapel, the union branch, the council … Writing such individuals out of the story would leave no significant trace on the macro-historical narrative. My point is rather that, collectively, if not as individuals, such men and women are major historical actors. What they do and think makes a difference. It can and has changed culture and the shape of history.

—Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (1998).

The sick man is no doubt incapable of working, but if he is placed in a hospital he becomes a double burden for society: the assistance that he is given relates only to himself, and his family is, in turn, left exposed to poverty and disease. The hospital, which creates disease by means of the enclosed, pestilential domain that it constitutes, creates further disease in the social space in which it is placed. This separation, intended to protect, communicates disease and multiplies it to infinity. The care spontaneously given by family and friends will cost nobody anything, and the financial assistance given to the sick man will be to the advantage of the family.

—Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963, English edition 1973).

All those who come and interview me I tell them the same thing. Do not interview me for your personal benefit. Do not refresh my wounds, do not treat my tears as water, do not consider this as a cassette that is playing and repeating … I give these interviews thinking that if our fight can gather strength and my voice goes far and if after watching this someone is being motivated, or has feelings of sympathy in his heart, and he adds his strength to the fight and maybe Bhopal gets justice soon.

—Hazra Bi, Gas Survivor (tape 5).