“An Alien Visitation”
Weird Atmospheres and the Representation of Bhopal in Siddhartha Deb’s the Light at the End of the World
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19219259 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amit R Baishya (0000-0001-5146-5957, University of Oklahoma, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asian Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0275-9527 • E-ISSN: 2573-9476 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02759527.2026.2679801 |
| OpenAlex | W7162564063 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
“Claustropolis: 1984,” the second part of Siddhartha Deb’s third novel The Light at the End of the World explores the fifteen days leading up to the disaster on “that night” in Bhopal and is narrated from the perspective of a Hindu fundamentalist assassin who was involved in the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in October-November 1984. I analyze this section and its representation of air through a contention with both the “old” and the “new” weird. The “old” weird, epitomized by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, often focuses on making architecture weird as quotidian spaces open portals to the numinous beyond, much like what happens to the narrator as he walks through the grounds owned by the company. The “new” weird, associated with progressive writers like China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer, approach this hybrid generic aesthetic mode via what Mieville calls “radicalized sublime backwash”—an aspect that we also notice in Deb’s novel. A critical consideration of the deployment of weird esthetics enables us to contend with the radical contingency of a disastrous event—how it appears as an “alien visitation” to its many unsuspecting victims at the moment of the catastrophe, and the slow violence that it inflicts across the decades
Alien · Deep time · Representation (politics) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |