Damaged Environment and Diseased Bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People: A Material Ecocritical Reading

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) offers a closer look at the aftermath of a toxic disaster through a disabled teenager who calls himself Animal. Inspired by the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 and its repercussions, Sinha’s fictional city of Khaufpur is a site of environmental injustice and corporate violence. This analysis tries to understand the material manifestations of the disaster in the novel through the framework of material ecocriticism. Material ecocriticism is one of the latest developments in the field of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism, which aims to understand the relationship between literature and environment, studies the material and discursive interconnections and interactions through material ecocritical scholarship. The paper tries to see how the material representations work throughout the novel to depict the environmental violence and marginalization. The novel provides what this paper calls as a ‘fragmented materiality,’ which needs to be ‘pieced together’ in order to understand the reality of Khaufpur. Using the idea of trans-corporeality, put forth by Stacy Alaimo which has deeply influenced material ecocriticism, this paper attempts to understand the nuanced portrayal of life, disease and damage in a toxic landscape through Animal and his story.