Ecological Rifts as Disaster in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

Literary texts can deconstruct the popular notion that environmental disasters are isolated accidents without global implications. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People portrays the Bhopal disaster of 1984 as symptomatic of “systemic” disasters that global capitalism perpetrates over time and distributes unevenly. The disaster has converted the setting of the novel, Khaufpur, into a toxic wasteland and metamorphosed Animal, the protagonist, whose uncompromising narrative perspective resists the violence against his body. The toxification of land and human body exemplify postcolonial developments of what Marx conceptualized as “metabolic rift”—the loss of soil nutrients due to capitalist exportation of crops. The postcolonial rifts in Sinha’s novel reflect the discriminatory subtraction of ecological materials by global capitalists who select “disposable” sites of subaltern people for risk-ridden projects that often unleash toxicity and further subtract soil fertility. The ecological rifts additionally expose the historical and global continuities of disasters in South Asia, especially how the colonial extraction of materials is now replicated by neocolonial projects like the pesticide plant in Animal’s People. The reading of disaster via ecological rifts demonstrates Sinha’s subaltern angle in responding to the South Asian varieties of disaster, especially how an abrupt industrial disaster means an endless environmental hazard and denial of justice for the poor.