Abstract
This essay examines how a recent fictionalisation of post-disaster life in Bhopal, Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), opens up perspectives on eco-crime, disaster, and systemic injustice on the level of genre. It begins by showing how the novel evokes private eye, noir, and spy genres in ways that present similarly hybrid forms of detective agency and legal subjectivity as a means of responding to the disaster’s criminal dimensions. It then shows how this hybridity relates to the way Sinha plays off crime fiction’s genealogical relationship with revenge tragedy both to disrupt the disaster’s common real-world designation as ‘tragedy’ and to implicate readers in modes of active witnessing that probe legal-democratic failure. The essay concludes by discussing how these formal techniques shed light on the potential for interdisciplinary exchange between postcolonial ecocriticism and green criminology in relation to transnational crimes such as Bhopal.
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