Paired with the impaired: disability, disaster and the role of the nation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I focus on Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People as case study, a literary representation of the compound crises of disability and a postcolonial chemical disaster that resulted in mass human disability and deaths. Set in the fictitious place of Khaufpur in India, the novel is a retelling of the 1984 ‘Bhopal Gas Disaster’. Sinha’s narrative depicts how the disaster extracts all human qualities from the eponymous character Animal and transforms him into a ‘creature’ with a crooked spine and walking on four ‘legs’, a progeny of the ‘Apokalis’, striving hard to survive, along with many other people of Khaufpur. This article will also investigate how Sinha makes Animal the icon of the impaired nation suffering from economic disability. I would simultaneously attempt to find out how a postcolonial nation becomes disabled in the hands of the multinational corporate economy, the imported ‘Biopolitics’ and neo-colonial exploitations, whilst also thinking about these metaphors critically.