“A Nother World” in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

This article examines Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People, an engagement with the consequences of the 1984 toxic chemical spill in Bhopal, India, in order to critique the humanist discourse of Dow Chemical’s massive rebranding effort, “The Human Element,” that began in 2006. The novel’s narrator, when his spine is twisted forward by the chemical toxins, adopts the name “Animal.” In contesting Western definitions of what constitutes a human, he helps to reimagine postcolonial activism by broadening its coalition to include nonhuman subjects. Sinha’s version of postcolonial environmentalism, this article thus suggests, searches out the possibilities and limitations of a posthuman postcolonialism.