Toxic Entanglements and Posthuman Ethics: A Baradian Reading of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) is a fictional account of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and retells the tale of a devastating industrial catastrophe. The novel is set in Khaufpur, an Indian town stricken by a chemical leak from a foreign-owned factory, which led to physical deformation, poisoning, and politically marginalizing generations of its inhabitants. In this way, the narrative deals with ethics, justice, and identity and also foregrounds that the boundaries between human and nonhuman and self and environment are intensely blurred. The disfigured narrator named Animal serves as a potent medium for inquiring into complicity, accountability, and the meaning of life amidst ecological catastrophe. In this paper, we attempt to analyse Animal’s People through the lens of Karen Barad’s agential realism, using some of the key insights, viz., intra-actions, or mutual entanglements of material and discursive forces. In this sense, this paper explores the way narrative critiques anthropocentrism and unsettles Cartesian subject-object binaries to acknowledge human and more-than-human agents.