Humor and Resistance in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

This article examines Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the comments it makes about the long-term corporeal effects of environmental catastrophes. Sinha’s choice of a first person narrative strategy strongly sharpens the visceral impact of the story. The narrator is a lovably unlovable misfit who has been deformed and crippled by an industrial disaster that claimed thousands of lives. While the effects of the disaster play out through the body of the narrator himself (he calls himself “Animal” because he is so deformed), they are more than merely bodily effects: they are psychological, social, economic, developmental, sexual, and so on. Animal is a spectacle, and his very existence calls into question the boundary between what is human and what is not. The story he tells reveals the effects of capitalist racism and greed and raises questions about environmental justice issues and corporate responsibility. These are important questions that are inseparable from the material facts of Animal’s broken body. It is a deadly serious topic that Animal narrates, but he does it with humor (often self-deprecating), and it is precisely this humor that ultimately both humanizes him and intensifies the impact of the narrative itself.