Neocolonialism and Environmental Disaster: An Ecocritical Study of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

Indra Sinha contemplates that colonialism still exists and finds new ways to exploit colonised land and people democratically. This paper is an effort to explore Animal’s People (2007) in the colonial and postcolonial paradigm and unfolds that the novel is a narrative about Bhopal Gas Tragedy that occurred in December, 1984 due to the leakage of poisonous gas named, Methyl isocyanate. It has also observed how literary activism addresses the negative social and environmental effects of gas leakage while posing as neo-colonialism. It questions a multinational company named The Union Carbide India Limited (an American-based chemical production company) for the injustice done to humans and non-humans alike and seeks justice for the poor people of India. The study shall foreground Sinha’s critique of capitalism, environmental toxicity, corporate colonialism, bio-colonisation, violation of human and animal rights, and environmental harm done to the Third World Nations. The paper is an attempt to understand how Sinha makes his readers aware of the recurrence of many more such events shortly and proposes equilibrium between environment and human beings, between the East and the West, and insists that environmental disaster has not only affected Indian people but it has also global repercussions.