Beyond Disability and Disaster: The Affect of Debilitation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

            While Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People has been commonly interpreted as a disability novel and/or a disaster novel, this article examines how Sinha explores the affect of debilitation through Animal’s unpleasant feelings, bodily responses and reactions, and unruly sexual urges. Theorizing debilitation as a consequence of forms of violence that are stretched across vast time and space, I argue that Sinha obfuscates the ability-disability binary and highlights the porosity between concepts such as the human, the animal, and the subhuman. Illustrating the complex affective dynamics between Animal and other characters, the novel shows that disindentification is a response of the marginalized subjects to debilitation engendered by neoliberal capitalism. Further, I suggest that Sinha captures the persistence of debilitation in Khaufpur through the ever-present and recurrent possibility of apocalypse. At the same time, Animal’s People foregrounds the possibility of subaltern solidarities, thereby complicating the binary between optimism and pessimism and calling for a broader understanding of debilitation in the twenty-first century.