Animal’s People and the Grotesque: Unnatural Narrativity, Power, and Protest

This article examines Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People through the intersecting frameworks of grotesque realism and unnatural narrativity to explore how form and language mediate subaltern experience. Set in the aftermath of a fictionalized Bhopal disaster, the novel defies conventional narrative structures through a posthuman narrator, Animal, whose grotesque hybrid identity challenges anthropocentric and neoliberal paradigms. The analysis foregrounds how Sinha employs bodily imagery, obscenity, and narrative fragmentation to critique dominant institutions such as law, medicine, and global capitalism. Particular emphasis is placed on scenes of defecation, self-cannibalism, and grotesque sexuality, which serve as symbolic acts of resistance and protest. Drawing on theorists such as Bakhtin, Fludernik, and Richardson, among several others, the article interrogates the novel’s narrative inconsistencies, polyphonic structure, and the limits of representability for marginalized subjects. It argues that Animal’s People redefines narrative voice by merging the abject with the comic, the human with the animal, and the real with the unnatural. Ultimately, the study contributes to broader scholarly conversations in posthumanism, ecocriticism, and subaltern studies by illustrating how grotesque and unnatural elements challenge established boundaries of genre, voice, and power. © 2025 Hunan Normal University Press. All rights reserved.