Hailing the Wild Being of the World : Indra Sinha's "Animal's People" : an ecocritical reading

Abstract EN

Literary interest in ecology has been registered throughout literary history in different trends.

The recent environmental crisis has revived that interest.

Old trends paved the road to "ecocriticism" which addresses a global issue that poses a serious threat to the entire world.

As ecologists agree, it has become crucial "to find ways of keeping the human community from destroying the natural community and with it the human community" (Glotfelty and From, 72).

The new world economy, especially with the emergence of the World Trade Organization, "is creating an economic system that straddles…borders" (421) through Transnational Corporations which are "particularly troubling" because they "no longer have any interests in or allegiances to a particular territory… and [are] irresponsible ecologically" (Masao744).

Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xx).

The aim of this paper is to address the issue of people's behavior towards the environment by conducting an ecological study of Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007).

Selected concepts of ecocriticism (e.g.

wild Being, affectedness, answerability, nation state, etc.) are discussed to reveal how Sinha's novel grounds the reader in ethically, politically and philosophically referential situations by the fictionalizing of a real environmental disaster, the Bhopal accident.

The paper concludes that the green/transnational state could be the remedy for the present environmental crisis.

New definitions, however, must be attached to basic concepts that will still be indispensible in the new allonational formations such as affectedness and answerability