The Paradox of Representation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People “Just Words Written on a Page”

Abstract

This paper performs a close reading of Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People to demonstrate how South Asian literary texts are entangled with unavoidable questions of representation, fetishization, and commodification. Bringing Althusser’s conception of non-vision in dialogue with Spivak’s theorization of the subaltern, I argue that Sinha’s novel performs a trenchant meta-commentary on the politics of narrativizing industrial disasters in the Global South.