The Desiring Subject Vs. the Object of Desire in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)

ABSTRACT

The goal of this paper is to read Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People through the lens of disability theories to expose the entanglement of disability, sexuality, and humanness. Only by taking into account these three interlocking spheres are we able to acknowledge fully Sinha’s nuanced and fair representation of disability in the novel. The narrative makes the connection between disability and sexuality explicit exposing the reality of the protagonist with disability as a desiring subject who grapples with the question whether he can be an object of desire. The intersection of animality and disability is also addressed through the investigation of the negative impact of ableism on the perception of humanness and its consequences for the realization of human sexual needs.

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. In his article of 2016 Justin Omar Johnston mentions that severe health problems are still experienced by the people of Bhopal.

2. The sexualization of the protagonist may seem so problematic when trying to tackle the subject of the Bhopal tragedy with due seriousness that it often leads to the exclusion of the topic from literary analyses.

3. Indra Sinha has translated The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra: With Extracts from Koka Shastra, Ananga Ranga and Other Famous Indian Works on Love 1980) 1993; Tantra: The Search for Ecstasy (also known with the subtitle “The Cult of Ecstasy”), 1993; and The Great Book of Tantra: Translations and Images from the Classic Indian Text, 1993.

4. Anita Mannur explains how the figure of a child may be an effective narrative device and how in Sinha’s text the representation of the child (teenager) with disability becomes complicated. It does not function merely as “a discourse to create empathy for wronged persons through a lens of pity” (390) but becomes an active site of resistance against Western journalism, which searches for the dramatized spectacle rather than transformative understanding of disability.

5. The figurative reading of the protagonist’s “animality” cannot be ignored. As Sunaura Taylor writes: “to call someone an animal is to render them a being to whom one does not have responsibilities, a being that can be shamelessly objectified” (n.p.). The protagonist’s insistence on his animality may signify his inferior status as a person with disabilities, as well as his dehumanization according to the logic of colonialism (or neocolonialism), which can also be called “dispossession” by the current global order (Singh).

6. One of the first and major publications in the field was Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies’s The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires, published in 1996, which – as the subtitle to the book suggested – brought to light many of the “untold desires” of the disabled, in other words, their sexual needs and dreams.

7. Siebers suggests that “Many people in the disability community are still waiting, as Corbett Joan O’Toole explains, to hear a story where a man or woman who chooses to be lovers with a disabled person is congratulated by family and friends for making a good choice” (42).

8. In contrast, Yadaw and Chowdhury argue that Sinha locates the apocalypse in the third world (370).

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Notes on contributors

Iwona Filipczak

Iwona Filipczak is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Modern Languages, University of Zielona Góra, Poland. Her academic interests concentrate on the questions of identity and experience in South Asian American fiction, globalization, and American short story.