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This paper, titled as "Reframing the Subaltern Body: Disability, Voice, and Agency in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People" (2007) studies Animal’s People by Indra Sinha through the critical lens of literary disability studies and explores how disability reshapes and transforms subaltern identity and enables forms of agency within conditions of utmost marginalization. Set against the backdrop of the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984, the novel features Animal, a physically disabled protagonist and narrator who is socially ostracized for his bodily difference and places him at the intersection of disability, poverty, environmental violence, and postcolonial neglect. The paper takes recourse to disability-studies theorists such as Lennard J. Davis and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, alongside subaltern and postcolonial frameworks and asserts that Sinha challenges dominant narratives that portray the disabled as subaltern, passive, voiceless, or merely symbolic of suffering.
Sayiqa Hayder. “Reframing the Subaltern Body: Disability, Voice, and Agency in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 553–563. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.34.
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