The Postcolonial Picaro in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People – Becoming Posthuman through Animal’s Eyes

One of the effects of ecocritical scholarship can be seen in the questioning of postmodern attempts of a radical constructivism that understands the world as a discursive phenomenon and that opposes any notion of a ‘reality’ outside those discursive entanglements. In light of environmental crises in particular, to doubt an extradiscursive reality seems inappropriate. However, I will argue in this essay that narratives of catastrophe do follow specific dramatising rhetorics, and I will show how Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People questions and ultimately deconstructs these. By radically questioning the idea of a stable reality and authentic means to narrate it, postcolonial ecocriticism in general, and Animal’s People in particular, engenders a sense of the tension between reality and representational ideology, and it enables a way of experiencing this conflict through the eyes of an ecological posthumanism.