Critical Regionalism of the Transhuman: Cyborg Politics in Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet

Abstract

This paper reads Anil Menon’s young-adult science fiction novel The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (2009) through Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985-1991), arguing that Menon’s 2040 Pune subjects Haraway’s cyborg politics to a postcolonial pressure test. Where Haraway celebrates the cyborg as a figure of boundary confusion and feminist liberation, Menon’s narrative insists that in a Global South context biotechnology also functions as an instrument of dispossession, surveillance, and bio-capital. Reading the novel’s key figures the bonsai as ideology, Tara’s skin politics, Aditya’s transformation into a Nurthi gene-hacker, and the collective dream-beast, the paper argues that Menon’s fiction constitutes a ‘critical regionalism of the transhuman’: a practice that takes the global discourse of the posthuman seriously while grounding it in specifically South Asian historical, social, and material conditions. The paper contributes to the growing field of Indian speculative fiction studies and to postcolonial feminist technoscience.