Syed Azeem Ali
This article synthesizes five foundational texts—Ian McEwan's The Cockroach, Rawi Hage's Cockroach, K. Raghavendra Rao's The Cockroach Man, Kenzaburō Ōe's The Silent Cry, and George Orwell's Animal Farm—to investigate the intersection of insectoid surrealism, political satire, and underground resistance in international literature. This paper builds a theoretical framework for analyzing a conceptual "Cockroach Janata Party"—a metaphorical collective representing the resilient, unflushable, and ubiquitous marginalized masses rising against oppressive political climates—by operating at the intersection of postcolonial theory, biopolitics, and literary animal studies. With an emphasis on similarities to India's current socio-political environment, the analysis interprets these pieces as intentional artistic interventions against corporate-bureaucratic state machinery, majoritarian populism, and state-sanctioned authoritarianism. This article shows how bug and animal allegories transform from historical instruments of colonial dehumanization into powerful mechanisms of democratic dissent, ideological subversion, and radical subaltern agency by examining tropes of metamorphosis, subaltern survival, and decentralized resistance.