Petrofiction at the Periphery: Reconceptualizing Indian Oil Literature through Gulf Migration in Benyamin’s Goat Days and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh coined the term “petrofiction” in 1992 to name a global literary failure: fiction’s inability to reckon with oil’s reshaping of modern society. That the diagnosis came from an Indian writer makes its domestic non-application particularly telling. India consumed approximately 5.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, ranking third globally, and is projected to lead global consumption growth through 2025 (EIA), yet has produced no sustained literary engagement with petroleum on its own soil. This article argues that Indian literature’s relationship with petrofiction is genuine but limited in scope: it exists almost entirely as Gulf labor migration narrative, most significantly in Benyamin’s Goat Days (2008) and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), works that render the human cost of petroculture through the disposable bodies of Keralite migrant workers in Gulf petro-states. Drawing on Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer’s Energy Humanities framework and Ghosh’s concept of the “oil encounter,” this article reads both texts as representing only one vector of India’s petroleum relationship, namely the externalized labor of a consuming nation, while domestic petroculture, from the Digboi oilfields to ONGC refinery townships, remains narratively invisible. This absence is not incidental; it reflects how postcolonial consuming nations structure their literary imagination of energy, displacing oil onto sites of extraction and labor export while rendering their own petroleum dependency mundane and therefore unwritable.