This paper looks at the affinity between women and animals through a lens of material postcolonial ecofeminism. Anita Desai's novel Cry, the Peacock provides an opportunity to re-think some of the postcolonial issues espoused in the fiction of male writers through a gendered perspective while simultaneously considering the specific processes that assign the woman and the animal to inferior and stereotyped positions. The woman and the animal, then, become mediators for each other. The notion of violence is key in exploring patriarchal oppression of both women and animals in Desai's novel. A key argument that is furthered in this paper is that the 'other' in the form of the woman and the animal is centred in the novel although both the woman and the animal are removed and distanced from society in this novel. While the woman becomes the mediator through whom the animal can be read, identity politics and relationships between men and women are mediated through the figure of the animal. The position of ambivalence seems to occupy the heart of the protagonists in this story, with the women belonging neither to the cultural or the natural.