Shilpaa Anand

Civil society collectives such as Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) created digital advertising campaigns to raise awareness internationally about human rights violations caused by coercive occupation in the Kashmir region. Pellet-emitting shotguns were introduced in 2010 as a non-lethal method of controlling aazadi (autonomy in Urdu) seeking Kashmiris, and were used with renewed vigour since 2016, resulting in disabling injuries to civilians. Protestors gathering peacefully to resist the Indian administration’s militarization of Kashmir and other ordinary citizens acquired injuries that made them visually impaired or facially disfigured. Activism via digital advertising campaigns enabled civil society groups to notify the world beyond the Kashmir region of the human rights violations and to demand justice in the form of international condemnation of the militarization. The article reads the imagery of blindness and sight that dominated two such campaigns, #KashmirBlindSpot (JKCCS) and #IndiaCan’tSee (Never Forget Pakistan), as inaugurating an aesthetics of debility (Puar). Two constituent aspects of debility aesthetics emerge through the analysis: the use of disability metaphors to raise awareness about injustice is inextricably related to contextual conditions of disablement. The second feature is that the aesthetics of such advertisements expose the problem of enforcing impairment as punishment for seeking emancipation from state control.

How does disability constitute religion? The proposed paper intends to trace the simultaneous development of the concepts of religion and disability and their interdependence. Drawing on the recent epistemic advances made by the field of disability studies, the paper will critically examine the diverse ways in which disablement is configured as a theological concept as well as within praxis of ritualistic traditions. In due course the paper will investigate notions of zakaat/charity/dana; the historical correlation between religious institutions of the development of institutions related to disability care: the leprosarium, the dargah and the psychiatric asylum.

The present juncture is an exciting one where teaching disability studies in India is concerned, given that the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (Government 2016), India’s latest disability law, mandates that all universities promote research in disability studies.

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Em and the Big Hoom, Jerry Pinto’s 2012 novel that won the Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award narrates the story of Em, the narrator’s mother who is diagnosed with a mental illness, bipolar disorder and her relations with her family members through the period of her illness. While tracing Em’s story, the novel also emphasizes the world and world-view of the characters that surround her illness, family members, professionals, co-patients and other members of her Bombay community. The present paper examines the novel for its portrayal of these people, who constitute the bystanders or onlookers in the context of any mental illness. Adopting a metaphor that emerges in the novel, that of ‘identical paper dolls’ the paper investigates the critical focalization the narrative assumes of the people who watch, define and attempt to correct ‘madness’ from without. Dwelling on the narrative techniques, metaphors and characterization, the paper argues that Pinto’s novel emerges as a critique of so-called normalcy, a mythical anchor that is discursively created by the bystander world. In so doing the novel robustly forwards a critique of psychiatric institutions and mechanisms that successfully reduce people surrounding the person diagnosed with mental illness to ironed-out, undifferentiated, uni-dimensional paper dolls.

How are disability and intimacy conceptualized in relation to each other? Often, intimacies that are considered as transgression of social norms result in one or more parties being punished with disabling conditions such as limb amputations or facial disfigurement. Disability studies discourses, advocating for an enabling view of disability as a complex socio-cultural process, categorically reject the familiar trope of disability as the result of punishment for wrongful action. Within the disability studies framework the conceptualization of disability as blessing or curse is designated as the moral model or religious model of disability that necessarily discredits everyday lived experiences of disablement. The category of the moral model serves as a mechanism to dismiss all conceptualizations of disabling punishments as pre-modern and undesirable regardless of cultural and historical context. Taking as its primary sources different renditions of the story of Madurai Veeran, the warrior-hero of Madurai in the nontinatakam tradition, a medieval and early modern form of Tamil performative genre, as well as in the oral form of the Madurai Veeran Kathai, the paper explores how caste-in-action, disablement and intimacy intersect to conceptualize bodily difference within a specific Tamil historical geography. Both the performative and oral genres are considered folk forms that were prevalent between the 17th and 19th centuries in the southern region of present-day Tamil Nadu.  The Madurai Veeran story, retold variously in the nontinatakams narrates the adventures of a young man, usually identified as a member of the Kallar caste, as he burgles rich households and romances temple dancers only to be punished by the local king with amputations of alternate arm and leg (marukal marukai). In the nontinatakam tradition, a satiric form recorded on palm-leaf manuscripts, he appeals to the local deity who restores his limbs, of whom he then becomes an ardent devotee. The Madurai Veeran Kathai, a balladic form, focuses on the ‘untouchable’ hero’s romantic relations with women of higher castes which earns him the punishment of similar limb amputations. Examining different aspects of the Madurai Veeran story, the paper critiques the ‘moral model of disability’ as an inadequate theoretical framework with which to make sense of disablement and concepts of bodily difference in different cultural contexts.  The paper argues for a contextual understanding of the corporeal at the intersections of multiple overlapping bio-social hierarchies.

The present chapter contends that the models approach to studying
disability, when used in India, has little descriptive or explanatory ability and hasbecome a way of evaluating research studies and judging them. While critiques ofmedical models approaches to framing disability have facilitated aspirations anddemands of disability rights movements the world over, its present use in the Indianacademic context requires critical examination. What is known as a medical modelframing of disability cannot as conveniently describe or explain disability in the Indian context for multiple reasons. One, the social role of biomedicine in India is a complex one because of the prevalence of different kinds of treatment traditions that are accessed variously and whose conceptualization of treatment, object of treatment and corporeality are different in different ways from those of biomedicine. Additionally, the models approach intrinsically affirms a progressive historiography;
the progression is from a moral or religious model to a medical model and then to a social–contextual model. Such a historiography is inadequate while tracing the genealogy of disabling conditions such as leprosy in the Indian context.

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