ESTRANGING SENSITIVITY: CRIPPING THE IDENTITY OF DISABLED WOMEN IN INDIA THROUGH THE READING OF SELECT TEXTS

Abstract

The physical attributes of human bodies are incredibly diverse and evolving, encompassing a wide range of dimensions, forms, shades, shapes, functions, and movement patterns. However, our culture does not seem to understand or represent this basic fact; instead, it idealises the human body. As a result of this idealisation, certain bodies are appreciated, and some are not. Some are thought to be normal, while others are not. Society has unsaid customs that regulate people to conform to the normative conventions of embodiment, failing which makes the bodies a subject of ridicule, neglect, despair, or other forms of discrimination and prejudice. The representational systems and cultural narratives that influence the interpersonal interactions and our perception of self-identity legitimise such practices. The ‘normalcy narrative’ is the hegemonic socio-cultural narrative about embodiment that establishes the logical, able-bodied, and male as the benchmark for social norms. It, therefore, also excludes the female subject from the cherished norm, due to which feminine physiology and thought have historically been considered a disability in Western philosophy. For example, the terms associated with women, such as “mutilated males” or “penis poor,” are the prominent examples that lead to the labelling of women as primordial freaks, a sort of congenital disability resulting from genetic infirmity. In a culture where women are physically labelled as disabled, and in turn, society also disables them, then what happens to women who de facto have physical impairments? The intersection of disability and gender answers this question because this confluence exposes the double jeopardy that women with disabilities experience and how they are portrayed even worse than non-disabled women in general as—unworthy, deficient, overbearing, incompetent, unsuitable, and useless in the collective imagination. Research from different contexts has shown that disabled women and girls, compared to disabled men and boys, encounter higher disadvantages in all spheres of society, including obtaining an independent living, education, job opportunities, medical services, social assistance, transportation, housing, land owning, and access to cultural venues. Similarly, in the cultural context of India, the dominating male gaze and the ableist gaze doubly pin the disabled women’s identities. In addition, the majority of disabled women in India face triple discrimination due to their gender, disability, and poverty. These social designations, as opposed to biological ones, are more appropriate in assigning the singular and reductive social category to disability that amalgamates and stigmatises various distinctions following subordinating rhetoric. Moreover, following the footsteps of the women’s movement, the disabled community organised itself into a thriving social movement, consequently redefining the concept of disability. Rather than viewing disability as a personal tragedy requiring treatment, they consider it as collective oppression in need of political action. In this manner, disability expands the perspectives of sexuality and gender, justice and individuality, definitions of minority groups, independence, completeness, autonomy, and dependence, as well as our understanding of physical beauty, the authenticity of the corporeality, health, and concepts of advancement and excellence in all facets of civilizations. More specifically, comprehending by what means disability functions as an identity group and a cultural construct will improve ourknowledge of what it is to be human, interpersonal connections, and an interaction of embodiment. Likewise, the poststructuralist tradition redefined disability as a cultural and discursive phenomenon, conferring it as an account of the ontological plurality, relationality, and existence of alterity that are the realities of our very existence. Therefore, disability is the newest addition to the well-known matrix of oppression categories, like caste, class, and gender. Due to their unique characteristics, the presence of disabled people in the public domain can exacerbate others’ already uncomfortable feelings of reluctance and ambiguity. Therefore, the disability discourse conflates epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics as a unified idiom of experiential immediacy and situated interpretive practice, the question of cultural and spatio-temporality. This research problematizes the normative discourses that besiege disabled women in Indian society and draws on the experiences of oppression across different socio-material spaces like home, public spaces, education, and employment. For this, the research studies the select texts by Indian authors to shed light on the ways in which disabled women challenge the ableist constructions of space, disrupt material realities, and evoke affective responses by aligning the disability discourse with the larger ideological systems. Informed by the theoretical framework of Critical Disability Studies, this qualitative study explores the representation of disabled women in India by linking disability with the issues of gender, class, sexuality, care, and nation, which facilitates an explicit emphasis and affirmation of the intersections of disability existence while exposing the double disadvantageous position of disabled women in the society. The second chapter of the thesis attempts a close reading of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991) by drawing theoretical insights from Clare Barker, Anita Ghai, and Mark Sherry. The chapter disentangles the novel to explore the body politics of disability and colonialism, owing disability to colonial practices, employing the metaphor of a disabled child, gives way to the unravelling of the historical hegemonic structures and agency concerning disability alongside the gendered experiences of disability during the times of Indian independence. The socio-political space in the text, which is conferred by the two parallel threads—the first is about home and everyday personal challenges, and the second is the partition, communal conflict, and exodus emphasises the complex negotiation between the material and metaphorical modes of illustration, where the imagery of breaking, cracking, pain, and blood embodies the complex body politics at both individual and national levels. It explores the liminal entity of the disabled body in the liminal space of decolonising India. In essence, the chapter examines how Cracking India demonstrates the experiences of minorities and reveals multiple layers of the region’s history of partition and decolonisation by spotlighting the disabled female narrator. The third chapter, through the critical examination of the lived and embodied experiences of a disabled woman in Malini Chib’s memoir, One Little Finger, foregrounds the complex challenges resulting from the double jeopardy of gender and disability by employing the theoretical framework of Feminist Disability Studies, and draws upon studies by Carol Thomas, Susan Wendell, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Jenny Morris, and Anita Ghai, Renu Addlakha, among others. The study accentuates the multifaceted barriers endured by a disabled woman in terms of accessibility, sexuality, and care. A meticulous analysis of Chib’s narrative foregrounds how societal structures, cultural perceptions, and systemic shortcomings that lead to the marginalisation of individuals with disabilities, particularly women. The chapter sheds light on the often-overlooked struggles within the realms of physical and social accessibility, the negotiation of sexual identity, and the provision of adequate care. Moreover, this chapter seeks to advocate for increased awareness, policy reform, and societal shifts to foster a more inclusive and equitable environment for those facing stigma, prejudice, marginalisation, and exclusion because of disability. The fourth chapter of the thesis, by adopting the three-pronged approach, studies Gayathri Ramprasad’s Shadows in the Sun from the perspective of psychiatric disability and scrutinises the distinct nuances of depression from the onset of symptoms, its diagnosis and medical treatment, followed by recovery and cure. For this, the chapter draws theoretical insights from Elizabeth J. Donaldson’s Literature of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health (2018) alongside the works of Margaret Price, Bradley Lewis, Andrea Nicki, and Renu Addlakha on mental disability. It examines how depression leads to disability and the socio- spatial segregation and reinstatement of individuals with depression who are classified as mentally ill or mentally deficient. In addition, it explores topics related to the body, identity, and self by describing the politics of medication as expressed by Ramprasad, a mental health service consumer. The study explores the representation of a depressed mind in the process— from the onset of the symptoms till recovery, followed by finding a way to live with and manage depression by hiding behind the façade of normalcy in a milieu that is oblivious and nescient on the issues of mental illness. By emphasizing personal experiences with depression, the study argues that Ramprasad writes this illness narrative by presenting the numerous shades of a depressed mind that is consistently episodic—from a mind with a disorder to feeling normal, to losing in oblivion, to finding a cure in the holistic wellness engaging mind, body, and soul. The study poses depression as a political and cultural epiphenomenon as much as it is a biological anomaly by foregrounding how depression leads to disability and discrimination, including the relationship between depression and gender. The fifth chapter of the thesis situates the disabled woman’s body in the space and time of the futuristic world by studying S.B. Divya’s Machinehood. The chapter follows the theoretical framework of Posthuman Disability Studies, and draws upon Stuart Murray’s Disability and the Posthuman, David Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon Snyder’s The Matter of Disability, alongside the insights of Dan Goodley, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Bradotti. It examines the not-so-redundant embodiment, even in 2095, i.e., the ‘disabled body,’ and investigates the use of disability as ‘a classic narrative trope,’ which is seemingly peripheral but a vital structural underpinning of the overall storyline. This chapter shifts to a futuristic view of disability and critiques the constructed environments, body technologies, and arguments against technological determinism but from perspectives that tend to be interpretive and experiential. By emphasising the protagonist’s experiences with epilepsy, it highlights the inter-corporeal aspect of disability and conveys both the unpredictable nature of seizures and the possible loss of control in public places. However, the study also highlights how the functioning of machinic assemblages shapes and limits the potential for subjective becoming and the capacities of impaired bodies to act. The findings of the chapter allude to the fact that in a world of an infinite number of technologies that possess the potential to create, change, and merge human embodiment and life, there is no end for the human entity; instead, it is a part of the evolutionary process. The research concludes with the last chapter reassessing the studies in the prior chapters and noting how the thesis adds a novel contribution to the discourse of Disability Studies in India and literary disability studies scholarship by employing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of postcolonialism, feminism, psychiatry, and posthumanism to scrutinise the select works and to reveal how the disability justice hark back to prejudices and stereotypes to find problems related to bodymind difference in contemporary times.