Abstract
Disability Studies in India: Global Discourses, Local Realities is an expansive text, an edited volume of 17 essays with a handy introduction. A compendium of this sort has been long awaited and this volume does not disappoint. It brings disability to its contexts in India, even as it enriches our notions of what it means to be disabled here, both in the realm of experience and of episteme. The volume begins with the task of marshaling an array of socio-cultural formations as an answer to (and an alternative mode of doing) the medical–welfarist–charity nomenclatures marking disability. This is a return of the political to the human body; an examination of what the editor lists are the ‘contributions, experiences, history and culture of persons with disabilities…from a variety of disciplinary positions, sociocultural contexts and subjective experiences within the overarching framework of the Indian reality’ (p. 1). Not a small task, indeed!
The volume is organised around a series of issues that emerged from a 2008 conference at Delhi’s Centre for Women’s Development Studies. These can be listed as follows: the first problematic revolves around the historical, methodological and transnational questions concerning the political emergence of disability studies in India; this is an emergence marked by the uneasy fit between realities in India and the epistemic, historical and ontological lenses we use to study those realities. Shilpaa Anand’s essay works towards taking stock of the baggage of colonialism in the context of pre-colonial epistemic traditions towards disablement; another essay (Jagdish Chander) looks at the evolution of postcolonial interventions of rights activists and scholars, interventions proceeding from singular disabled conditions to a generalised advocacy for disability rights; and the third essay (N. Sundaresan) speaks of the ongoing importance of transnational groups like the United Nations (UN) towards evolving socio-legal formations such as declarations, resolutions, guidelines, etc. in the context of disability, formations that then inflect work within the nation.
The second problematic in this volume deals with the important (but not earlier ignored) questions concerning the familial, domestic, work and (inter)subjective experiential entailments of disability in contemporary India. Essays in this section deal with a variety of issues: the abortion of disabled foetuses (in a context where the pro-choice autonomy of women—the primary care providers—is emphasised); how such medical and discursive techniques foster a particularly despondent notion of (dis)ability; and how the vital experience of disablement as a fact of life is effaced by such biomedical interventions cloaked in the language of tragedy, burden or worthlessness (Anita Ghai and Rachana Johri). Other essays deal with resources for the care of the disabled, both within and outside familial structures; how certain non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operate (Upali Chakravarti); and how notions of masculinity, femininity and infantilisation circulate both within and outside institutional structures concerning disability, especially in contexts where a neoliberal state is in the process of withdrawing from care and familial structures are breaking down towards increased nuclearisation and urbanisation (Nilika Mehrotra and Shubhangi Vaidya). An interesting essay (Amit Upadhyay) from this section of the volume pertains to the prospects, triumphs and tribulations with regards work—that privileged locus of self-worth—in the context of disability. Work and disability and their interrelations with other variables such as gender and class speak of the complex entanglements of other identities in operation within the realm of a disabled life; these complex entanglements point to the complex ontology of such a life itself.
The third realm that the book explores is that of language and its formations and emergences in projects of self-assertion, especially in contexts where language itself slides under the burdens of biophysical alterity, and needs to be reclaimed, in diverse attempts, for survival. Essays in part III and IV of the volume deconstruct the (hetero)normative manners in which a ‘presentation of the self’ is articulated by those occupying diverse positions in the disability matrix; these then generate, as Michele Friedner shows in her essay on deaf culture, ‘an identity, a culture, and a community’ (pp. 243–44), all of which proceed from, but are not limited to, a disability, in the constitution of selves that occupy, also, other identitarian terrains. Agency is central to this constitution of selves, as is a ‘trajectory’ towards something else; agency and trajectory emerge within what Deleuze has described as becoming—’those individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants and definitions’ (Biehl and Locke: 2010). This entails unshackling oneself from the predestined, from stereotype, from the discursive, in however small a manner, and as Renu Addlakha, Sandhya Limaye and Nandini Ghosh show in different ways, it is only an account of a life that can illustrate the mechanism of this unshackling. These accounts introduce disability studies to its political promise. This section of the volume overtly, and others implicitly, seek to accomplish this task—of showing the variable contingencies that mark disabled lives and the resources that those lives marshal (or are confronted with), in complex ways, in order to become beings with a future.
The fourth issue in the volume pertains to questions of the law and allied procedures and proposals, and their activation in practice, for the promotion of rights and the guarantee of life-chances. The volume’s last section presents experiences, strategies and a critical examination of financial–legal policies as possible sites, as well as tools, for the realisation of the ameliorative promises of public policy; these essays also imply the oft-hidden violence of such ‘rational’ policies in the fomentation of (mainly intersectional) marginalities. Here, if one set of accounts is invaluable in seeing how the law converts into its vital social effects, pointing to the complex confabulations and intersectional interests that mark an emergent legal terrain (Bhargavi Davar; Amita Dhanda, in the volume), then other accounts show how the law or public policies, on their own, are often ineffective or inadequate (Asha Hans, Amrita Patel and S.B. Agnihotri; Jeeja Ghosh, in the volume).
Given the constraint for space in this brief review, I reluctantly forego individual conversations with the 17 essays that grapple with these problematics in the volume. Broadly, however, these issues coalesce around how disability—as a social and a biophysical phenomenon—becomes available in practice. Practice is the theoretical terrain that marks a series of performances, interventions, receptions and discursive imaginations; it is the site at which biophysical and psychical alterity—as an emergence or as a given—(re)emerges as a certain kind of available ‘disability’. For this volume, this availability of disability in practice emerges around life in the everyday—the work of being born, of caring, of being. It is situated in the work of disciplinary, policy and legal inscriptions. And this availability may be traced in certain techniques for assertions of self or techniques of biopolitical interventions, realised in certain forms of the procedural, the legal and the technological that together come to be visited upon the body bearing the marks of difference.
If I have some quibble with the astonishingly broad subject-matter in this volume, it is regarding the absence of discussion over technologies of enumeration and legal–bureaucratic judgement—the mundane but powerful work of paper/procedure, certification, medical–bureaucratic techniques of evaluation, etc. (a notable exception is the essay by Davar, limited to psychiatric interventions). These are techniques within a regime of the ‘rule of experts’ (Mitchell 2002) by which disability emerges as a public fact in the nation-state. What are the hidden assumptions and violences of these rationalising medical–bureaucratic formations (formations of expertise that are also indisputable facts of disabled life)—ostensibly erected for the promotion of a regime of rights and entitlements? Can fabricated documents be apposite tools for plumbing the depths of certain discourses by which the state conceptualises difference, marks bodies and offers prosthetics of care? Can these socio-technical objects, perpetually inflecting the experiences of all disabled persons, through their presence, absence or circulation in life, be ignored?
The task of the volume, as the editor declares, is ‘an engagement with the experiential reality of disability, historicisation and politicisation of that category, intersectional analysis, epistemological recognition and social transformation’ (p. 8). Towards that end, the volume offers a beginning—a conversation with practitioners from a whole host of contexts, from academia to activism, from subjective experiences of persons living with biophysical and psychical alterity to those that frame the terrains that inform such experiences.