Disability Studies in India

Global Discourses, Local Realities

Renu Addlakha

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780815384359
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000084412
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Learning Disabilities
• Index: Psychology

Since the 1970s, the international disability rights movement, the United Nations and national governments across the world have attempted to ameliorate the status of the disabled population through a range of legislative and policy measures primarily in the areas of health, education, employment, accessible environments and social security. While the discourse in the disability sector in India has shifted from charity and welfare to human rights and entitlements, disability studies — as an interdisciplinary academic terrain that focuses on the contributions, experiences, history and culture of persons with disabilities — has not yet taken root.

This volume collates some of the most recent pioneering work on disability studies from across the country. The essays presented here engage with the concept of disability from a variety of disciplinary positions, sociocultural contexts and subjective experiences within the overarching framework of the Indian reality. The contributors — including some with disabilities themselves — provide a well-rounded perspective, in shifting focus from disability as a medical condition only needing clinical intervention to giving it due social and academic legitimacy.

This book outlines key issues that would be germane to any disability studies endeavour in India and South Asia, and will appeal to academics, activists, institutions, laypersons and professionals involved in social welfare, sociology, disability studies, women's studies, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and social and preventive medicine.

PART I
Disability Movement, Disability Rights and Disability Studies

1
Historicising Disability in India: Questions of Subject and Method

SHILPAA ANAND

It would certainly be a mistake to try to discover what could have been said of madness at a particular time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its silent, self-enclosed truth; mental illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own.

Michel Foucault (1989a: 35)

The Problem

Disability studies as a field of inquiry has developed certain methods of organising and narrating histories of disability. It engages with certain events, themes and subjects as seminal to offering an explanation for the present treatment of disability as a human condition, a social category and a concept. These events and themes are drawn primarily from Western histories, as the field of study itself was by and large constituted in the USA and UK during the latter half of the 20^th century. As a consequence of the locale of its disciplinary evolution, disability history appears to have tacitly assumed a universal project of unearthing the factors responsible for the present marginalisation of disabled people in different parts of the world, disregarding its own genealogy. As a result, the discourse of disability studies presents us with a template of subjects, themes and methodological frameworks with which to study the history of disability as a category of human condition. How, then, does a scholar invested in studying the historical trajectory of disability in a non-Western context undertake his or her enterprise? One finds that many scholars are compelled to go about their research using the Western scholarship as their template; the disability history of parts of Africa and Asia, then, reads like the histories of disability of Europe and America. This essay offers a critique of such dominant trends in history-writing that have become a blueprint for subsequent histories, while proposing a methodological intervention to better understand how corporeal differences are conceptualised in the Indian (South Asian) cultural context.

The essay is divided into three sections: the first is an overview of existing currents in the historical discourse of disability within the field of disability studies, the second section outlines the historical sources identified by existing scholarship on disability in India, and the third submits a proposal for future avenues of study.

Disability History: An Overview of Subjects and Themes

Disability historians have examined religious events and practices, past episodes of plagues and other epidemics, traditions of institutionalisation — asylums, poor houses and lazar houses — medical diagnoses and treatment of blindness, deafness, feeblemindedness, etc., as well as the role of industrialisation in Western society in producing notions of ability, able-bodiedness, normalcy and the productive body (Foucault 1973; Rose 2003; Stiker 2002; Yong 2007). It is possible to plot the features of disability history in three parts — events and moments in the past, classification of these moments into themes and categories, and finally the explanatory capacity of each event and theme. Facilitating the task of surveying the trends of doing disability history, Table 1.1 sketches major approaches employed within disability studies discourse to establish histories of disability.

The first column (A) of the table provides a broad historical–cultural context. The second column (B) presents the explanations of these contexts and the third column (C) underlines the choice of the corresponding elements in the first column as constitutive of the history of disability. Indeed, it is being argued that shifts in (C) are constituted by epistemic shifts relevant to the West. There is an interdependence between events (A), discursive themes that frame the events (B), and the motivations (C) behind knowledge production in the development of disability history. It needs to be noted that the nature of this interdependence is characteristic of the West alone.

Studies of the history of disability are heavily dependent on identifying instances of social unrest and strife, such as the institutional criminalisation of madness, the Holocaust, industrialisation, etc., to show that contemporary responses are coded in these historical experiences. Furthermore, the practices and routines of modern medicine place the burden of difference on the individual, thus making the person with disability the object of scrutiny — diagnoses succeed in pathologising physical and developmental differences as deviance. Many histories also find that confinement practices that emerge at different moments in the history of the West are responsible for discriminating against and subsequently ‘othering’ people lodged in the lazar houses, the lunatic asylums and the poor houses (Foucault 1973; Stiker 2002). Industrial, economic, scientific, religious and social discourses put in place notions of normalcy that actively constituted and produced exclusionary norms of wellness and able-bodiedness.

Indeed, items in (B) (Table 1.1) are instrumental to establishing crucial links between the three columns. There appears to be some consensus on the themes, ideas and concepts that populate (B), in that there is little confusion as to the meanings of ‘social’, ‘medical’ or ‘religious’ — for instance, the scholarship reflects little or no conceptual difficulty in classifying events and moments in history as ‘social’, ‘medical’ or ‘religious’.

Table 1.1: Disability Historiography

Events/Subjects	Themes/Concepts/Ideas	Project/Intent
(A)	(B)	(C)
Monsters, miracles, religious institutions — Christianity, Judaism	Religious/moral model of charity; Christian influence on constructing abnormality; what the Bible says about disability — attitudes towards disability, charitable or welfare models; theology; Medieval studies (bodily aberrations and early Christian interpretations of aberrance as sub-natural or subnormal) and Judaism^1	To describe and explain social attitudes to disablement and disabled persons in present times.
		To understand theological contexts and the emergence of concepts of charity, institutionalisation, segregation and social stigma.
Greco-Roman culture — evolution of Western society	Infanticide; endorsement of physical beauty^2	To find explanations for contemporary trends in discrimination against physical difference.
		To understand contemporary veneration of beauty and perfection.
Medical science; scientific advances; social reactions to some adverse uses of medical research	Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as ‘ableist’, survival of the fittest thesis; theories of normalcy; development of medical intervention—diagnosis, classification, treatment, cure; the medical model of disability	To explain the overdependence of human thought and action on notions of normalcy and the subsequent emergence of the disabled body as abnormal.^3 Reject the medical model as a discriminatory model of disability and emphasise its dehumanising tendency.
Wars — veterans of war;^4 political paradigms	Heroism ensuing from disability; eugenics and the holocaust^5 — exclusion based on bodily markers of difference; impairments resulting from courageous acts — positive connotations of disability	To understand the origins of perceptions of disabled persons as respectable, as achievers and heroes.
		Political discrimination of disabled bodies and the hegemony of ‘ableist’ societies.
Industrialisation	Disability oppression as a result of industrialising society; Marginalisation of disabled persons as a side effect of capitalist societies (Barnes 1997; Finkelstein 2004; Oliver 1996). Emphasis on economic capabilities predicated on the ability to work, and allied notions of work ethics.	To put in perspective current trends in social treatment of disabled persons. Establish the emergence of disability as a category of historical changes of Western society.
Human rights, governance of disability as a human category, minority category; disability rights movements^6	Rights framework of disability, the social model of disability, individual’s rights, disability as an individual’s identity and political identity; Civil rights movement’s motivation	To change negative attitudes towards, and perspectives of, disability. Recognition of disability as a minority political category and the disability rights movement as akin to civil rights movements and class struggles. Politicisation of the category, disabled persons, and implementing the role of disability as an identity politics issue.
Freaks and freak shows^7	Normative notions of wholeness, perfection and normalcy that society adheres to, which shape the Zeitgeist; Social relations and attitudes based on physical difference.	To establish social history and social behaviour which show the early forms of some present-day treatment of disabled persons; Reflection of social reform

Note: This table has been developed using an assorted selection of literature on disability studies that circulates within the discipline, primarily in universities in the US and UK.

Using these themes, disability studies scholars have been able to classify the Western historical experience of disablement as belonging to, and at times, transitioning to and from the charity model/moral model, the medical model and the social model. Such a classification, however, seems largely dependent on the thematic allotment (B) of different events and instances. If we look more closely at how disability as a concept as well as a category has been historicised, we find an array of answers consistent within the frames of the table above. It appears that much of the exercise to historicise disability resembles ‘the evolution of a species’ and charts ‘the destiny of a people’ (Foucault 1977: 146). Foucault would have argued that it is these processes that float and sustain the chimera of an ‘unbroken continuity’ in the life of a concept, meaning that such retrospective categorisation imposes a historical sequence and conceptual resemblance on a series of events (ibid.). Nevertheless, the table does present a variety of theories and perspectives that organise events and themes into explanatory sequences.

The idea of disability in Marxist understanding, for instance, depends on one’s functionalism in society, and the emphasis is on a person’s utility to his community and environment (Barnes 1997). Talcott Parsons’ work (1951) on the concept of the ‘sick role’⁸ has been identified as an important source for sociological consolidation of the medical model of disability. Some historians have elaborated on the conception of disability having roots in notions of abnormality, subnormality and, more essentially, the fear of the unknown. The study of institutions of confinement became popular with Foucault’s groundbreaking work Madness and Civilization (1965). Isolation as the logic of institutional segregation has been studied variously as a historical form of oppression shown to disabled persons such as lepers, lunatics and poor people (Buckingham 2002). Many of these studies reckon that when they discuss terms and notions such as disability, disablement and social stigma, they signify the now normalised sense in which these words discursively operate.

A relatively recent channel of work is the theological history of disability and disablement. Studies, in disability and theology consistently offer contextualised debates, which animate the examination of relationships between present-day universalised social notions of disablement and theological discussions about very specific concepts like charity that emerged at a particular time in relation to the church. The pioneering work in this domain is Henri-Jacques Stiker’s widely acclaimed A History of Disability (2002). The author is cautious enough to state from the outset that he is dealing with ‘Western history’, a tag that often slips under the radar of his readers. Stiker’s history begins with representations of disability in texts like the Old Testament and maps out prominent notions such as prohibitions prescribed by the Bible, teratology⁹ of antiquity and segregation during the times of plague and leprosy. From such analysis, he arrives at certain conceptual typologies like:

profanity = defect = impurity = blemish = deformity = subnormal

The development of ideas in the Judaic traditions offers Stiker a canvas where these wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Disability Movement, Disability Rights and Disability Studies
• Part II: Family, Care and Work
• Part III: Gender and Disability
• Part IV: Assertion of Difference through Art and Communication
• Part V: Contesting Marginality at Micro- and Macro-levels
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Index