Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

Michele Ilana Friedner

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813570600
• eBook ISBN: 9780813573724
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sign Language
• Index: Social Sciences

Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India.    Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities.     Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society.     

1

Orienting from (Bad) Family to (Good) Friends

Interviewing the Family

One afternoon in November 2008, I went to visit Kamala and her family. Kamala was a young deaf woman whom I had initially met in the summer of 2007 at the Disabled Peoples Association (DPA), a popular NGO offering vocational training program for deaf and disabled young adults, where she was studying electronics. I was eager to meet Kamala’s family, as I had spent a lot of time with her at DPA and I enjoyed her lively personality and inquisitive nature; we joked and practiced BISL together, and she often asked me for help with English writing. This afternoon, with the assistance of Ravindra, a Kannada-language translator, and a patient and intrepid rickshaw driver, I traveled across Bangalore, traveling from east to west; we finally found ourselves in a narrow unpaved lane of new three-story apartment buildings in a rapidly developing middle-class area of Bangalore. Kamala was not yet home from the vocational training program where she was studying computer hardware (she had since finished her course in electronics at DPA and was now studying hardware at a government training program where there were a few deaf students), and so we phoned her father, who came down to escort us up to the family’s apartment. Ravindra and I settled down on a sofa in the family’s living room, and a cousin hospitably offered us coffee. As we waited for Kamala to return from her course, Kamala’s father and cousin showed us various framed photos of Kamala as a child: Kamala dressed up for a dance recital at the deaf school that she attended, Kamala receiving a certificate for her dance skills, and Kamala and her younger sister in new saris. Kamala’s younger sister also hovered around, occasionally sneaking glances at the television that her father had turned on.

While we waited, we also discussed how we would communicate once Kamala returned home. We decided that I would ask questions in English, Ravindra would translate these questions to Kannada, and then I would also translate these same questions into BISL for Kamala. Ravindra would then translate the family’s responses from Kannada to English for me and Kamala’s sister would translate the same responses from Kannada to BISL for Kamala. However, when Kamala arrived, she was not happy with this arrangement. She said that her sister did not really know sign language and that she only knew gestures and signs that they had made up together. Nevertheless, she reluctantly agreed to this process (perhaps because there was no better option), and we went ahead with the interview, an unstructured discussion about raising a deaf child.

As we started talking, it quickly became apparent that there were two interviews taking place in the living room: one in English and Kannada and another in BISL. For example, I asked why Kamala was studying computer hardware (and therefore potentially not using the skills she had learned from studying electronics at DPA) and not working. Kamala’s father replied: “As money is not a problem for us and she does not need to work, I want her to continue her education. I want her to study as much as possible. I didn’t look for a job for her.” In contrast, Kamala replied: “My father looked for a job for me but he could not find one that would hire deaf people. I was bored and sat at home.” During the interview, Kamala’s father also told me that Kamala’s brother, who was not present at the interview, was very helpful to Kamala and that he “loved her the best.” When I translated this for Kamala, she very quickly retorted that this was not true at all and that her brother helped her “only sometimes” and that he often ignored her. Indeed, Kamala often seemed upset by the responses uttered by her father, cousin, and sister. Signing urgently, she answered questions too, and then told me not to translate these answers into English or Kannada. And so I struggled with the two interviews, the gaps in the stories I was told, and ultimately, the gap in understanding between parents, familial networks, and deaf children.

Deaf young adults frequently told me about the disconnect that they felt while spending time with their families. Many of my deaf friends strongly felt that they had little or no communication with their families. They lamented the fact that their parents did not know sign language, and they told me that the only interactions that they had with their families were related to biological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping. A common refrain was: “My mother only beckons me to come and eat and then tells me that it is time to sleep.” Home, for many of my deaf friends, was a place to eat a dosa and sleep, but not much else. To be sure, other analysts have very productively argued that food preparation and consumption, or what Arjun Appadurai calls “gastro-politics” (1981, 496), construct intimate relationships. However, my deaf friends did not value this sense of affiliation and attachment ostensibly engendered through eating together and sharing living space. Instead, they talked about the importance of communication, understanding, and sharing.

In this chapter, I explore the ambivalent and largely absent role that the family plays in deaf young adults’ present and future orientations. This may be surprising, because, as Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb write, “The family is a central site of everyday life in South Asia” (2010, 7). They point out that in several Indian languages the word for family is samsara, or that which flows together. However, in the case of my deaf friends, the family was something to be negotiated with ambivalence. In foregrounding this ambivalence and asking why and how it occurs, I also depart from much of the anthropological work on disability and deafness that examines family relationships and the role of the family in negotiating disability.1

Let me be clear about an essential point around which this chapter revolves: articulating desires for communication, understanding, and sharing was something that my interlocutors learned as young adults. Similarly, they learned to critique their families for lacking the abilities for these things to take place. As I will argue in this chapter, and throughout this book, communicating, understanding, and sharing are values that deaf young adults learn as they formally and informally learn the values of deaf sociality and the importance of sign language. Indeed, such values are embedded and foregrounded in the transmission of deaf language ideologies and practices (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). Learning these values is part of taking a deaf turn and becoming disoriented from the family and oriented toward other deaf people. How do these turns, disorientations, and new orientations occur? And what is it about their families that is so dissatisfying for my deaf friends?

The visit to Kamala’s house, with its negotiations and tensions around communication, was typical of other visits. I conducted home visits with approximately twenty-nine families. Initially I planned to conduct structured interviews with both parents and their deaf young adult children in the hopes of creating an environment that was communicatively open to all parties. I felt strongly that ensuring language access was important after my deaf friends’ constant discussions about their feelings of exclusion in family experiences; I did not want to reproduce these feelings while conducting research. However, I quickly learned that providing communication access to all parties was either difficult or impossible in most cases. Let me explain why. For families whose primary languages were Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, or Urdu, I initially brought a translator to the meeting, as I did with Kamala’s family. This person was responsible for facilitating communication between the parents, other relatives who happened to be present, and myself. However, the question remained of who would interpret for the deaf person? It was not possible to find a qualified sign language interpreter in Bangalore who was available for these meetings, as there were only three or four such interpreters in the city, and their services were in high demand. In some cases, there was a sibling who knew some sign language and he or she would interpret—although I observed that in most cases the information provided was not complete or accurate.2 In other cases, I interpreted and therefore engaged in a complicated juggling act through which I asked questions via the translator, attempted to understand what the translator was relaying to me, and then I tried to provide all of this information in sign language to the deaf person.

Occasionally two different interviews happened simultaneously, as with Kamala and her family, as my deaf friends also answered questions and their answers were sometimes in direct contradiction to what their families told me. In at least a few cases, families told me that they felt that they had good communication with their deaf child and that he or she was included in conversations and family events. Also, many parents told me that they loved their deaf child more than their other children. When I interpreted this for the child, he or she would adamantly reply otherwise and say, “I am always bored at home”; “No one ever talks to me”; “I ask for information and I am not told anything”; or “They all talk to each other and do not tell me anything.” The fact that many families told me that they loved their deaf children more than other children while deaf children continued to feel excluded and outside of family communication foregrounds a discordance in perspectives on the meaning of love or care. For families, love and communication were two different things while deafs, through their participation in deaf sociality, came to see love and communication as synonymous. There could be no love without communication.

There were times when these interviews were tense and heavy with sentiments not shared. Occasionally, deaf children told me not to repeat what they had said in front of their parents, especially when it was about interacting with someone from the opposite sex or going to church, and there were times when families used my presence as a means of gathering information about their deaf children. An example of this occurred during an interview with Faiza’s family, lower-class Muslims living in Bangalore whom I met through my research at DPA. I asked Faiza’s mother, through an Urdu translator, if Faiza spent a lot of time outside the family’s home and if she was sent to nearby shops for milk and other items. Faiza’s mother thought about it for a second and said that she did not think that Faiza went out into the neighborhood often. She then turned to me and asked if I would ask Faiza this very same question. She then asked if I could ask Faiza about what she did the previous weekend while she was out with deaf friends. Faiza’s mother said that I could communicate better with Faiza and she was hoping to gain more information about how her daughter had spent her time socializing. And before I traveled to Faiza’s house for this interview, Faiza had pleaded with me to advocate for deaf-deaf marriage because she had a crush on a deaf young man whom she had met at DPA.3 I declined, although I promised her that I would ask her mother how she felt about such marriages. These kinds of requests were not uncommon and reveal the complicated role that I played during these visits. (While I was talking to her mother, Faiza had some friends over and they sat in a tight circle having a conversation in sign language, which Faiza’s mother could not understand.)

While conducting these interviews, I had concerns about my deaf friends not having access to them. I also realized that I was not actually learning very much because I was perhaps overly privileging speech acts and missing the gap between what people say and what they do. I therefore changed my strategy after the first few home visits. I began to enlist the deaf child as the interpreter (or communication mediator), and I did not bring another interpreter. This was important to me, as I wanted to see how deaf children and their hearing families communicated. In some cases children were able to communicate orally with their parents. In other cases, parents and deaf children had developed a home sign system (gestures and signs that are understood by members of the family, although not always by outsiders) or the parents knew a few basic signs that their children taught them. There were also cases in which siblings knew some sign language, and they interpreted. Deaf friends with signing siblings often told me that these siblings were sources of support and conversation at home (although, like Kamala, they also complained that they did not sign well enough). And when spoken and signed communication failed, I ended up simply spending time with the families, hanging out and drinking tea.4

“Communication Gaps” and Their Effects

These visits furthered my understanding of what NGO administrators and deaf education professionals often call “communication gaps” between deaf children and their parents. According to Brinda Chaudury, a former technical advisor to the United Kingdom–based International Deaf Children’s Society’s (IDCS) India project, deaf young adults often came to her to express frustration about their lack of communication with their parents. She told me that she had heard many stories of young adults feeling isolated, sad, and depressed about their inability to communicate with their families. Chaudury told me that she thought that families were to blame, and that they did not make enough of an effort to reach out to their deaf children. An article in an October 2007 newsletter published by IDCS India states: “Approximately 50% of deaf children have emotional, behavioral, and social difficulties as compared to 25% of children in the general population. A major reason for these difficulties is the frustration that most deaf children feel at not being able to communicate, even with their own family members. It is estimated that over 80% of families of deaf children never learn to communicate with the children.” While I am not sure where IDCS’s numbers come from and what is meant by “emotional, behavioral, and social difficulties,” the article makes a provocative point.5 In addition, this quote very clearly highlights the discourse used to describe communication between deaf children and hearing parents in which there is a focus on gaps and deaf children’s frustrations about these gaps. This discourse is, of course, laden with normative assumptions about what communication should be like, including the expectation that communication should be easy and that families and children should understand each other and share information.

Parents were often aware of communication gaps (although none of the parents I spoke to used this term) and, with varying degrees of urgency, they approached teachers and NGO administrators who knew sign language for support and interpreting services when they needed help explaining something to their deaf child.6 While spending time at DPA, I often witnessed families soliciting help from Radhika, the principal of the industrial training center, to communicate with their child. On one occasion, Radhika was asked to “talk some sense” into a student who was less interested in his studies than in pursuing young women. And on a home visit that Radhika and I conducted together, we were intermediaries between an angry normal older brother and Narayanan, his younger deaf brother. Narayanan had come from the family’s native village to live with his brother in Bangalore. Narayanan’s older brother did not understand why Narayanan was spending so much time with other deaf people instead of being at home with his family. Narayanan tried to explain that he felt that he was isolated at home and that spending time with other deaf people offered opportunities for sharing knowledge and communicating. Radhika helped by interpreting from sign language to Kannada, although there was little resolution at the end. In addition to these kinds of interventions, Radhika often made phone calls home for students to relay information to families about diverse matters, including why a student would be home late, what kind of sporting or cultural program they would be attending on a field trip, and when final exams would be held. Students were often unable to communicate this information themselves to their parents. Indeed, Radhika and other DPA teachers often interpreted in mundane and everyday conversations. On one occasion, another DPA teacher who knew some sign language interpreted for a mother and her deaf daughter as they debated how much spending money the daughter should have each day for snacks and tea.

In August of 2007, Radhika and I organized a workshop at DPA for parents of deaf students in its various training programs. During the workshop, Radhika asked parents to stand up and recount a good conversation that they had had with their deaf child and to share how they had this conversation. Our goal was to solicit strategies for improving communication between deaf children and hearing parents. None of the approximately fifteen parents were able to do this, and instead they talked about how happy they were that their son or daughter was learning at DPA. Afterward, a father told me that he wrote back and forth with his daughter and that he felt that this worked well, something that I had also heard from other parents. DPA occasionally offered sign language classes, and families said that they wanted these classes. However, enrollment often dropped off after the first few weeks as parents had to balance other competing commitments, including work schedules and home responsibilities. In parent workshops that DPA offered, Radhika constantly encouraged parents to learn sign language from their deaf children, and parents said that they would do so, although most did not.

According to Radhika, most families that she queried about why they do not know or use sign language told her that they feel shame around using sign language, as it marks them as different from others; they feel that they have sufficient communication without using sign language; no one ever told them while their child was young that they should learn sign language; and they never realized the importance of communication and instead focused on providing basic needs such as food, clothing, and education. Many families also told Radhika that they were specifically instructed by school administrators and audiologists not to sign with their children. I heard similar stories and families also told me that it was “too late” to learn. I was often told: “My child is now grown up and we have managed this long. Why should I have to change now?” But as I discuss throughout this chapter, it was precisely because their children were grown up, interacting with other deaf people, and learning new language ideologies and practices that families needed to change.

Parents’ responses to Radhika’s questions are revealing for what they say about both the current landscape of intervention and language ideologies in regards to deafness and sign language. Early intervention professionals and educators often do not inform parents that there is such a thing as ISL. If they mention sign language at all, professionals and educators stress that learning sign language will impede so-called normal development. Parents are told that their children should learn to speak and lip-read and that they should wear hearing aids. They are told that they should enroll their children in educational institutions that use the oral method of education. The oral method focuses on using auditory verbal techniques to teach deaf children how to speak and lip-read. This method is most successful when it is started from an early age, usually before the age of one year, and when it is accompanied by appropriate amplification and by families playing a significant role in helping their children learn to pronounce and decipher sounds. For oral education to have a chance at succeeding, classroom sizes must be appropriately small and teachers must have experience using auditory verbal methods. In addition, studies have shown that high-quality hearing aids and cochlear implants (a surgically implanted electronic device) increase the likelihood of success in oral education (P...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Naming and Translation Practices
• Introduction: Deaf Turns, Deaf Orientations, and Deaf Development
• Chapter 1. Orienting from (Bad) Family to (Good) Friends
• Chapter 2. Converting to the Church of Deaf Sociality
• Chapter 3. Circulation as Vocation
• Chapter 4. Deaf Bodies, Corporate Bodies
• Chapter 5. Enrolling Deafness in Multilevel Marketing Businesses
• Conclusion: India’s Deaf Futures/Reorienting the World
• Appendix: Key Concepts from Indian Sign Language
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author