Where did you go to my lovely – I start with the popular song by Peter Sarstedt from 1969 that I sang during the book release function of Anita Ghai’s pathbreaking book Rethinking Disability in India (Routledge) in 2015, sadly with a change in the tense, reminding us of that terrible 11th day of this month, when I could only inform in choked voice some of my group members around 1 pm about her sudden passing.
I didn’t own Anita, neither did she me; nor did we spend a whole lot of time together since the last almost two decades we had known each other. But we were close. Very close. Academically, and being on the ‘right’ side of disability thinking. Like many other close allies, including Anita herself, we thought we had time now to plan out collaborations, slowly, and more wisely – however, ‘time’ itself had other ideas.
We met during the ascendence of neoliberal policies the world over in the mid-2000s that affected disabled people more than it did any other sector. Disability activism in the country however was and have been since, mostly unaware of even the core disability studies philosophy, let alone its critique in the form of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) that was born out of the economic recession of the period, elsewhere.
This is exactly the theoretical terrain where Anita and I began our journey together in thinking about a southern form of CDS, which I have been structuring the framework of until that time, but it was Anita who provided the necessary rationale, empirical validity and a life to it that paved the way for us to walk along. The ‘Delhi’ school of disability thus took shape under her wings in ways that I as her ‘abled’ travel-mate in this journey, could bring to fruition in the form of the new journal Indian Journal of Critical Disability Studies that we launched in 2020 and had been co-editing since.
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Though Anita is not the first disability scholar to highlight an epistemological understanding of disability, it is certainly her work alone that relentlessly garnered in support case after case for viewing it as such – this, according to me, stands out as her most outstanding contribution to the knowledge of disability that carves out a place for a southern theory to emerge. As I admit in Centring Disability An Epistemological Reversal, (forthcoming), to be published by Tulika Books: “[G]hai’s body of work very clearly explored the possibility of disability being the source of knowledge. This book therefore owes a great deal to Anita’s inspiring conceptualisation of the role of disability in our understanding of the structuring of knowledge.”
In Anita’s first book (Dis)embodies Forms: Issues of Disabled Women, (2003), and her outstanding, Rethinking Disability in India, (2015), it is made absolutely clear that disability is the badge of honour for her when she discusses in great detail her own narrative of disability, right at the beginning of each. This is echoed by Dan Goodley, a well-known disability scholar, who expresses a similar thought in his foreword to the 2015 book when he says: “As with earlier writing (Ghai, 2012) she is keen always to foreground her own personal, local and national context.”
It highlights the fact that disability for Anita is not only a personal identity, but is also local and national, making this positioning as different from the global northern scholars for whom the personal is the supreme. Anita’s activism therefore too, takes a wider national and local form, placing it rightly within the framework of struggles and movements in other spheres of oppression in India. This approach to disability has been the chosen vantage point for her, as clear from her several citations of work in other domains within India that admits community as a hierarchically superior unit in relation to the individual.
The constant traffic between gender and disability studies in Anita’s work remains (and will remain) unparalleled. Listening to Anita deliver the Neera Desai keynote talk in December 2021, it became clear that we should rethink the concept of identity and that instead, we should build our discourse around notion of the agency; only then can we unlearn traditional knowledge and listen to diverse narratives of all women’s experiences.
She questioned everyday basic assumptions, everywhere – be it a missing ramp at a dais from where she was invited to deliver a lecture, or a talk without a sign language interpreter or indeed a poster that shows only abled people (and men) bonding together. This cross-disability and cross-sectorial solidarity establishes Anita’s academic activism and wider vision that starts with disability but doesn’t necessarily end with it. This is critical disability studies.
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The end which has come suddenly, shocking us all, raises questions about the comparative safety of a disabled person in the context of a society rife with discourses, actions and policies targeting and demonising the minority; who is to say that the terror of the societal and state-sponsored mass institutionalisation of otherness is not responsible for this avoidable, untimely death? Isn’t the medical profession’s smug assurance a result of the rampant ableist agenda unfurled by the bulldozer of an engine called homogenisation, where it is assumed that we are all alike? It also raises questions about the lonely life within the familial network for a disabled person.
As poignantly posed by Sharmishthaa Atreja, a key member of our ‘Critical Disability Studies in India’ group during the small gathering on the night of December 11, ‘Who is who and who would be who,’ are important questions to ask with regards to a disabled person’s position in a family, even for a purportedly secure and independent disabled life.
In the end, it is Anita’s life-defining quests and emotionally charged responses that will circulate within us and the greater circle of disability scholars and activists, and will raise further questions, out of which will emerge an understanding of the radical potential of disability knowledge that we are only beginning to feel the pulse of, today. And that will be the day, my dear friend Anita, will let out a sigh of relief.
Tanmoy Bhattacharya is a professor of linguistics, University of Delhi, and guides research on Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Gender, Disability, Inclusion Deaf Education, and Sign Linguistics.
