Mired inside its rather archaic comprehension as a medical phenomenon, disability, for a long time now, has been ignored as a marker of identity. The world has only been busy in rectifying the absences that have, ostensibly “dis-abled”, rather than accepting such impaired existences as human beings themselves. The volume intends to reclaim the representations of disability and present narratives that do not just use the figure of the disabled as a means to an end. It includes translation of 17 disability centric short stories from multiple Indian languages into English. Further it uses these stories as illustration to test and develop new theoretical formulations concerning disability and the disabled. What grants the proposed work its uniqueness is, in other words, not only the translations of the erstwhile lost stories of disability but also the use of these stories towards the formation of theoretical paradigms to move forward the project of Disability Studies.
The volume shows, interrogates and problematizes the affect that impairment and disability has on those who are “abled”. It presents how the “normal” human being approaches the disabled and interacts with them.
All in all, owing to its academic engagement with disability as a phenomenon and within a narrative, this work intends to take the role of a resource book that will find ready use in the newly emergent multidisciplinary field of Disability Studies and will be of great significance to India and the world at large especially since Literature has a major role to play in this field. Not only, then, does it present different disability narratives to the world but, through their academic interrogation, also allows researchers and academics, especially in India, to form the theoretical enhancements in Disability Studies that both our country and the world desperately require.
Someshwar Sati is an Associate Professor of English at Kirori Mal College, Delhi University. He has been singularly responsible for the creation of multiple disability studies courses in the university and the conduction of multiple disability-centric programmes. He is currently the chairperson of the Indian Disability Studies Collective. He is also the recipient of the 2016 C.D. Narasimhaiah Prize.
G.J.V. Prasad, formerly Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, is a poet, novelist, and translator. His teachings and research have focused on Indian English literature, modern drama and translation.
Ritwick Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi, New Delhi. His research has been located around fantasy, philosophy, phenomenology, horror fiction, science fiction, Indian English novels and disability studies. He is the author of Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy and a co-editor of Horror Fictions of the Global South: Cultures, Narratives and Representations with Saikat Ghosh, What Makes it Pop? Introduction to Studies in Popular Fiction with Srinjoyee Dutta, Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms with Shweta Khilnani and Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction with Someshwar Sati and G.J.V. Prasad. He has been awarded the Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial Award for his essay titled 'Politics of Translation: Disability, Language, and the Inbetween' published in the book Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience. His book Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms has been awarded the best academic book published in 2022 by the Federation of Indian Publishers and has been nominated for BLS book of the year and 2023 Idaho University Teaching Literature Book Award.
