LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 22:4 April 2022
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Authoring Disability, Documenting Struggle:
An Analysis of Naseema Huzruk’s The Incredible Story

P. Boopathi, Ph.D.


Courtesy: www.amazon.com

Abstract

Disability life narratives, written with the equal vigor and vitality of other marginalized life narratives, narrate the countless struggles and discriminations endured by the disabled in their day today lives, while challenging “Ableist Culture” and “Corporeal Normativity.” Emerged as purely “Ethnocentric Narratives,” the life narratives of the disabled foreground the untold and marginalized stories of the disabled in a more poignant manner by documenting their distinct life experiences. Having drawn inspiration from Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, the disabled people, mostly activists of the Disability Rights Movement, have begun recording their struggles as part of documenting disability history throughout the world in the latter half of twentieth century. In such process, they felt the need for their self-representation, for their representation in literary writings by the non-disabled has downgraded their dignity and reduced them to a mere object of self-pity and charity. In the Indian context, the life narratives of the disabled recount various kinds of discriminations faced by the disabled people such as religious, gender, social, caste, class and cultural.

The text The Incredible Story (2005) selected for this paper is an autobiography of Naseema Huzruk, a disabled woman belongs to the state of Maharashtra. Her autobiography is one of the pioneering texts of the disabled in India. It is considered to be the first women disabled life narrative published in the subcontinent. A founding text of disability life narratives in India, Naseema’s autobiography touches upon various issues such as rehabilitation, accessibility, education, healthcare and employment pertaining to the disabled people in India in the latter half of the last century. Her text is a telling account of the countless issues faced by the disabled before the enactment of first disability legislation (PWD Act) 1995. The text also documents how Naseema, being a Muslim woman, encountered hurdles and challenges posed by the upper caste Hindus in her ceaseless struggle for the empowerment of disabled. This paper, by reading Naseema’s life narrative as a document of disability history in the Indian state of Maharashtra, will attempt to unearth her stupendous struggles to promote the countless disabled at the time when there was no legal protection for the disabled.

Keywords: Naseema Huzruk, The Incredible Story, Disability Life Narratives, Disability History, Self-Representation, Disability Rights Movement, Ethnocentric Narratives.

1. Introduction

Disability History, relatively a new branch of Disability Studies, gained the attention of academia in the last decade. The epistemology of disability, fostered through the discipline of Disability Studies, internalizes Disability History to unearth the status of disabled in the past. Like other marginalized studies such as Dalit, Women, LGBTQI and Minorities, Disability Studies also emerged from rights movements in the early 1980s. As it adopted the models like rights, citizenship, social and minority followed by the Disability Rights Movements in England to study the subject position of the disabled in the early period, it did not take up the history of disabled as its focus. Since charity, medical and individual models of disability dominated the discourses on disability till the 1990s, scholars in Disability Studies were mostly occupied with countering such Ableist approaches. Further, owing to these prevalent approaches towards disability, the fields such as law, sociology, psychology and feminism formed the theoretical bases of Disability Studies before 2000. The historical approach towards disability, propelled by the plight of disabled people in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, employed by historians to revisit the history of America and England to analyze the treatment of disabled.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

P. Boopathi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English Studies
School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur 610005 pboopathi@cutn.ac.in
Mobile: +91-9843693951
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