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.
