The topic of disability has been recently in debate in legal and policy circles following allegations that a trainee officer used multiple fake disability certificates to gain entry into India’s civil services. This has resurfaced some of the earlier contentions around the category of disability in India. To be sure, in all official and governmental records, people with disabilities (PWDs) are referred to as divyang –changed from the earlier term ‘viklang’-emphasizing normative ableism. For instance, the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities under the Government of India’s Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment is known in Hindi as Divyangjan Sashaktikaran Vibhag, or the concession certificates issued by the Indian Railways or relatedly, the railway coaches reserved for people with disability are known as Divyang coaches. As such, divyang encompasses two Sanskrit words divya and ang, the literal translation of which means ‘those with divine limbs’. Collectively, PWDs are referred to as Divyangjan where the suffix jan denotes a group of people sharing the same characteristics. Inevitably, in this framing, Divyangjan homogenizes the diverse experiences of those with disabilities under the umbrella of jan.

In the year 2015 in his radio broadcast Man ki Baat, the Prime Minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi, suggested the use of the term divyang instead of viklang. This lexical change, he suggested, was for a reason. He proposed that instead of using ‘viklang’ (a ‘bad’ or a diseased limb) for PWDs, the recognition that those with a missing body part(s) had a divine gift- something extra that God has bestowed to make them extraordinarily talented. This changed nomenclature was met with criticisms from researchers and disability rights activists. While some argued that shifting nomenclatures could at times be an early effort in changing ingrained social ideologies and practices, such as ‘surdas’ being used for people with visual impairment, or the term ‘harijan’ for backward castes. Others noted that such changes reify identities that are often socially stigmatized.

Legal scholar, Kalpana Kannabiran (2016) puts this sharply “Viklang was derogatory and insulting, isn’t the new term ‘divyang’ both misleading and patronizing?….[they] ostensibly believe that a mere name change would undo the hardships and social ridicule that such people face on a daily basis”. Additionally, the visual spectre of the (dis)abled condition is crucial for it to be divyang. What about those whose disabilities are not immediately visible and those who choose not to visibilize them? Moreover, this new etymology is silent about those with cognitive impairments. Overall, this reintroduces a new way of classifying bodies while denying equal citizenship to those with disabilities. Or as Friedner (2017) noted, disability becomes a non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity where a nation’s aspirations and neoliberal notions of success are assayed through the disabled body.   

Disability: Under Religion’s Eyes

Seen another way, the notion of a God here takes disability into realms of theology and religion -both categories within which disability is deeply intertwined. In particular, the paradoxical connections between disability and religion is proffered through the binaries: as a ‘divine blessing’ on one hand, and a ‘divine punishment’ on the other. British sociologist and theologian Nancy Eiesland, also as someone with a lived experience of disability, remarked how such an appropriation became a source of unease and symbolic violence (Eiesland 2002, 13). Religious-moral explanations such as “God gifted me disability to develop my being” are misleading as they are inadequate in capturing the disabled self and life. This discomfort becomes evident in Eiesland’s notable work in the theological studies of disability, namely The Disabled God (1994) where she argued how religious imagery and symbolism often marginalise people with disabilities; or, as she put it, “romantic beliefs of heroic suffering coupled with structures that force those with disabilities into the margins…” (Eiesland 1994, 10), thereby pressing for the need to represent disability in ways which are “fully compatible with the experience of disability” (p. 11). As such, Eiesland’s notion of “heroic suffering” finds cultural resonance with Divyang or those who have supposedly ‘divine’ bodies.

Significantly, the intersection of disability and religion affords critical sociological interrogations. For example, religious studies scholar, Sarah Imhoff (2017), draws our attention to disability through the combined lenses of religion and theology. Building on earlier works that privilege the social model of disability (as opposed to the medical model) Imhoff argues that if disability is a social construction, then it is not the individual body that is ‘abnormal’, rather the “environments are disabling, societies deem a physical body abnormal, and people and institutions marginalise” (Imhoff 2017, 8). We argue that Divyang, with its euphemistically reconfigured focus on divinity eulogizes the medical model where disability is located on a physical, individual self, requiring (medical) assessment, classification and intervention. The insistence that people with disability are those “who have one or more such organs, which is/are divine and where divine power flows- an extraordinary aspect that we normal bodied people do not have” (PM’s 2015 address, VS’s translation) offers a feel-good rationale for “new humanitarianism” under a religious-neoliberal garb.

Where Do We Go From Here: Anthropology’s Promise

We contend that both the social and the medical models are empirically unfulfilling, since the lived experience of disability- ways in which people experience physiological challenges arising out of impairment, bodily pain and how they are self-constructed in the light of their own lived socio-religious contexts- is embodied and biosocial at once.  Although the social offers a more liberatory scope as it involves relational and material forms of sociality, it can also be limiting. Theorists such as Rose (1999) and Ferguson (2015) have shown the dark side of the social where it becomes a catchall framework where all moral, ethical and political problems can be remediated through social fixes. In doing so, the social becomes a “new category of control and organization” (Friedner, 2020; S39) Instead, we argue that anthropological notions of social suffering (Kleinman, Das & Lock 1997), structural violence and “inter/alterwordly” (Friedner, 2020) hold promise in offering a middle ground- a secular, and perhaps a reparative understanding of disability in contemporary India.

Kleinman and Das’s seminal anthropological contributions to examine violence and social worlds through the lens of social suffering, allow us to see ways in which social forces inflict harm on individuals and collectivities. Through these analytical references, they have argued that the clustering of bodily pain, social harm, abuse and trauma runs against the standard categorization of conditions ‘diagnosed’ as psychological or medical, and by that extension, individual. Instead, it reveals the inter-relationality of the personal with the social and the corporeal. In other words, suffering is a social and an embodied experience making itself knowable through intersubjective connections. Seen this way, disability is not located in individual bodies, “but rather “off” the body of the individual and within a network of social and kin relationships” (Das & Addlakha, 2001). In a more recent work, Friedner’s (2020) notion of “inter/alterwordly” opens up an exceptionally creative space wherein disability coalesces with religion and yet preserves its analytical agency. Friedner’s evocative ethnography on Indian churches and the deaf community unfolds a form of sociality that “includes the interwordly (as opposed to otherworldly) based upon (affective) forms of knowledge, love and care that are not biopolitical in nature” (S43; italicized texts added by authors). As such, since religion is constituted as an everyday practice, the significance of religion as a ‘social project’ enables us to imagine disability futures in which disability is lived and imagined.

In conclusion, we return to the term divyang, and ask – what (social-moral) function does such an invocation entail? We have argued that living with disability is neither heroic nor divine, nor an aesthetic subject of “representation” in social justice terms. We instead, draw attention to disability as an embodied, quotidian experience that can contest the (benevolent) state-citizen relation. Hence the conceptual and popular vocabulary of disability needs to jettison itself from the burdened language of morality (social) and individual-failing (medical) to one that is both political and non-exceptional. We find literary theorist and bioethicist, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (2017) trenchant plea to understand disability “as a cultural interpretation of physical transformation” and a “comparison of bodies that structures social relations and institutions”, particularly potent in troubling these established hierarchies. Without losing focus on the body as a political project, we join this plea to (re)examine disability as a multivalent analytic that reveals possibilities for signification that go beyond monologic invocations to divinity, morality and heroism.

References:

Das, V., & Addlakha, R. (2001). Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject. Public Culture.13(3): 511-531.

Eiesland, N. (1994). The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Eiesland, N. (2002, September & October). Encountering the Disabled God. First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Retrieved August 13, 2024, from https://www.firstchurchberkeley.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/21206.Eiesland-Disabled-God.pdf

Ferguson, J. (2015). Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Friedner, M. (2017). How the Disabled Body Unites the National Body: Disability as ‘Feel good’ Diversity in Urban India. Contemporary South Asia.25(4): 347-363.

Friedner, M. (2020). Disability, Anonymous Love, and Interwordly Socials in Urban India. Current Anthropology.61(S21): S37-S45.

Garland-Thomson, R. (2017). Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Imhoff, S. (2017). Why Disability Studies Needs to Take Religion Seriously? Religions.8(9), 186.

Kannabiran, K. (2016, September 22). Disability is not Divinity. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Disability-is-not-divinity/article13994207.ece

Kleinman, A., Das, V., & Lock, M. (1997). Introduction in A. Kleinman, V. Das, & M. Lock edited Social Suffering. Pp. ix-xxvii. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wendell, S. (1996). The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge.

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Vinay Suhalka is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at FLAME University, Pune. His research interests are in the fields of disability studies, ageing studies and sociology of religion. Tannistha Samanta is an Associate Professor of Sociology at FLAME University. Her work lies at the intersection of family sociology and ageing studies.