Disability in India

The number of people with disabilities in India has been estimated at 70 million.^[1]

India is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, having signed the treaty on 30 March 2007 and ratified it on 1 October 2007.^[2]

Unlike those in the West, most people with disabilities in India and their families are focused on survival in the context of deep poverty. India's disability rights movement, however, mainly comprises elite, middle-class activists who generally mirror the goals of the disability rights movement in Western countries.^[1]

Common public perceptions of disability in India are influenced by certain discourses that are generally rejected by the field of disability studies. People with disabilities are often seen as wicked or deceitful, or as unable to progress to adulthood and dependent on charity and pity for assistance.^[1] This is as opposed to an emphasis on the strengths people possess despite their disabilities, and their potential for adaptation.

Disability in India is affected by other social divisions such as class, gender, and caste.^[1] Statistics show that women with disabilities in India are more marginalized than their male counterparts.^[1] Anita Ghai argues that Indian feminism has ignored the unique conditions of women with disabilities.^[1]

India's Hindi-language cinema has often reinforced negative stereotypes about people with disabilities, but more recently it has produced several films that have helped raise awareness.^[3] A recurrent theme has for a long time been that disability is a punishment for misdeeds, for instance in Jeevan Naiya (1936), Aadmi (1968), and Dhanwan (1981).^[3] Characters with mental disabilities have frequently been used as comic relief, a trend which has been criticized by Dinesh Bhugra as reinforcing social stigma.^[3] Atanu Mohapatra identifies several ways in which women with disabilities are misrepresented in Hindi films as compared to men with disabilities: they are included less frequently, they very rarely win the love of able-bodied men despite the converse often being the case, they are much less likely to become self-supporting economically, and they are not included unless they are physically attractive.^[3]

The decade following 2005 has seen a shift in the representation of people with disabilities by Hindi cinema. The immediate cause for the shift appears to have been an international disability film festival in 2005 facilitated by the Ability Foundation (an Indian NGO).^[3] Black (2005) broke new ground by focusing on a female protagonist with a disability, a girl who is blind, deaf, and mute but succeeds academically after considerable struggle.^[3] Other films including Taare Zameen Par (2007) by famed actor and director Aamir Khan have explored the lives of people with dyslexia, progeria, Asperger syndrome, and amnesia, among other conditions.^[3] There were some earlier precedents to these more well-rounded portrayals, including Koshish (1972) and Sparsh (1980), which explored deafness and blindness respectively.^[3] Conversely, some recent Hindi films have continued to display ill-founded stereotypes about people with disabilities.

References