Reading literature and law side by side
My thesis brings four novels and a memoir into one comparison, then reads that comparison against how Indian disability law changed across the same thirty four years. The value sits in bringing them together, not in any single reading on its own.
Why genre kept these texts apart
Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day is usually read as postcolonial fiction. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is read as postcolonial allegory. Firdaus Kanga’s Trying to Grow sits closer to queer and disability criticism. Pinki Virani’s Deaf Heaven, though fiction, is rarely read for how its own form handles disability. Shivani Gupta’s No Looking Back belongs to life writing rather than fiction studies at all. Genre keeps them apart. Disability studies asks a different question of a text: not what kind of writing this is, but who it treats as a full subject, and how. Read that way, the five belong in one conversation.
Fiction
Desai, Rushdie, Kanga, and Virani each imagine disabled interiority through a constructed narrator, at a certain distance from the writer’s own life.
Memoir
Gupta testifies to it directly. Writer, narrator, and subject converge, so the account can’t be held at arm’s length as invention.
That’s a real difference in form, not a detail to smooth over. Following G. Thomas Couser’s account of disability life writing as its own genre, I treat the difference as part of the finding: what changes about disability representation when the form itself changes, from a story someone else could have written to an account only the author could give.
A five stage shift, in step with the law
Placed in order, the five texts trace a direction: from background detail nobody examines, to a metaphor for the nation, to a first person claim on selfhood, to the entire organising structure of a narrative, to plain testimony. Indian disability law moves in a comparable direction across the same years, from a global awareness year, to an Act organised around welfare and category, to an Act organised around rights and participation. I read the two side by side rather than as separate archives that happen to share a country and a period.
A pattern I call the certificatory trap
Indian disability law generally requires a person to be officially certified as disabled before they can claim the protections meant for them, which can delay or block access to the very rights the certificate exists to unlock. It surfaces most directly in Gupta’s memoir, appears in fictionalised form in Virani’s novel, and shows up by absence in the three earlier texts, where no character has to prove anything to anyone. I’m still working out how far this pattern extends across the corpus, so I’m noting it here rather than building the whole argument on it.
The theoretical tools behind this
The social model of disability separates impairment from the disabling effect of social structures, which is the starting point for asking how a text builds or removes those structures. Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis explains how disability conventionally props up a story rather than speaking for itself, the exact tendency the five stage shift tracks the texts moving away from. Garland Thomson’s work on the normate and the stare, and McRuer’s crip theory, help read how these texts position a reader in relation to a disabled body. Crenshaw’s intersectionality, Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination, Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, Stuart Hall’s politics of difference, and Grech’s decolonising critique of disability studies each test whether frameworks built mainly on Anglo American material hold up against this corpus, and where they need revising.
How the comparison was built
The fields this draws on
Disability Studies
The social and cultural models of disability, and how narrative form either props itself up on disability or lets it speak for itself.
Indian English Fiction
How the novel and the memoir in English have registered, and sometimes lagged behind, social change in India since independence.
Postcolonial Literature
Frameworks built largely on Anglo American material, tested and revised against a South Asian corpus.
Digital Humanities
Open, searchable archives as infrastructure for exactly this kind of cross genre, cross text comparison.
Journal Articles & Presentations
From Pity to Collective Agency: Reframing Disability in Indian Cinema (2010 to 2025), with Special Reference to Sitaare Zameen Par
Athar, M., and P. S. Jafri. Smart Moves Journal IJELLH, vol. 14, no. 4, Apr. 2026, pp. 100 to 122. doi.org/10.24113/smji.v14i4.11752
The Unarchived Voice: Disability Narratives and Digital Humanities
National Webinar, Dept. of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. January 2023.
Where this goes from here
Two essays extend the same method to film: one reads Animal’s People and The Railway Men against the Bhopal disaster, the other traces the disabled body’s right to desire across decades of Hindi cinema. Both grow out of the published article on collective agency in Indian cinema.
Further ahead, three directions interest me. Extending the corpus into Bhasha literatures, so the comparison isn’t limited to English. Looking at how caste intersects with access to care and representation, alongside disability. And testing whether the five stage arc holds outside the literary text, in the oral histories and primary sources Oceanic Fiction and Disability Archives are gathering.
Three fields, three uses
For Indian English literary studies, this treats disability studies as a working method rather than an occasional lens on one book. For disability studies, it tests frameworks built mainly on Anglo American material against a South Asian corpus, and asks what needs revising. For law and humanities, it treats legislation and literature as two records of the same social change, worth reading together rather than filing separately.