Delusive discourse: Tracing the conceptual history of disability in India

'Delusive Discourse: Tracing the Conceptual History of Disability in India' suggests that existing disability theory can only minimally account for the historical experience of bodily difference in India. While disability historiography argues severally that disability has a maligned and marginalized status historically, anthropological strains of disability studies claim that disability is conceived differently in different cultural contexts. In my dissertation, I set up an encounter between the two sets of concurrent findings to answer the question: Is there a conceptual trace of disability in India? Western discourse is a repository of historical experience that is specific to the West, as is the conceptual lexicon that constitutes it. When these concepts are employed to theorize and historicize disability in a cultural context that has not had the same historical experience that produced those concepts, certain misinterpretations and miscalculations materialize. This discourse also has a peculiar tendency to act as if it were the only explanatory theory of experiences of bodily difference, regardless of context. It is this propensity of the discourse that makes it delusive. Such a discourse has two active aspects, the concepts it employs and the speech-act imperative that it conveys.;My dissertation examines the distinction between such a discourse that has become normative and the experience of bodily difference in the Indian cultural context. Examining the encounter between western notions and the Indian way of life in the colonial period offered insights into the incommensurability between two diverse cultural configurations of knowing and going about the world. I have investigated the discourse of certain prominent medical moments in the Indian colonial context---smallpox, cholera and plague epidemics (eighteenth- twentieth centuries), feeblemindedness and insanity in the nineteenth century, leprosy and its treatment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I traced the genealogy of notions of disease, infection, health, deviance, and normalcy across administrative and medical reports, newspaper columns and historical writing. The investigation revealed that smallpox in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resists the rubric of disease-cure, Shah Daula's chuhas defy the classification of feeblemindedness and monstrosity is unknown. Gandhi's views on the treatment of leprosy in early twentieth century further illustrate the problem at hand. Modern medicine enters India without having divested itself of some theological notions; as a result its secular, scientific intentions are suspect.;Each of the historical moments examined, I conclude, calibrate and evaluate bodily difference contextually. The various conceptions of bodily difference do not coalesce into one notion of difference that can be theorized and historicized under on category. It follows that the disability studies discourse, as it exists, is an inadequate tool with which to build a theory of bodily difference is conceived in the Indian cultural context.