In Memoriam — Becoming Ancestor: The Living Legacy of Anita Ghai by Sandeep R. Singh

To cite this work: Singh, Sandeep R. (2025). In Memoriam — Becoming Ancestor: The Living Legacy of Anita Ghai. In Goodley, D., Halsey, R., Scully, J., Singh, S., Titchkosky, T. and Wong, M.E. (Editors). The Disability Matters Scholarship Collection. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. 

Sandeep R. Singh is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India where he teaches courses on Disability Studies, World Literature, Literary Comparison, Narratology and Life-Writing at the Undergraduate and Postgraduate level. He is pursuing his PhD titled “Writing Life, Narrating Self: Disability Discourse in the Works of Oliver W. Sacks” at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and he is due to submit by December 2025. He is also a co-applicant on the Disability Matters Project, a major six-year pan-national programme of disability, health and science research, funded by a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award (2023 - 2029).

To think about Professor Anita Ghai—or Anita, as she always insisted I call her—comes from a place of shared experience, of navigating worlds never designed with our bodies, our histories, or our ways of knowing. As a fellow disabled person, I recognised in her not only a mentor and a friend but someone who stood far larger than any of these definitions could encapsulate. Anita has been, and always will remain, my disability ancestor. As one of the pioneering architects of disability scholarship in India, Anita expanded the conceptual, pedagogical, and ethical discourses that have shaped disability studies in the Global South. In placing disability at the centre of critical inquiry, she generated modes of thought and practice that will continue to inform our work. Her presence opened conceptual terrains of possibilities for thinking, writing and living disability in a far more nuanced and intersectional manner. In the clarity of her thought and the generosity of her practice, she cultivated conditions in which alternative modes of knowledge, care, and embodiment could take form, enabling others to imagine lives that exceeded inherited limits.

If disability studies in India exists today as a discourse of epistemic enquiry, it is because Anita had already been doing the difficult intellectual, political, and affective labour of making such interventions possible. Her work did not simply shape a discipline, it shaped the conditions under which many of us could enter that discipline with integrity, imagination, and courage.

Anita was a foundational figure in Indian Critical Disability Studies. Her scholarship shaped how disability was thought, narrated, and politicised in the Indian academia and beyond. She brought disciplinary conversations to a framework that refused the divide between gender and disability, insisting instead that disability must be analysed as a category interwoven with identity, embodiment, culture, and community. Her work questioned the developmentalist, charitable, and medical paradigms that had long dominated disability discourse in India. She argued for disability as a site of agency, cultural meaning, and political struggle. Through her interventions, she helped shift the conversation from inclusion as benevolence to inclusion as social justice; from impairment as pathology to embodiment as a locus of knowledge; from disability as an individual misfortune to disability as a structural, relational, and cultural phenomenon.

What I learned from her however, was never only gleaned from texts or institutional interactions, it emerged from the resonance of a shared embodiment and the ethical labour of thinking with a fellow disabled person. Anita taught me to see disability studies not as a detached academic field but as a lived, ethical, and political practice. With her, the discipline unfolded as a site where epistemology and activism were not parallel pursuits but entwined commitments—where thinking was a form of resistance, and resistance itself was knowledge production. She always told me that theory must remain accountable to lived experience, that activism is also epistemic labour, and that disability studies, when done well, challenges entrenched assumptions about who gets to define knowledge and why.

Anita always batted for interdependence, not as a concession but as a philosophical stance. She questioned the fetish of independence that dominates modern political imaginaries, showing how it obscures the deep interpersonal nature of human life. For her, interdependence was vital to the human condition. She always asked, what if political and social communities recognised that vulnerability is universal, that care is a shared responsibility, and that dependence is not a flaw but a condition of coexistence? Anita’s work urges us to think that autonomy itself is sustained by networks of reciprocity, and that democratic life is impoverished when these networks are denied or hidden. Through these questions, she offers not merely a critique but a reimagined ethical horizon that is grounded in interdependence, dignity, and collective flourishing.

Her mentorship taught me to stay with discomfort; not to turn away from it, to examine the assumptions that even disabled scholars can so easily internalise, and to recognise intersubjectivity as central to intellectual practice. She asked questions that opened interpretive frames within disability discourse that I had not known were available to me. Her intellectual generosity was never performative; it was a deeply embodied ethic. Through her, I learnt that the epistemology of disability is also an epistemology of survival, community, critique, and imaginative possibilities.

Anita’s friendship too, was a space of recognition that only another disabled person could offer. Our conversations spilled easily into humour, our shared frustrations, and those small yet profound moments of understanding that emerge only from disabled kinship. Anita’s companionship was grounded, steady and disarmingly honest. She brought to friendship the same commitments she brought to scholarship; those of rigour, care, accountability, and a refusal to abandon complexity for convenience.

To call her my disability ancestor, then, is not merely a metaphor, it is an acknowledgement of a lineage she embodied and passed on—a lineage of intellectual courage, feminist insistence, political sharpness, and the capability of imagining freedoms not yet available. She made possible a space in which people like me could think, study, speak, and claim disability not as deficit but as a generative way of being in the world. She walked ahead so that many of us could arrive with less fear.

So yes, she was my mentor. But that word holds only a fraction of what she gave me. Anita shaped how I thought, how I understood disability studies, and how I inhabited my own disability without apology. She taught me that rigour and tenderness could coexist, that critique and care were not binaries, and that intellectual life—especially for disabled people—was always collaborative work. In her presence, it became possible to imagine a scholarship that was neither alienated from lived experience nor trapped within it, a scholarship that practised what it theorised.

For her friendship, her solidarity, her example, and for the place she occupies in my own lineage of becoming, I remain deeply grateful. Even in her absence, Anita continues to shape not only my intellectual commitments but my sense of how one moves through the world—disabled, thinking, resisting, and still making room for joy.