Honouring the Legacy of Professor Anita Ghai by Dr Sruti Mohapatra

To cite this work:  Mohapatra, Sruti(2025). Disability Matters Online Symposia 2025: Honouring the Legacy of Professor Anita Ghai. In Goodley, D., Halsey, R., Scully, J., Singh, S. R., Titchkosky, T. and Wong, M.E. (Editors). The Disability Matters Scholarship Collection. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. 

Dr. Sruti Mohapatra is a national icon in the disability rights movement - an author, scholar, international inclusion trainer, and tireless advocate for equity and accessibility. As the founder of Swabhiman, a leading nonprofit working in inclusive education, accessibility, and policy reform, she has conceptualized award-winning programs such as Anjali, Saksham, Prerana, and others that have influenced policy and practice across India. She has played a key role in shaping disability legislation, and serves on key national education and policy bodies. Dr. Mohapatra is a five-time TEDx speaker and recipient of over 77 national and international awards, including the Nari Shakti Puraskar from the President of India. Her journey has inspired two films, one by the Films Division of India and another in Odia language, highlighting her contributions and spirit. 

In the quiet of a morning that has not yet learned its name

a woman lifts her voice and the world stirs

her body becomes a doorway into truth

and her truth becomes a light that refuses to go out.

Anita Ghai was born in October nineteen fifty eight. She lived with polio from early childhood, and from the beginning her life unfolded in a world that treated disability as something to hide or correct. Her family, like many families of that time, took her to faith healers and rituals of cure. She witnessed the silent sorrow that society imposes on difference. Yet what she absorbed was not shame. She absorbed a stubborn clarity that her body did not need fixing. The world around her did.

She grew into a thinker shaped by both tenderness and steel. As a young woman she found her way into the study of psychology and later into the world of teaching. She spent many years at Jesus and Mary College where she became a beloved teacher, a thoughtful colleague, and a person who made ideas feel human and alive. Those who worked with her often remember how she challenged them, not with aggression but with a firm, questioning gentleness that stayed long after the conversation ended.

Her life took a transformative turn when she joined Ambedkar University Delhi. There she helped build the disability studies programme from the ground up. For her, this was not merely an academic exercise. It was an act of justice. A declaration that disabled lives deserved their own intellectual space and deserved it without apology. She saw disability not as a medical flaw but as a social and political condition created by barriers, prejudice, and unequal structures. She argued that society imposes disability through inaccessible spaces, through ignorance, through fear, and through a refusal to acknowledge the fullness of human diversity.

Her writings reshaped the field in India. Her book titled “Dis-Embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women” brought attention to the specific experiences of disabled women. Rethinking Disability in India questioned every easy assumption about normalcy. She edited works that helped locate disability in the specific cultural and political contexts of South Asia. Readers across the country still turn to her writing to understand not only disability but the meaning of justice itself.

Her scholarship was not separate from her life. It was born from her body, her pain, her joy, her memories. She often spoke of the ways in which disabled women navigate desire, agency, and dignity in a world that either infantilises them or erases them completely. She challenged mainstream feminism for ignoring disability. She challenged disability rights spaces for ignoring gender. She refused every kind of compartmentalisation, insisting that real justice must see the whole person.

She lived her activism. When an airline failed to provide her a wheelchair at an airport and she was forced to crawl on the tarmac, she did not accept humiliation quietly. She spoke about it publicly. She demanded accountability. She insisted that accessibility was not charity but a right. That dignity was not negotiable. That disabled people should not have to plead for basic respect.

At Ambedkar University she also played a vital role in institutional justice. A colleague recalls that when a Dalit sanitation worker came forward with a grave complaint of sexual harassment, Anita was heading the Internal Complaints Committee. She took the case seriously and sent a clear message that no position of power could overshadow the suffering of a woman from a marginalised background. In a system where caste, class, and gender often silence the most vulnerable, Anita ensured that justice was not merely discussed but delivered. This memory remains one of the clearest examples of her courage and her unwavering commitment to equity.

In the center of her long journey

there burned a single flame

quiet but unyielding

a promise that every human being deserves to belong.

Her colleagues remember her warmth. Her students remember how she made theory breathe. Her friends remember her wit, her laughter, her stubborn hope. Even when she was dealing with serious health challenges including heart surgeries, cancer, and the lingering effects of childhood polio, she did not allow despair to define her. She believed in the shared vulnerability of human beings. She believed that difference is not a wound. It is a form of richness that society refuses to understand.

She wrote about interdependence as an ethical stance. Not the forced independence that society idolises, but an honest acceptance that human beings need one another. She wrote about the slow violence of ableism, about the way ignorance embeds itself into institutions, about how exclusion becomes normal unless we deliberately name it and dismantle it. She wrote with the steady conviction that compassion must be structural. It cannot be left to goodwill. It must be built into the bones of society.

Her passing in December twenty twenty four shook many communities. Scholars, activists, students, colleagues, and friends felt the loss as something deeply personal. It was not only the loss of a teacher or an author or an activist. It was the loss of a presence that had quietly held together so many conversations about justice, difference, and belonging. It was the loss of someone who had lived her convictions so completely that her life itself became a lesson.

Yet her legacy remains vibrant. Her writings continue to guide those trying to reshape institutions. Her teachings continue to influence young scholars and activists who want to build more accessible worlds. The disability rights movement and the womens rights movement both recognise her as one of the most critical voices of the last several decades. Her life reminds us that a single person, living with integrity, can shift the direction of entire fields.

Her ideas continue to spark reflection. What does it mean to truly see another person. What does it mean to recognise difference without fear. What does it mean to build a world where dignity is not conditional. She did not offer simple answers. She offered clarity. And courage. And compassion grounded in truth.

And now in the soft twilight of memory

her voice returns like a steady wind

whispering that justice is made not of words but of choices

and that love is the greatest form of courage we carry.

To remember Anita Ghai is to remember a woman who lived fully, intellectually, politically, and emotionally. A woman who questioned the foundations of exclusion and taught us that to honour disability is to honour humanity itself. A woman who held both fire and gentleness together in her voice. A woman whose words refuse to fade.

Her story continues. Because every act of fairness carries her name. Every accessible classroom carries her vision. Every student who learns to see disability as difference rather than defect carries her thought forward. Every instance of justice rendered to someone ignored by society becomes part of her unfinished work.

May we continue to carry her light. May we continue to question. May we continue to create a world that welcomes every body. May we live in a way that would make her smile. VP