Anita Ghai, Trickster by Dr Shilpaa Anand

To cite this work: Anand, Shilpaa(2025). Anita Ghai, Trickster. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Shilpaa Anand, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS-Pilani Hyderabad Campus

Shilpaa Anand is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the BITS-Pilani Hyderabad Campus in India. She has a PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in English from the University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include literary and cultural disability studies, the historiography of disability, and culturally different concepts of corporeality. Her doctoral work explored the conceptual histories of disability in the Indian context. She moderates a lively email list called Disability Studies India.

“At that time I felt that I was only a token … then I thought…umm, I am also rebellious… so let’s use the token…”. 

“And if disability cannot be used as knowledge, then what you do is, you tend to take disability as a concessional category, no?”  

(Anita Ghai in conversation with Hemachandran Karah, 2019)

Ever since Professor Anita Ghai passed on in December 2024, students and teachers in different parts of India have been looking for her published work, reading her books, citing her papers and chasing down old and recent digitized copies of everything she had ever written. This would have made Anita happy. Her repeated grouse, as her friend recalled in her memorial meeting, was that no one read or cited what she had said about this, that or the other. As someone who has gone back to Ghai’s work this past year, I realize now, why she thought that way. It’s true, Anita had indeed thought and written about so many things, even though she is primarily remembered for shaking up the women’s movement in India with questions about access and disability-selective abortion. Her book, Rethinking Disability in India (Routledge, 2015), is a testament to all things disability and India that she had thought and written about. In this account, however, I want remember Professor Ghai as the quintessential organic intellectual, over and above the legacy of published work she has left us and her ardent love for theorizing disability. 

As I looked up her recorded lectures on the internet, I discovered, a candid and revelatory conversation she had had with Professor Hemachandran Karah in the series of interviews he conducted in 2019, as part of his NPTEL course on disability studies. Responding to Hemachandran’s question about her work at the intersections of gender and disability, Anita said that she would like to distinguish herself from other disability scholars because what she liked most was addressing and mingling with those who were not the “converted” disability conscious folk. She confessed to preferring opportunities that allowed her to intervene as the disability advocate, rather than preaching to the disability studies choir. 

Her conversation with Hemachandran reminded me of the conference on marginality she and I had attended over a decade ago held in a legendary social sciences institution. All the sessions of the conference were held in a classroom that was on the first floor of a building that had no elevators. Anita arrived for her session, after a morning full of teaching and seeing the absence of a lift, got out of her wheelchair using her calipers and climbed up the hallowed stairs using her palms and feet. Shocked academics, caught off guard, huddled at the top of the stairs, holding their breath and looking down at Professor Ghai with their ablebodied gaze. The support staff had carried up her wheelchair. As the clutch of embarrassed academics, heaved a relieved sigh and trouped into the room with furtive glances, Anita, already settled in her wheelchair, rolled in, dived into friendly conversations, smiling, laughing her big laugh, jousting about ableism. Her lecture on access seemed redundant after that; her crawl had eloquently made the point.  

I recall that conference session vividly, as must all others who attended it and the learning Anita enabled for everyone present, through her deliberate actions to occupy a space that was exclusive and inaccessible. We could have a conference full of sessions and volumes full of chapters describing the many ways in which Anita crafted pedagogic moments with her embodied engagement as she traversed the structural and intellectual labyrinths of Indian academia! And that is a debt we have all incurred – the gains disability studies scholars in India have made because the maverick Prof. Ghai’s reversed every tokenistic invitation into a lesson in politics of access. 

And to all who continue to struggle to convince university administrations to enable access, to admit disabled students, to recruit disabled faculty, to provide accommodations in the classroom, and include disability studies electives in the curriculum, remember we are here now because Professor Ghai took one for the team!

And so, we must continue to read her and respectfully teach her as Anita Ghai, the organic intellectual who tricked every tokenistic invitation into a startling campaign against ableism in academia. 

References:

Ghai, Anita. 2015. Rethinking Disability in India. London: Routledge.

NPTEL-NOC IITM. 2021. "mod06lec25 - Gender and Disability: Interviews with Prof. Anita Ghai." Video. June 8, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGFZ0dOuekI.