Confronting Ignorance of Disability: A Tribute to Anita Ghai’s Enduring Legacy by Dr Ankita Mishra

To cite this work: Mishra, Ankita (2025). Confronting Ignorance of Disability: A Tribute to Anita Ghai’s Enduring Legacy. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Dr Ankita Mishra (she/her) is a Research Associate for Health Priorities for the Disability Matters project at iHuman, The University of Sheffield. She is particularly interested in participatory action research, creative and arts-based research methods that amplify multiple ways of knowing and being in marginalised communities affected by intersectional oppression. Ankita is passionate about de-scholarising the academy by transforming academic-community collaborations embodying the principle of ‘Nothing about us without us is for us’. 

In her 2010 essay “Ignorance of Disability: Some Epistemological Questions”, Anita Ghai examines how ignorance about disability is not simply a gap or an omission but an active epistemic project that is structured, reproduced, and naturalised across social, political, and cultural life (Ghai, 2010). She unsettles the assumption that ignorance is accidental. Instead, she demonstrates how it is crafted, disciplined, institutionalised. She analyses ignorance as a deliberate structured system of not-knowing that actively produces and protects ableist privilege. Her work shatters complacency, demanding that we hold in tension what we think we know with what we have refused to see. Medical training that omits disability sensitivity, architectural design premised on universal mobility, consent protocols that privilege documentation over dignity are some of the systematic ways through which non-disabled worlds secure themselves while performing neutrality. She compels us to confront how inherited certainties and epistemologies systematically erase entire worlds of disabled lives.

Central to Ghai’s critique is her insistence that ignorance about disability is inersectional. In Disabled Women: An Excluded Agenda of Indian Feminism, she demonstrates how such ignorance compounds when disability converges with gender, caste, class, or region. Disabled women, she argues, are constituted as the “devalued Other”, “as ‘not’, as ‘lack’, as ‘void’” (Ghai, 2002, p. 55). They become hypervisible as bodies to be managed yet epistemically erased as subjects with agency, desire, and political voice. Feminist movements often struggle to recognise how patriarchal violence is intensified through disablism; disability movements may overlook how gender and caste deepen marginalisation. The result is a conceptual void in which disabled women’s subjectivities become unthinkable within dominant frameworks.

Ghai extends this critique to Western disability epistemologies and their reproduction of colonial ignorance. She argues that when Northern theoretical frameworks universalise autonomy and individualist notions of freedom, they enact a geopolitical epistemology of ignorance. Disability in India, she argues, cannot be understood without engaging deeply with caste hierarchies, kinship relations, religious cosmologies, and uneven state structures (Ghai, 2024). Yet dominant Northern narratives often flatten or erase these contexts, replacing them with deficit frames that position the Global South as lacking proper disability consciousness or failing to achieve independence (Ghai, 2015). Such structured ignorance consolidates Northern authority over what counts as legitimate disability knowledge.

This geopolitical critique deepens into her methodological provocation. Ghai teaches us to recognise how ignorance permeates research itself: how academic inquiry privileges abstraction over lived experience and re-creates colonial hierarchies in knowledge production. She demands a scholarship that emerges from lived realities, centres activist knowledge, and refuses disciplinary containment, that positions the disabled body not merely as an object of study but as epistemology, an embodied, affective, and political way of knowing (Ghai, 2010).

Her writing refuses comfort. It interrupts: what do we privilege as knowledge? Whose subjectivities remain unreadable because the epistemic frameworks are rooted in assumptions of universality or normative bodies? She names what is refused: the multiplicities of caste, of kinship, of spiritual cosmologies, of relational subjectivities that a Western universalist gaze cannot always perceive. She insists on attending to these relational worlds, those shaped by interdependence, context, and situated histories, and on disrupting the epistemic erasures that keep them out of view.

Ghai leaves us with an unsettling yet generative invitation: to confront the forms of ignorance we continue to reproduce about Southern contexts, about disabled women’s lives, about the labour and inequities embedded within care. Her work highlights that the violence of ignorance lies not only in what is unknown but in what we refuse to know. To read her is to accept that discomfort of the need to dismantle wilful structured ignorance, attend to what has been kept invisible, and begin the collective labour of knowing differently.

References

Ghai, A. (2002). Disabled women: An excluded agenda of Indian feminism. Hypatia, 17(3), 49–66.

Ghai, A. (2010). Ignorance of disability: Some epistemological questions. In Anita Ghai: Selected Writings.

Ghai, A. (2015). Rethinking disability in India. Routledge.

Ghai, A. (2024). Disability studies and engaged practice: A potential and some concerns. The 2024 iHuman Annual Critical Disability Studies Lecture. University of Sheffield. Retrieved from https://sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/disability-matters/2024-ihuman-annual-lecture