Disability and the Global South: The Epistemic Legacy of Anita Ghai by Dr Karuna Rajeev

To cite this work: Rajeev, Karuna  (2025).Disability and the Global South: The Epistemic Legacy of Anita Ghai. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Dr Karuna Rajeev is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English in Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature, literary and cultural disability studies, marginality studies, and narrative discourse.

as long as we retain a disability lens where disability is conceptualized in terms of Western corporeality, our “obstacles” will never be removed, retaining the concept of disability in our studies. (Anand, 2015)

An engagement with the definitions and terminology utilised in disability discourse is absolutely essential. “Who is disabled?” is a query, which to date is a highly problematic one because any reflection on the construction and use of the term signifies its pervasiveness beyond what can be taken as its normative bodily marker. (Ghai, 2003) 

As readers, we frequently remain mired within our own positions when we draw meaning from texts. Like many researchers of my generation, my initial encounter with Anita’s work was through her writings; only later did I have the opportunity to hear her speak, and eventually to know her in a warmer, more personal way. If I were to trace some frequent refrains in the symphony that is her scholarship, then an epistemology of disability echoes throughout. Her critique of how disability was neglected within late twentieth-century feminist activism, her ire with the absence of a disability centred discourse in academia, her insistence on the intersectional nature of disability—particularly in Indian contexts—all gesture towards what she identifies as “epistemic disenfranchisement” in her Rethinking Disability. 

Anita consistently emphasised a gap in the ways we conceptualise and produce knowledge about disability. Her incisive criticism, in my reading, was also directed at disability scholarship and not just towards the absence of disability related discursivity in academia and society at large. This idea was reinforced after listening to her in real time during her lectures and in interactions with her. While Anita’s work reflects on embodiment and what “actual conditions of life, the fleshy, enmeshed conditions that forever come to us with a past, present, and future, in fact tell us” (Reynolds, 2022), it also furthers the idea that the epistemology of disability, while rooted in the body, simultaneously presents a larger awareness, where “disability is perpetuated when it is associated only with the experiential terrain without any meaningful connection with critical thinking about feminism or culture” (Ghai, 2003). Anita’s work both foregrounds the body, and, in an act of radicality, compels us to move with the body toward an understanding that exceeds it. She invites us to consider what the variability of our bodies suggests about understanding “disability” as an act of epistemic activism in itself. She thus coerces on us a reconceptualisation of disability away from the lens of western conceptualisation. 

In her understanding of kinship, care and community, Anita foregrounds the terrain of conflict in disabled identity and underscores the absence in India of the institutional histories that have shaped disability in the West. Her training as a psychologist further enables her to unpack what disability comes to signify when it is lived and internalised through bonds of love, intimacy, and relationality with the underlying echoes of loneliness. Therefore, Anita’s legacy lies in her insistence that epistemological authority does not solely reside in the situatedness of disabled bodies in the global South, but in the very reconceptualisation of disability from an alternative perspective. Such a shift not only affirms the value of lived experiences but also opens up a mode of analysis that attends to both the body and what can be sublimated through it.

References: 

Anand, S. (2015). “Corporeality and Culture: Theorizing Difference in the South Asian Context.” In S. Rao & M. Kalyanpur (Eds.), South Asia and Disability Studies: Redefining Boundaries and Extending Horizons (pp. 154–170). Peter Lang.

Ghai, A. (2003). (Dis)embodied form: Women, disability and the lived body. Shakti Books, Har-Anand Publications.

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

Reynolds, J. M. (2022). The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality. University of Minnesota Press.