Honouring Professor Anita Ghai’s Legacy: Reflections by Professor Rachana Johri

To cite this work: Johri, Rachana (2025). Honouring Professor Anita Ghai’s Legacy: Reflections by Professor Rachana Johri. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Anita Ghai was an insatiable traveller, both in her imagination and in the real world. I tended to be quite stationary by comparison. In one of the few trips we did together, we were in Vadodara, going from one part of the city to another. In those days Anita used callipers.  We had both decided to board a local bus. Understandably she took some time to board. To my horror I found the driver screaming at her for wasting his time, asking her what entitled her to step out of her home.  Anita, on the other hand, constantly stepped out of the boundaries the world had set up for her. 

 In her refusal to be restricted by the normative construction of  a disabled woman she simultaneously disturbed the normative world of patriarchy and ableism. In her contribution to the Hypatia volumes, Feminism and Disability, Ghai (2002) pointed to the exclusion of the disabled woman from both the disability movement and the women’s movement in India. With characteristic courage, she wrote of the paradoxical relationship between the concerns of non-disabled women and the oppression experienced by those with disabilities. Always drawn to the psychical, Ghai made a plea for a distinct and different subjectivity for women with disabilities. While the women’s movement in India highlighted the objectification of the woman’s body and the violence of the sexual gaze, Ghai marked the difference between this gaze and the stare that declared the disabled woman as fundamentally asexual and object of revolt and disgust. Similarly, while most women in India were subject to the norm of compulsory motherhood, the construction of a woman with disability as an eternal and vulnerable child rendered her unfit to be a mother. 

In the context of women’s lives, Anita thought deeply about the problematic of care; it was difficult to be the caretaker of a child with disability particularly in India. These were most often women some of whom had faced tremendous ostracism for ‘being responsible’ for the birth of a disabled child. Yet she also recognized the difficulty of being a disabled daughter, who was often infantilized and struggled to find a balance between vulnerability and agency.

In this and her other reflections over the years, Anita consistently resisted binaries. She spoke of the temporary able bodied rather than the normal vs  the disabled, the frame of interdependence instead of dependence versus autonomy and bodymind (Price, 2015) instead of mind and body. Trained as a psychologist and deeply drawn to psychoanalysis she often  began from the vantage point of experience and turned to theory, moving amongst frameworks and employing them to argue in favour of  a located rethinking around disability. 

One facet of our friendship was that she would share thoughts when they were at a nascent stage. As I reflect upon our last few years together, I can see that she seemed to be returning to an early concern. Writing in 2023, she said, ‘as early as 1998, I began to question whether I could overlook the material reality of the impaired body. "Should I blame this pain on society? Who can I demonstrate against? Not all bodily suffering is a socially curable phenomenon. Some physical pain is simply the consequence of having a body that's made of flesh. All living creatures know pain. Those of us living with disabilities may know more than most" (Ghai, 1998, p. 36). As she put it her non-normative woman’s body was equally the source of delight and astonishment as of suffering and pain.  In the 2023 piece, she reiterated that feminists are unable to resonate with  the experiences of pain, breakdown, illness and uncertainty. ‘Re(writing ) the disabled body’ requires thinking about pain, vulnerability and suffering in order to subvert the idea of the normal body. In her last year she worked on a monograph as a Dalai Lama Fellow. Always in search of new journeys, she turned to the Buddhist thought of the Dalai Lama to explore how Disability Studies and Buddhism might be enriched by their shared ethic of interdependence, interdependence and compassion, all central to her understanding of disability. Her explorations notwithstanding, I see her as steadfast to her self description as a woman with visible disability and each new turn she took as a gesture to feminists for greater engagement.

References

Ghai, A. (2002).Disabled Women: An Excluded Agenda of Indian Feminism”. Hypatia, 17,3,49-66.

Ghai, A (2023). Disabled bodies, pain and the question of vulnerability. In Malhotra, M., Menon, K and Johri, R. (eds)The gendered body in South Asia. New Delhi. Routledge

Ghai, A. (2024). Facilitating the Conversation between Disability, Buddhist  Thought and Mind Training. Monograph submitted to the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama