Honouring Professor Anita Ghai’s Legacy: Reflections by Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya

To cite this work: Bhattacharya, Tanmoy  (2025). Disability Dialogues — Honouring Professor Anita Ghai’s Legacy. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya, University of Delhi, tanmoy@linguistics.du.ac.in 

Tanmoy Bhattacharya is a professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Delhi, and guides research on Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Gender, Disability, Deaf Education, and Sign Linguistics . His latest forthcoming book is titled Centring Disability: An Epistemological Reversal. 

Disability Studies (DS) as a model cannot be bound up by a neatly drawn boundary, cordoning off all that is inside from anything outside of that boundary. If there is any certainty, it is the undeniable fluidity of the various boundaries we draw to maintain our power as knowledge experts; as a discipline it is made up of a cluster of ungovernable flows of knowledge from all directions related to our disabled being (Bhattacharya, 2026). The predominantly modernist framework of DS, therefore, has all the trappings of naturally making way for critical disability studies (CDS), calling for a nuanced approach to difference. However, this stance of preferring difference, endangers a crisis as disability politics becomes a casualty. In the Indian disability legislation history, therefore, measuring and quantifying standards like benchmark or long-term disability—however abominable—have been put in place since the 1990s as a result of rights-based disability politics. Notwithstanding the critical theorists' position on the instability of the boundary between the disabled–nondisabled, the call for identity politics attains priority over being overwhelmed by Deleuzean difference and variation. 

I've decided to fight my way out of the sudden block that your passing has caused, Anita, and I will do it by arguing against you, with you, on this point. Our constant dilemma was how and how much to accommodate of each other's ontological reality across the boundary of our disability–non-disability. We connected fully at some 'cloud' of an uncertain DS conceptualization—both though, wishing to overcome the burden of the model; my efforts at convincing you of the urgency of CDS nonetheless were always fended off with a series of buts. I now understand—and desperately wish to convey the same to you—this impasse. It landed us precisely at the most vulnerable point of CDS, namely, the absence of the possibility of disability politics—the general problem of the baggage of canons that CDS is born out of. Your buts make sense now, our discomfiture in arriving at a 'worldly' plane makes sense now. But don't you think we could have done better, Anita? 

We could have called upon the metaphor of overlapping layers within a difference to account for difference and variation. This, going beyond the framework of structural equality, circles us back to the early 1970s when UPIAS activists worried about legislation and constitutional provisions overshadowing grassroot work of groups advocating a more radical reorganisation of society (Antova, 2016). After half-a-century of disability activism, shouldn't we, on either side of the boundary, go beyond by reimagining the 'barriers of the mind'? We two could have launched DS 3.0, where disability politics thrives with postcoventionality; but suddenly, in the middle of a cold December night somewhere in western Delhi, a wheelchair toppled over for no reason, it seems; I am sure you fought and I am sure I turned in my sleep but somewhere far above us, a star twinkled for a reason.

References

Antova, I. (2016). The socialist tradition in the disability movement: Lessons for contemporary activists. Irish Marxists Review, 5(16), 65–69.  (https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/irishmr/vol05/no16/antova.pdf)

Bhattacharya, T. (2026) [Forthcoming]. Centring Disability: An Epistemological Reversal. New Delhi: Tulika Books. (https://shop.tulikabooks.in/authors/tanmoy-bhattacharya-6659b3aa8da7b)

(https://cup.columbia.edu/book/centring-disability/9788195839452/)