Personal reflections on Professor Anita Ghai by Prof Dan Goodley

To cite this work: Goodley, Dan (2025). Personal reflections on Professor Anita Ghai. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Dan Goodley is Professor of Disability Studies and Education and PI of the Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award Disability Matters:; a project that never would have been funded without the collaboration of the late great Professor Anita Ghai.

Personal reflections on Professor Anita Ghai

What to say about a friend? 

What to say about a luminary? 

What to say about someone you admired from afar who became, in time, a dear friend?

I knew Anita before I met her. 

I knew her through her writing. 
Meeting her in the flesh was a true fan-boy moment. 

The Anita Ghai. 

In Manchester! When she visited us at Manchester Metropolitan University, my old alma mater. 

To move from the textual Ghai to the embodied Ghai was such a joy.

They say - never meet your idols - this was not the case with Anita.

She was and remains a powerhouse. 

She was charismatic.

Wise but irreverent.

She could charm and trouble in the very same moment.

She was not one for easy frivolous talk.

She was quick to tell you when she disagreed.

The world was and is serious.

Disablement was and is serious. 

Disability studies was and is serious.

But life is also creative and joyful.

Anita was a scream. 

She had an infectious laugh. 
She enjoyed people, food, and conversation.

She was a gossip; in the best sense of the word.

She enjoyed sharing tales of those most human of moments: those times when different souls collided and connected with one another.

Once, I think I saw her at her happiest.

During her Manchester trip, she’d insisted that we visit the Old Trafford Cricket Ground.

We drove there. 

She got out of our car and positioned herself by the entrance of the ground.

I thought the floodlights were on. 

But it was actually her beaming smile.

She never truly understood online meetings.

I was often subjected to a view of her ceiling rather than her face.

She was as likely to join you online from a driving car as she was from a quiet room.

Things were never boring with her.

And I things were never boring to her.

She was a furious reader.

And the most skilled synthesiser of ideas.

Anita’s intellectual framings reflected a smorgasbord of critical psychological, feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, postcolonial and of course disability studies theories. 

She was unique in her contributions to critical disability studies.

She could speak of the psyche and society together in one carefully crafted spoken sentence.

She could hold Spivak and Freud in her hands as equal partners.

She was a true critical psychologist.

And she always centered India in her work.
Her ambivalence with Indian culture, society and history was truly psychoanalytically driven: she desired India just as much as some of its disablist elements repulsed her.

She taught us all to be ambivalent with our national locations.
Take, for example, page 15 of Ghai’s  (2007) (Dis)embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women.

'It was not too difficult for me to understand that socially, disability is represented as a deficiency that becomes the defining characteristic of the person and is accounted for mostly in terms of a medicalised biography. Constituted as being profoundly 'Other' disability symbolically represents lack, tragic loss, dependency and abnormality. It is true that all of us begin life in a completely dependent state, often undergoing experiences of shame and loss. This comprehension however is moderated by the recognition that human minds and bodies are always in transition, moving from an incomplete, imperfect, and vulnerable existence to a relatively autonomous existence, (Winnicot, 1965). The possibility of this movement, however, is not accorded to the disabled as it is believed that she/he does not have to deal with the vulnerabilities or lack, unlike the whole person who has to come to terms with it and therefore suffers more There is thus a refusal by the able-bodied society to recognise that the impaired human being is different but not deficient.'


I could go on.

And we all will go on.

Sitting with these textual treasures.

Sitting with Professor Ghai.

In the early months of putting together the Disability Matters programme I knew I needed to work with Anita and India.

For me, India and Anita were inseparable.

I arranged some meetings to discuss the proposal.

I got her to email me parts of her CV so that I could add them to the proposal.

There is not doubt that having her on board helped to convince Wellcome that we were worthy of funding.

And she was keen to bring in this new scholar that she raved about - Sandeep Singh - and through Anita I’ve had the pleasure to come to know.

I know that Sandeep and other close colleagues are missing Anita. 

I know we are all missing her.

My last time of being in the flesh with Anita was in Delhi with Sandeep.

We met outside the India International Centre just off Lodhi Gardens in Delhi.

Typically Anita was dressed with style and colour.

As we made our way to lunch she was open with her feelings.

She was frustrated to be retiring from the university. 

She felt her retirement had come too soon.

She had lots more to say.

And lots more to write.

For her to pass so soon into her retirement is a tragedy.

But tragedy is a word with a long negative disabling legacy.

And Anita very much wrote against a tragedy model of disability and of life. 

So I will not think of her passing as a tragedy but as a moment to connect with one another.

Let us think together with Anita.

She is still here in our memories.

And she will linger for a long time in our world through our writing. 

References

Ghai, A. (2007). (Dis)embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women. Delhi:  Har Anand Publications.