Committee:

Gyan Prakash, co-adviser
Regina Kunzel, co-adviser, Yale University
Divya Cherian
Aparna Nair, University of Toronto

Abstract:

This dissertation offers a transnational genealogy of the concept of “disability” through the lens of Indian colonial and postcolonial history between the 1920s and the 1980s. Situating “disability” as a historically contingent, politically charged, and flexibly deployed category, it examines the ways that colonial administrators, postcolonial nationalists, and international aid groups deployed the figure of the disabled body to claim moral authority for varied political projects. Bridging critical disability studies with South Asian historiography, the dissertation deploys two interlinked methodological frameworks: it “crips” decoloniality to examine the limits of symbolic politics unmoored from embodied realities and “provincializes” disability to challenge the presumed Western origins of modern disability discourse. In doing so, it recasts the disabled body not as a marginal subject but as central to the moral, political, and developmental logics of the Indian nation-state.

Drawing on multilingual archival research from India, the UK, the US, and international organizations such as the UN, this project examines four central sites: leprosy and its spectacularization under colonial and nationalist regimes; physical culture and fitness as curative discourses; prosthetics and vocational training as tools of postcolonial economic rehabilitation; and India’s leadership in global disability policy during the Cold War. Across these sites, disability emerges as a category indelibly co-constituted by caste and gender. It introduces the postcolonial Indian legal and welfare concept of “social disability” to unseat the dominant genealogical paradigms of disability rights and in the field of disability studies.

By documenting the concept history of disability as it moves through humanitarian, developmental, and welfare institutions, this dissertation argues that postcolonial India was not a passive recipient of Western disability archetypes but an active site of their transformation. It challenges both ethnonationalist and liberal-progressive invocations of “indigenous” and “decolonial” care, foregrounding instead the complex historical processes that naturalized and politicized bodily difference. Ultimately, this work reframes disability as a central category in postcolonial histories of imperialism, nationalism, state-making, and development, while also challenging ahistorical assumptions of both Western universalism and cultural alterity in global disability discourse.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.