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Re-thinking the Narratives of Disability: A Reading of the Panels of Sriram Jagannathan’s MAI - Jhilam Ganguly & Prof. Manish Shrivastava

 


RE-THINKING THE NARRATIVES OF DISABILITY: A READING OF THE PANELS OF SRIRAM JAGANNATHAN’S MAI

Jhilam Ganguly

PhD Research Scholar,

Department of English and Foreign Language

Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya (Central University),

Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India

&

Prof. Manish Shrivastava

Professor

Dept of English & Foreign Languages
Director,

Centre For Open & Distance Education
Former Registrar
Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya
(A Central University)

Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India

 

Abstract:

Resonant with a plethora of such prefixes as ‘dis’, ’un’, ‘in’, ‘im’, ‘non’, the wordbook of disability studies strums a negative notation to conjure up a very careful image of lack, loss and failure to fleece a profile off the symptomatic attributes of ‘ableism’. This article proposes to dissect the oft-pliant, oft-hostile public sentiments perpetrated to a disabled body puncturing the organic agency it is bestowed with. Based on a real incident with one Malvika Iyer at the centre, Sriram ventures to dovetail the magnitude of adversities weighing heavy on the then thirteenyears old girl, who survived a grenade blast to live with both of her hands amputated for the rest of her life. A jocund tale of resilience wiping the oozing pus of disability, MAI renders a graphic treatment of the story, thus swelling the piquancy and poignancy of the receiving end, whose despondency is redoubled with a string of the syndromes of ‘otherhood’ –born in a South Asian (erstwhile) colony as well as a ‘disabled’ identity ‘caged’ in a woman’s body. Moreover, the proposed study intends to perpetrate into the struggling lot of Indian graphic novels to find a niche of its own in the related cultural map, which is under the sway of Manga Mania, Franco-Belgian renditions and American counterparts. Therefore, the pivotal question that the study purports to raise and respond to accordingly is how far the aforementioned syndromes of ‘otherhood’, that are globally interpreted as serious drawbacks, actually threaten the victims and how far they are just politically detailed agenda to enforce the rubrics of ableism and power-centricism. 

Keywords: Disability Studies, Ableism, Indian Graphic novel, Identity, Agency, Otherhood, Manga Mania

 ‘Dear Malvika,

                                                                             God bless you.

        I would like to explain an incident which took place in Rashtrapati Bhavan. On 27th November 2003. I met about 1000 differently challenged children, who were taking part in the Abilympics. They were extremely enthusiastic to visit Rashtrapati Bhavan and the environment gave them happiness. To that gathering, I recited a small poem, which runs like this:

          We are all God's children,

          Our minds are stronger than diamond.

          We will win, win, win with our mighty will.

          God is with us who can be against!(Jagannathan 100)

On hearing this, a boy from Iran by name Mustafa came to me, who didn't have both legs and was fitted with artificial limbs. He thrust a paper in my hand. He had written a beautiful poem titled "Courage", in Persian language. It reads like this:

Courage

I don't have legs.

My mind says: Don't weep, don't weep

For, I need not bow even in front of a King.

          I was really moved by the positive thinking of that boy. It shows his courage to face the life with optimism. I wish all of you to carry this message to make your life meaningful.

                                                                                                                        A.P.J Abdul Kalam

                                                                                                                          15/6/04’(Jagannathan 100)

This constitutes the penultimate page of the book preceded by a graphical rendering of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The juxtaposition of the two poems, which are totally incompatible in nature, in the same note of greeting brings in the sensitive issue of marginalization in terms of language. Dr. Kalam somehow admits that he made a very humble effort to encourage the differently abled children congregated to hear from him; but that effort was tainted by divine intervention being incurred as a fundamental agenda to get those bloomed. The Persian poem ‘Courage’, on the contrary, resonates grit and determination of a much higher scale, even more than those to be found among the able bodies i.e. the majority, who commonly love to stoop before the king, pun intended. Therefore, the segment undoubtedly challenges the very common practice of relaxing the contours of disability by associating it with the divine and divinity, where there is no such need to seek the divine in a differently abled person. The biggest scar, in this respect, perhaps is the Indian word ‘divyang’ (divya + ang), which not only reinforces the divine connotation, but also locates disability externally or physically, and therefore is limited as it discriminates and does not embrace other non-physical manifestations of disability (to say for instance, mental or cognitive disability). Therefore, the lexicon of socially acceptable language should be woven with great care that does not discriminate on the ground of a bundle of social identifiers, which in turn include ability as a major prerequisite. Disability is traditionally seen as a shortcoming, a void, punctured with the sentiment of lack, and even taking away. The language in use, if studied penetratively, is largely ableist. Ableism is a word which is used to describe the oft-judicial attitude and discriminatory behaviours towards people with disability. Moreover, the interpretation of ableism hinges its thrust on one’s understanding of rights, benefits and functions afforded to and by people who are deemed to be normal.

Words pertaining to the attributes of disability are highly subjective as well. They are latent with innuendoes, tones and textures which attempt to hide the excessive baggage in the form of feelings and biases. However, they unknowingly highlight the hierarchical equations that underline the difference in skills and ability. For example, words like victim, abnormal, defective, infirm, invalid, unsound, moron; expressions like lame logic, blind folded and even Bangla expressions like thuntojagannath(for a person with amputated hands), andher ki ba din ki baraat (for a blind person’s inability) reflect stereotypical social perceptions.

Malvika, a jovial child of 13 years from Bikaner, meets a severe accident while playing with a grenade mistaken for a hammer with a purely innocuous and unadulterated intention to fix the torn pocket of her favourite pair of jeans. A child of 13 years, still unaware of the gendered complexities constructed by the society, learns so and so once she comes back to her senses having survived the ghastly incident. She undergoes a series of surgeries and medical procedures from amputation to intermittent skin grafting across the whole body for months together. Hands amputated and legs broken to pieces, Malvika’s movements are restricted often spiralling her into depression. The negative emotions are only bolstered with her every visit to the hospital for a check-up. A little soul, stuck to the wheelchair, becomes the objective of inquisitive eyes around the hospital periphery. ‘There, that’s the girl I told you about…’, ‘Oh my God! What happened to her?’, ‘…Oh poor girl, who is going to marry her?...(Jagannathan 71)these are the words floating in the air that bothered the whole family to withdraw themselves from the external world. The girl of such a tender age, who acquires accidental disability during the course of her life, starts to pull such untoward sympathies as she would be further receded onto the disadvantageous end in the marriage market.

One of the most popular approaches in the western epistemology is the model approach in the perspectivization and narrativization of disability experiences against the transitional tract starting with the religious/moral model through the medical model to the social model. Incorporating this western approach to read a similar issue in an Indian situation is in no way intended to homogenize the socio-economically dividend nature of experiences, nevertheless this indeed is a useful framework to dissect the cacophony of disparate yet traumatic experiences traversing the chronotope. What should be noted is that the models do operate on the basis of two distinguished paradigms: the first of which sees disability as the unfortunate other or the passive recipient of what the society ordains for them; and the other, if the disabled persons have the agency to negotiate what the society has to offer. Chronologically speaking, religious/moral model being the oldest vector, goes all the way back to the Greeko-Roman times or a pre-vedic/vedic era to look upon disability as sheer misfortune, begotten out of the sins committed by the predecessors or predilection for evils, and thus a token of shame for the individual as well as the lineage. Arguably, at times, it was and still is romanticized as an attribute of being God’s chosen one. In either case, therefore, the disabled person is robbed off the selfhood. While there should have been no discomfort as such with the ingress of medicine into the ambit of disability, the medical model diagnosed only the physical or cognitive deficiency to be addressed immediately, this too at a very individual level, which had nothing to do with the social position or geographical location of the same self. This again led to an institutionalization of normalcy, where ‘normal’ itself has a rather disturbing history having etymological debts to the word norm. This scientific approach failed terribly to lessen the chances of ostracization. Social model gathered momentum in recent years, in which the very genuine necessities and civil rights of the disabled people took over the sway to substitute the hollow sympathies and charities offered by the society at large, regulated by an overpoweringly majoritarian consensus. Though any of the models is not without minor to major drawbacks, Mai’s case, as received by the society, initially falls under the previous two models, especially, the medical one. However, the onus falls on Mai herself, who extends a report card of her secondary examination to the sympathizers consisting of record-breaking score in almost every subject after a preparation of meager four months, and finally the degree certificate recording her PhD.

The practice of storytelling translocating fairytales, folklores and myths down the generations is always littered with a dirty representation of the disabled bodies – pious princesses abducted by limping demons to expected queens poisoned by hunchbacked elderly maids. Political caricatures, an essential component for the forwarding of civilization, have thoroughly been projecting the targets as having a physical unusualness: none can forget George Cruikshank’s depiction of George IV, obese and with gout-swollen legs and crutches. Comics or graphic narratives are all the more potential a medium to communicate the coarseness of a culture insensitive to disability by its politics of representation: ‘…comics are by their nature concerned with and bound up in the politics of representation by way of the normalizing or oppressive stare of their implied readers’ (Foss 4), observes Chris Foss. Ailment and Illness narratives indeed appeal to the hearts, but the speech balloons or thought bubbles voicing the sounds, noises and moans elongate the effect of the struggles empanelled.

Whereas a random use of the term ‘comics’ is always challenged by the connotation of childish impishness, and thus unapologetically considered to be unsuitable for serious academic amity, the genre has received a mighty jerk worldwide since the latter half of the preceding century. India is no less fertile a land to have cultivated the offshoots of ‘comics’ across regional as well as national avenues. Though the dichotomous yet complementary equation between the two alternatively functional terminologies(comics and graphic narrative)demands arguments for pages, the present study would hinge its emphasis entirely on the edges of the format(under either of the nomenclatures)  to render the wholesome impact of a piece of art all the more sound. If investigated, the seminal stage of the development of comics used to be regulated to a great extent by the necessity to posit a rejoinder to the mindless whims of the status quo across the globe. Noted Bengali political cartoonists as Prannath Datta, Gaganendranath Tagore and Binay Basu took recourse to the genre under discussion as a fecund soil to till the seeds of self-esteem to be swallowed by the imitative, pretentious, anglophile babu class in late colonial Bengal. Moreover, it was the pursuit of a couple of Bengali cartoon magazines like Harbola Bhar (begun in 1873) and Basantak (begun in 1874) that the ‘cartoon’ attained a cult status by embracing such stuff as wit, farce, caricature, satire, parody and above all, literary imagination. However, the line of comics eventually shrugged off the fundamental drive of an indoctrinated cultural/political agenda; and flourished as a clatter to punctuate the existing intellectual data base.

Works Cited

 

Dashgupta, Shubhendu. Cartoon Katha.Cartoon Dal, 2022.

Eisner, Will.Comics and Sequential Art. W. W. Norton & Company, 1985.

Foss, Chris. Comics Studies: A Guidebook. Routledge, 2014.

Foss, Chris, et al. Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives.Routledge, 2020.

Mahanta, Banibrata. Disability Studies: An Introduction.Yking Books, 2017.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1994.

Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. Routledge, 2016.