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.