Representation of Disability in Literature and Culture

Description

The Immediate Impetus for this book is the incorporation of disability as a focus of study in the English Studies curriculum at the University of Delhi in the last few years, a phenomenal development as engagement with marginalized perspectives shaped by gender, race, class, caste, and sexuality, and more recently, disability, and old age is what students need to get sensitized. Prof Banibrata Mahanta in the ‘Foreword’ quite appropriately suggests that this “has also engendered a broader understanding of textually, one that encompasses popular culture, everyday experience, as well as non-normative identities,” which are nonetheless vital to understanding the cultural production. Moreover, the enlargement of the scope of the discipline has made it more interdisciplinary and inclusive by enabling students as well as scholars to use their critical apparatuses to interrogate dominant narratives and engage with diverse forms of knowledge and expression. He hopes the conscious inclusion of the discipline in English curriculum will contribute to building a more equitable intellectual landscape. It is this incipient constituency that the present collection of essays addresses. Most importantly he exhorts the readers through these words, “It is not just a collection of essays; it is an invitation to think differently about body, norm, and narrative. It is also a reminder that critical engagement with disability is necessary for any serious inquiry into culture, justice, and care. The essays in this volume take up such gestures of presence-across stories, films, and bodies—to offer a powerful reimagining of disability as diversity hoping readers to ponder over and assist in making an equitable society for all.”

Prerana Sinha has been working as an English Faculty at ARSD College for more than two decades and has published her book The Suitable Writer: A Critical Study, while another book, Critical Essays on Indian English Writings: Lensing the Postcolonial Literary Praxis has just got published in February 2026. She has published widely on several Diaspora writers and on Disability literature, Ecology, Partition and Dalit Literature that have got featured in national, international books/journals. Her another book on Ecological Sustainability is forthcoming. After seeing Disability Studies in English curriculum, she felt an urge to bring out a book on this very important subject to sensitize students and scholars.

Indrani Das Gupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi. She completed her doctoral research in the field of Indian Science Fiction from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis focuses on re-examining the construct of science fiction at the intersection of colonial, postcolonial, techno scientific advances, gender, ecological consciousness and Print Culture in urban modern India to identify the nature and value of Indian Science Fiction. Her recent articles have been published in Routledge, Bloomsbury and Macmillan which includes a co-edited book on Gandhi (Routledge, New York) and chapters on Bollywood dance, Rudyard Kipling. Ecoparity and Indian Science Fiction, also published in Routledge, New York and Bloomsbury, London. Her research interests are varied which also include Popular Culture, Genre Studies, Sports Studies, Cultural Studies, Postomodernism and Film Studies.