PurposeThis paper aims to trace Tata Group's role in responding to disability in the decades immediately following India's independence until the preliberalization period of the Indian economy, i.e. from the 1950s to the 1990s. Design/methodology/approachThis study's methodology entailed a historiographical approach and archival engagement at Tata Archives (Pune, India) of the company documents. Materials and records of the Tata Company between 1942 and 1992. FindingsAdopting the corporate culture lens, the study findings show that Tata Group demonstrated an active prosocial corporate approach toward disability. In a period governed by the ideology of a state-dominated developmental approach, Tata Group's initiatives were related to medical interventions for a wide spectrum of disabilities, rehabilitation and efforts to ensure persons with disabilities (PWDS)' livelihood. Originality/valueDisability, in the neoliberalized economic landscape of India, is an emergent business issue for companies espousing workplace diversity. The historical understanding of business engagement with disability from postindependence to liberalization in India remains, however, limited. In postindependence India, the passive business response to disability emerged within an ethical and discretionary framework, with charity and philanthropy as the main modes of engagement. In this background, this paper explores Tata's response to disability and PWDs, which was distinct.
Disability, CBR and Inclusive Development aims to enhance knowledge in the field of disability and inclusive development, addressing the needs of practitioners, policy makers, DPOs and the scientific community.
The neo-liberal discourse of rights focuses on rights-based legislations and empowers citizens to place claims on the state. The push toward a rights-based approach in India by disability activists sought to shift the underlying power dynamic between citizens and the state through legislation. However, such rights-based discourses underplay or negate intra-group power politics that influence claims to rights and entitlements. This paper attempts to explore the ways in which disability groups in India engaged with the concept of citizenship in the debates prior to the passage of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016. As citizenship creates whole categories of people who are subject to the government’s authority, an attempt will be made to see how actors within the rights movements interacted among themselves and with the state, to ensure welfare provisions as well as citizenship rights for different groups of people from different impairment categories.
This chapter looks at the ways in which the simultaneous experience of gender and disability influences the lives, of Bengali women and structures their daily lives to create uniquely gendered and disabled identities. Using a life cycle approach, the essay reveals the experiences of disabled Bengali women at different stages of their lives, such as childhood, adolescence and adulthood in their natal and affinal families. In Bengal, gender ideologies, developed and accepted by the upper middle classes during the Nationalist struggle, recast women as mothers, with the Nation being projected as a Mother to be obeyed, protected and revered. In Bengal there are two dominant representations of femininity for women to follow, one for young unmarried girls and the other for married women who are expected to model their lives on those of their mother or mother-in-law. This study is exploratory and has been conducted in the cultural context of Bengal concentrating on women with orthopaedic disabilities.
Intersectionality is primarily an organizing principle which calls for reflexivity in the study of social characteristics, such that one marginality is not substituted for another and lived experiences are not treated as generic and undifferentiated. Critiques of intersectionality have feared that intersectionality results in the fragmentation of the opposition to structural oppression. We argue for the potentialities of a reflexive use of intersectionality rather than its rejection, for this intersectionality has to be applied as a method of research. Lived experiences provide the possibility to explore how intersectionality works in practice. By mapping the fractured nature of the everyday, a lived-experience approach allows us to be open to competing interpretations, thereby not only illustrating the multi-dimensionality of what is constructed as hegemonic fact, but also can in fact script some resistance to it. Consequently, this article thus argues in addition in favor of a radical intersectional praxis as a means of building coalitions across marginalities.
This essay analyzes the stakes involved when a movement claims to be “cross-disability” in India. Activists, disabled peoples’ organizations, and non-governmental organizations devoted to disability often claim that their work and focus is “cross-disability” and that all categories of disability are included within their purview. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with various disability organizations and disabled people in India between 2008–2017, we argue that the “cross-disability” category obscures tensions that exist between different categories of disability, while benefiting the state and civil society. Moreover, performing representation results in fragmentation as different groups lobby for their own interests. We analyze the social and political work that the categories “cross-disability” and “disability” do in everyday worlds in India and analyze new forms of disability inclusions and exclusions that have emerged in the aftermath of a 2016 disability law.
Intersectionality is primarily an organizing principle which calls for reflexivity in the study of social characteristics, such that one marginality is not substituted for another and lived experiences are not treated as generic and undifferentiated. Critiques of intersectionality have feared that intersectionality results in the fragmentation of the opposition to structural oppression. We argue for the potentialities of a reflexive use of intersectionality rather than its rejection, for this intersectionality has to be applied as a method of research. Lived experiences provide the possibility to explore how intersectionality works in practice. By mapping the fractured nature of the everyday, a lived-experience approach allows us to be open to competing interpretations, thereby not only illustrating the multi-dimensionality of what is constructed as hegemonic fact, but also can in fact script some resistance to it. Consequently, this article thus argues in addition in favor of a radical intersectional praxis as a means of building coalitions across marginalities.
Bodies marked by caste, gender and disability are devalued and excluded from the dominant discourses and practices. Discourses, that construct and replicate social power and hierarchies, use gender, caste and ableist ideologies to proscribe and limit disabled women's access to work. The cultural representations, social processes and institutions that determine the creation and reproduction of gender and disability in everyday socio-cultural practices are affected by the caste locations of the people in a particular context. This chapter examines how caste interacts with gender-disability identities to determine access to work for disabled Dalit women across the country. Using Census of India 2011 data, the chapter attempts to understand the larger participation of women with disabilities in the workforce, which challenges the prevalent ideologies of incapability and dependency. This participation in and experience of paid work, which affects their life chances, the choices available to them and the ways in which they are able to make use of the multiple status positions they occupy, are illustrated by qualitative case studies that explore the ways in which gendered experiences of caste and impairment influence the work lives of disabled women in both rural and urban contexts.
The notion of care often normalizes within it violence that can have devastating effects on the lives of disabled people. Cripping care critiques the normalization of such notions of care. This paper articulates this paradox of care within the lived experiences of disabled girls and their mothers as primary carers. Through extensive case studies of young, disabled girls and their carers in villages of West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Odisha in India—where abject poverty, lack of resources, and a dearth of sensitized social relationships remain entrenched—this paper problematizes care relationships, moving beyond social model approaches to include understandings from the Global South of what it might mean to crip care. The paper explores care relationships within the family, which valorize the emotional and physical labor of women in the garb of motherhood while negating the personhood of disabled daughters. While the care relationship between mother and daughter is enhanced by the affective bonds of empathy, emotional responsiveness, and perceptual attentiveness that transform intimate tasks into relationships of trust and demonstrations of trustworthiness, in the unforgiving realities of rural poverty in India the collective act of survival of such families needs to be contextualized within the debates about cripping care.
This paper explores the lived experiences of women with locomotor impairments in the cultural context of Bengal in India and elaborates the ways in which women with disabilities construct their selves, negotiate their identities and live their lives in adherence with, redefining or subverting the accepted ideas of femininity and ability. An embodiment that is shaped by an impaired female body coupled with the sociocultural valuation of a disabled person as well as of the different social roles a woman plays greatly influences the way in which disabled femininity is constructed, nurtured and contested. This paper illuminates and illustrates the ways in which disabled women strive towards normative femininity, despite facing negation and denial of the sexuality in the form of suppression within the household to stigmatizing encounters in the public sphere. Disabled women also redefine, the ideal of a bhalo meye in the different domains of their daily lives, whether in the private realms of their homes and personal processes or in the public sphere.
The academic discipline of disability studies resulted in the establishment of a new paradigm, with Western scholars problematizing disability as discrimination rooted in personal, interpersonal and institutional processes of exclusion and oppression, which is endemic to any society. Theoretical approaches to disability have engaged in critically unpacking structures of categorical exclusion in the form of ableism, normalcy and construction of disabled people as the other. Thus, interdisciplinary disability studies continuously attempts to unravel different ways in which disability is conceptualized and its impact on the daily lived experiences of disabled people at the community level. The introduction to this volume endeavours to lay out the debates around disability and the ways in which disability studies as an academic discipline have addressed the concerns of disabled people. Further the chapter tries to weave together the papers in this volume by examining the relevance of the Western perspectives on disability in contextualizing the concept of disability from the vantage point of social, cultural, political and legal discourses in India that have an impact on the way in which disability is defined, interpreted and experienced.
Social movements are conscious, collective, concerted and sustained efforts by broad social alliances of people connected through their shared interest in affecting social change. Over the past few years, alliances of persons with disabilities, termed Disabled People's Organizations (DPOs), are being forged at local levels in order to initiate localized disability advocacy struggles in various parts of India, and also in order to bring about a perceptible change in the status of disabled people. Such DPOs are formed on the basis of a collective identity for all persons with disability and are organized on the lines of self-help groups (SHGs) by local NGOs, either working on disability-specific issues or on general community issues. This chapter explores the formation and genesis of such DPOs in different parts of India and the processes whereby these groups have engaged with the goals they were set up for. The chapter attempts to assess the extent to which these groups have been able to achieve a movement for change of social attitudes at the grass-roots level and the resultant effect it has on their identities. The engagement with social movement processes has also revealed and crystallized divisions within the DPOs themselves, with internal power struggles and dynamics influencing the outcomes of their achievements.
