Dialectics of impairment: historical anxieties in late-colonial Bengali fictional narratives on disability

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines a body of early twentieth-century Bengali fiction foregrounding persons marked as disabled (including people experiencing physical disability, learning disability and chronic illness). A number of Bengali short stories and novels offer embodied narratives, which consider the human body as a productive site of contest between the colonial social order, the attempt to impose Western modernity and indigenous consciousness. An emergent sense of cultural agency can be found to be claimed by people, whose physical and mental states deviate from codes of ‘normalcy’. These works unearth social discrimination based on the binary of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ under the converging rules of native feudalism and foreign colonialism. The treatment of corporeality in Bengali texts of the period from the 1930s to the 1950s cannot be fully grasped by applying the disability theories of the Global North. Rather these texts conflate multiple forms of marginalization of subject bodies to explore several socio-historical cross-sections and address the question of identity formation. This article rereads selected fiction on disability by Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–1956) and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971).