Scripting Disability as the ‘New’ Bollywood: Pitching, reflecting, researching and negotiating

Abstract

In this article, I explore the role of screenwriters and dialogue writers within the more extensive filmmaking process of New Bollywood. Drawing on ethnographic data, I foreground the creative tools, research and negotiations that prompt screenwriters to conceptualise and pitch character arcs that feature disability while positioning the writer as central to diversify film genres. By building on scholarship on production cultures, scripting and disability studies, I draw upon factors that navigate the writer’s gaze from non-hereditary filmmaking networks to foreground disabilities in scripts and character arcs in efforts to strategise that they do not classify as reductive pathologisations and supercripping cultures. This article pays close attention to the conditions, identity politics, biases and situated vulnerabilities of writers that shape the assemblages of scripting disability rhetorics. The data from semi-structured interviews, with an explicit focus on three films and their script ideation and production pedagogies, illustrate these interlinkages and insights.