6

Fitting In When Your Body Does Not

Young Girl Characters with Disabilities in Contemporary Indian English Fiction for Children

ANURIMA CHANDA

Introduction

A few years back, great furor was generated on social media over a chapter on “Major Social Problems in India” in a Class 12 Sociology school textbook from Maharashtra where, under the section “Dowry,” a separate case was made for “Ugliness,” which read:

If girl is ugly and handicapped, then it becomes very difficult for her to get married. To marry such girls bridegroom and his family demand more dowry. Parents of such girls become helpless and pay dowry as per the demands of bridegroom’s family. It leads to rise in the practice of dowry system.¹

While this case luckily got reported, numerous others stealthily continue to lie embedded in our culture and practices, generating stereotypical gender expectations regarding physical appearance among women that shape and manipulate their expectations of their bodies. Growing up in an environment surrounded with images that propagate the myth of the beautiful body is difficult enough for women in general, but for women with a disability, it is doubly tortuous. Research shows how girls with disabilities start experiencing a sense of shame toward their bodies from as early as late childhood and early adolescence, when the body becomes a principal site of individuation.² Guided by unattainable beauty standards laid down by society—thanks to the homogenizing effect of the “global beauty boom”³—contemporary women, especially those with disabilities, across cultures often internalize the belief that their impaired bodies are unfeminine and unattractive, which in turn has grave consequences on their development as healthy physical and sexual beings.

Against such a backdrop, the spate of a bunch of empowered girl characters with disabilities within Indian English children’s literature over the last couple of years who have taken upon themselves the task of flouting all bodily expectations has brought about a much-needed discursive change with regard to female embodiment. Under this new articulation, made possible by the new-realist shift that has been noticed within the genre from the late twentieth century onward, along with the advancement of disability activism, a space has been created where dominant discourses around the ideal body type can be challenged and healthier ways of engaging with human subjects can emerge. Through the exploration of two contemporary Indian English books for children centered on girl characters with disabilities—namely, Leela Gour Broome’s Flute in the Forest (FIF) (2010) and Devika Rangachari’s Queen of Ice (QOI) (2014, winner of the Neev Young Adult Book Award), this chapter shows how issues of physical appearance and sexual desirability as dictated by society can have debilitating effects on the developing selfhood of girls with disabilities and how such consciously woven narratives, which challenge problematic body norms, can go a long way in developing newer discourses of celebrating the body in its varied forms and shapes. The attempt here is to demonstrate how these critically unexplored texts do not shy away from displaying the impaired body but make their point by openly flaunting it, thereby subverting dominant standards through a carefully crafted oppositional gaze by bringing back the focus on the functionality of the body irrespective of its state or differences.

Women’s Body Aesthetics and the Case of Flute in the Forest and Queen of Ice

The standards of physical attractiveness and the ideal body vary both inter- as well as intraculturally and across time and space.⁴ Yet, with increased globalization, a general consensus seems to be forming throughout the globe about what is considered aesthetically pleasing. Interestingly enough, even though FIF and QOI are set in different fictional epochs, they still seem to be governed by this dominant beauty standard, perhaps hinting at how deeply ingrained the hegemony of a perfect body is and how little has changed within India. Tellingly, the two lead characters in these novels are female, a fact that proves the claim made by prominent body image scholars that women are more affected by the injunctions of such idealisms and tendencies.⁵ Such a body-driven idea of normative femininity, which glorifies an ideal physical type among women, is further backed by an evolutionary logic that almost unanimously abides with most patriarchal sociocultural constructs.⁶ As a result, the body as a site of identification for most women becomes dangerously entangled with goals prescribed by both patriarchy and a commodity culture, which in turn might not always align with their own sense of embodiment.

This pressure of fitting into the mold of the ideal body that plagues women across the globe is even more intense for women with physical disabilities. Fighting with both sexism and handicapism, women and girls with special abilities are doubly oppressed.⁷ Unfortunately, the struggles of women with physical disabilities often get subsumed within the larger discourse of disability studies, which tends to create a monolithic structure where “disability” and “gender” are treated as mutually exclusive. Specifically in India, where disability studies itself is at a very nascent stage, the general attitude has been to sweep everything under one fold, disregarding differences of kind or degree of impairment, the modes of adaptation to the impairment, and issues of rural-urban divide, class, caste, and gender.⁸

Isolating gender within disability studies, disability studies expert Anita Ghai writes, “In a culture where being a daughter is considered a curse, being a disabled daughter is a fate worse than death.”⁹ QOI echoes this sentiment by addressing conspiracy theories that do the rounds within the royal court when the titular character, Princess Didda of the Kingdom of Lohara from early medieval Kashmir, is not “stifled at birth for being a girl—and a deformed one at that.”¹⁰ Here, for being unable to fulfill the ritual value that only a son can within Hinduism, the princess is perhaps forgiven. What cannot be forgiven, however, is her disabled body, which makes her an “imperfect” offering in the institution of marriage. The price of her imperfection has to be borne by her family, primarily her father, who has to arrange for payments in kind to compensate for the supposed lack in his daughter with a disability. In the worst-case scenario, serious compromises have to be made in the choice of the groom irrespective of the daughter’s wishes. This is evident in the way Didda’s father justifies her marriage trade-off as “He gets Didda, I get a little land . . . after all, a cripple has no value.”¹¹ Despite such compensations and compromises, there is still a huge possibility that the daughter might never find a husband for herself, again proving the huge oppressions of patriarchal values on women who are differently abled.

Defined by their physical appearances and bombarded with images reflecting unattainable beauty standards all the time, women end up objectifying their own bodies and expose themselves to greater dangers of body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem. Unfortunately, it is not an easy cycle to break as such perceptions of the ideal body image are constantly “legitimized and reinforced by social institutions like family, and community and State mechanisms such as education, medicine and popular media.”¹² This gendered body, which is purportedly anomalous or differently abled, becomes the site of cultural production of identity through which oppressive cultural structures play out, forcing the woman to conform without any agency of her own. The woman ends up separating her body from her selfhood, giving rise to a skewed sense of identity that is not her own but one projected onto her by masculinist forces, leaving her with very little autonomy and agency over her own body. In this toxic ambit, where selfhood is mistakenly equated with the socially produced female body, any inability to fit in can have a damaging impact on the woman’s sense of self.

This is something that has been rampantly observed in women with physical disabilities, who are equally susceptible to the cultural expectations of body aesthetics as every other woman. Women with disabilities are denied even the little semblance of selfhood that is available to their able-bodied counterparts. Their “imperfect” bodies, which are unable to attain physical norms through regular self-fashioning, are not just considered unworthy of the male gaze but also subjected to unkind stares, which “turns the disabled object into a grotesque sight.”¹³ Both FIF and QOI strengthen this argument, where one of the protagonists seeks refuge in the depths of the forest and the other wields power as her defense mechanism against unkind stares and insulting attitudes. Both novels demonstrate how the impaired female body ends up distorting a woman’s own perceptions of embodiment, leaving her feeling unfeminine and unacceptable. Explaining this phenomenon, Nandini Ghosh appropriately notes, “Socialized into such patriarchal ideologies, disabled girls grow up feeling uncomfortable with their own bodies for being deficient and thus not beautiful.”¹⁴

With global standards of the physically perfect body assuming supremacy, Indian women with physical disability are finding it more and more difficult to fit in. Within this imagination, the ideal female body is one that lacks any extra fat; is tall and slim; has a tiny waist, an accentuated hip, fair skin, and long lustrous hair; and is young, fertile, and agile, among others. There is no focus on the health or functionality of the body as markers of its perfection, but rather an unnecessary fixation on qualities based on appearance alone. Most of the time, these aspirational qualities are completely divorced from a culture’s material reality, and the Indian obsession with fair skin or tall and slim bodies proves a case in point. When one adds the aspect of physical disability to this, compliance to these normative prototypes of femininity becomes even more difficult because individuals who are differently abled are often visibly different and even require accommodating devices like wheelchairs or crutches or have restricted physical movements or atypical body parts. This makes the woman with a disability grow up devaluing her impaired body, thereby voluntarily relegating herself to the margins of society, as is seen in Atiya Sardare, the protagonist of FIF, who prefers the wilderness over civilization.

While the process of internalizing gendered body norms starts early, it is mainly during adolescence that its effects are fully realized when an individual’s body starts undergoing changes. Medically and culturally, women become more concerned about their appearance and shape during this stage onward since appearance and desirability are considered integral to the process of female identity formation. As Nandini Ghosh attests, “Young girls internalise an image of the ideal body and the particular kind of physical beauty, notions of appropriate and acceptable feminine comportment as well as functional capacities that are desirable among women, through the verbal and visual messages projected by other women and the media.”¹⁵ The same is true for girls with disabilities, too, who are additionally made to realize their differences from their able-bodied peers and their inadequacy in competing at the same level as the latter—like Atiya, who is teased by her peers as “slow and dim,”¹⁶ and Didda, whose father desires “a strong, healthy son to his name . . . not a weakling girl who was lame.”¹⁷ Clearly, living with alternate body abilities is very hard for young women inhabiting cultures obsessed with ideal body aesthetics.

Adolescent Selfhood, Differently Abled Female Bodies, and Young Adult Literature

Girls with disabilities grow up more conscious of their impaired bodies and begin to view them as something deficient and in need of reconstruction.¹⁸ Their immediate reaction is to reduce the visual impact of the disabled body as much as possible, be it through surgery or use of material aids, which again amounts to surrendering to the standards of the perfect body. An example can be taken from Ghosh’s study of women with locomotor disabilities from West Bengal, India, where she mentions how one of her subjects chose to shift from frocks to long skirts to hide her calipers because it clashed with her idea of the “feminine self.”¹⁹ Despite such efforts, the girl with a disability cannot completely shake off the material reality of her impaired body, which becomes a prime marker in the path of her identity formation. This also means a general internalization of prejudices that “disabled women are ‘incomplete’ and hence do not require feminine adornments in terms of dress and ornamentation.”²⁰ Ghosh mentions how this leads to young girls downplaying their femininity by underdressing—wearing oversized clothes, using minimal makeup—to avoid taunts and stares from people who find it ridiculous to see a girl with a disability so dressed up.²¹

Unfortunately, for differently abled girls, families are not very supportive in most cases since they are conditioned by the same expectations of feminine body ideal as the society at large. That the pubertal process for girls with disabilities can be the same as that of any other person is looked upon suspiciously, even by mothers. Any delay in the onset of menstruation or the development of breasts is taken as a sign of their difference, making the girls feel less of a woman.²² The negation of their femininity as a result of an impaired body continues everywhere, including in matters of attracting a romantic partner. Since daughters with disabilities are viewed as desexed, family members feel they are less at risk from sexual predators than their able-bodied counterparts.²³ Naturally, this leaves them with greater risk of and susceptibility toward sexual harassment and violence. These girls also grow up with limited expectations about a “normal” marriage. Yet this does not save them from their responsibilities as women in protecting their reputations through the appropriate social behavior expected of women in general. Such contradictory negotiations with the self leave women who are differently abled uncomfortable in their own skin and with a highly undervalued sense of their own bodies.

This sense of normative femininity is constantly fed via popular media like television or magazine advertisements, popular soap operas or films, and billboards, among others. One among these myriad sources is young adult fiction. Officially categorized as a distinct genre since the 1960s, works of young adult fiction (specifically those targeted at young girls), with their focus on sexuality and sexual development (more often than not in the traditional sense), remain one of the prime sources of providing both information as well as reflection of such body angst among adolescent girls. Interestingly, at the time of the genre’s inception, sexuality was a complete taboo within the domain of children’s literature. By making sexuality its mainstay, young adult fiction managed to flout all such norms and create a liberal space. Yet, in the manner of the treatment of the subject, it fell back on conventional norms, emerging as sexually liberal but regressive in format, especially on the subject of body image. Within this representation, the ideal feminine body is always the one that fits the dominant patriarchal sociocultural expectations (based on global or Eurocentric formulations)—with insistence on thin bodies, curvaceous form, fair skin, long hair, moderately sized hips, large breasts, and feminine gait—and enormous cultural power is with those who possesses such a body. An example is Judy Blume’s Forever . . . (1975), which is touted as an iconic young adult fiction for breaking boundaries. And yet, Forever . . . , while openly talking about its protagonist’s discovery of sexual pleasure, is relatively understated on issues of body weight angst, which is equally embedded within the central narrative.

In India, too, where the idea of young adult fiction is a Western import, a similar tendency can be observed, especially in the case of fiction crafted in English. Although Indian young adult fiction generally follows the status quo even in its handling of sexual subjects when compared to its Western counterpart, on the issue of body image it is mainly regressive, if not worse. Over the last two decades, however, there has been a palpable change within Indian English young adult fiction in terms of challenging such hegemonic body representations by reimagining ways of resisting dominant societal norms, including that of gender. Unfortunately, the majority of works have still not found the adequate vocabulary for such narratives, either falling back on tried-and-tested means or setting up newer gender norms in the process of breaching older ones, thereby proving to be largely counterproductive. One can perhaps take the example of Balaji Venkataramanan’s Flat-Track Bullies (2013), which does a wonderful job of challenging class politics within Indian society but forgets to do the same while talking about gender. Through the eyes of an eleven-year-old male protagonist, Ravi, readers scan young girls under the lens of preexisting body norms and categorize them as beautiful for adhering to “film-star looks” with flowing hair, fair skin, and a sharp nose; as lucky for having a pretty face; but as inappropriate for wearing skimpy clothes.²⁴

While it is evident what effect this might have on a young adult female reader, it will understandably be doubly worse for a young adult female reader with a disability for whom body concerns and limitations are far greater than the former. This is not very shocking since, in reality, there are few Indian young adult works of fiction that are written with such a reader in mind. The adolescent girl with a disability is mostly pushed to the margin and is, in fact, on the receiving end of multiple marginalizations. Even in the rare instance when such a character is given center stage, primacy is given to generating a benevolent attitude toward her rather than her bodily struggles. Under such circumstances, texts like Broome’s FIF and Rangachari’s QOI bring in a fresh perspective by attempting the opposite. Not only do they interrogate in depth the challenges of living with an impaired body in a society that gives enormous preference to notions of bodily perfection and explore the problematics of such preferences, but they also try to subvert it through the oppositional gaze—to use the framework of a concept developed by bell hooks—by bringing back the focus on the functionality of the body irrespective of its appearance or form.

Alternate Embodiments / Alternate Beauties in Flute in the Forest and Queen of Ice

Leela Gour Broome’s Flute in the Forest is about thirteen-year-old Atiya, who lives with her father, a range forest officer in southern India. Her struggles begin at the age of five when she contracts polio, which leaves her with a weaker and shorter left leg. This results in a huge rift between her parents, causing her mother to leave and her father to immerse himself in work. Atiya is left with no other option but to learn how to take care of herself from a very young age. She grows up a loner, with a busy father, an absent mother, and classmates who make fun of her for being “slow and dim.”²⁵ In this situation, she finds a friend in the forest, where she often escapes alone to undertake short, secret treks on her own. In the course of these expeditions, Atiya crosses path with a sullen old anthropologist and music genius suffering from a degenerative disease (whom she nicknames Ogre Uncle); his daughter, Mishora (a Kurumba girl); and a rogue old elephant, Rangappa. All of them end up forming unlikely bonds with each other that help them self-heal from the various ordeals they are experiencing.

The book starts challenging body norms right at the outset starting with the mother-daughter duo. Sarojini, Atiya’s mother, is described as “beautiful” and “lissom”²⁶—attributes that make her husband, Ram Deva Sardare, besotted with her in the first place. Atiya, on the other hand, with her “short, straight, black hair and a high forehead,” is described to be a “bright young girl” but

far from good looking [since] her nose was way too long and pointed. Even her chin, was much too sharp in her bony face. She was a long, thin wisp of a girl—made for an athletic outdoor life, but was now trapped by her handicap. Even her ears, though small, stuck out at a ridiculous angle. People often wondered how such good-looking parents could have produced such an ugly child.²⁷

It is worth noting here that one of the basic premises that the gendered body norm discourse is based on, as Viren Swami’s “Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Appearance and Body Image” attests, is the fact that a beautiful, lithe female body is the harbinger of beautiful and healthy progeny. However, through the case of Atiya, Broome appears to subvert this structure by demonstrating the fallacy of such beliefs. Atiya is neither conventionally beautiful like her mother nor “healthy” (although her disability is not congenital). In addition, Atiya is “slow,” as rightly pointed out by her classmates, as anybody walking with a wooden stick is. Yet that does not make her any less “beautiful” or functional, as the world around her claims. Broome proves this not through words but through Atiya’s actions. After having delved in depth detailing each of her facial features through the usual societal “gaze,” the author spends the rest of the narrative repositioning the reader’s gaze so the reader becomes mindful of Atiya’s physical beauty not through pre-prejudiced lenses but through articulations where beauty and body functionality are redefined simply owing to their distinctness. What is more important is how, in this process, Broome does not shift the reader’s gaze onto the body to focus on some redemptive ability as a compensation for Atiya’s so-called lack. Instead, the novelist brings back the focus on Atiya’s body itself with all its distinctness as the protagonist limps her way through forests, enlivening the spirits of two old damaged souls (Ogre Uncle and Rangappa) around her. Atiya’s body movements are not graceful in the traditional sense here—“limping along on her strong foot, the other being a little shorter”²⁸—but that is also because of society’s tendency to regard grace through preset constraints. Atiya’s beauty, too, is not in tune with the dominant standards, but at the end, when she sits playing the flute with composure, she manages to “charm” a full audience, leaving them in “awestruck silence.”²⁹ By highlighting Atiya’s distinct attributes, both of her body and of her mind, the author successfully recrafts the narrative of the body beautiful for an adolescent girl.

The other gender construct that Broome challenges is that of motherhood. Women with disabilities, by virtue of their “imperfect” and hence desexed bodies, are often denied traditional roles assigned to all women (despite having to adhere to traditional female behavior perforce), like motherhood.³⁰ And when forced into such roles, women with alternate abilities experience a condition called “rolelessness,” according to Michele Fine and Adrienne Asch.³¹ In FIF, however, it is Sarojini who embraces such “rolelessness” by voluntarily rejecting the valorized role of a mother that had been conferred upon her by society and instead choosing a career as a dancer. It is her able-bodiedness that urges her to choose her passion over traditionally consigned roles, thereby reversing those very sociocultural norms that deny women with disabilities the right to even pursue the same. A similar analogy is true for romance/marriage as well in this context. Sardare’s love for his wife is solely described as being rooted in the charm of Sarojini’s physical beauty. Yet that does not stop them from parting ways, once again nullifying the romantic myth of an aesthetically pleasing woman’s eternally blessed marital life. Atiya, on the other hand, manages to find a much-healthier companion in Gopal, the son of Mrs. Naina Pillai, her new geography teacher in school. Although their companionship does not blossom into a conventional romance in the course of the novel, the author leaves us with a promise that in the future it may lead to a meaningful relationship. Their relationship is shown to be based on mutual interests and an easy understanding of each other’s aspirations. It does not require Atiya to charm him by converting her body image to something socially acceptable. Instead, we note how Gopal enjoys her company and says “wow!” in admiration to hear her perfectly imitate the Indian pitta bird’s two-note call.³² But at the same time, their bond is also not completely disengaged from physicality. They are shown to be extremely comfortable with each other’s bodies, be it spending time together in Atiya’s father’s forest lodge or hurriedly escaping after mistakenly entering a large animal’s cave during a secret trek, “holding tightly on to each other.”³³ Hence, if Atiya, with her so-called unattractive body, proves to be a nurturer to Ogre Uncle and Rangappa, with this same body she makes a loving companion for Gopal. And in both cases, her body crafts alternate definitions of aesthetic appeal.

A similar unravelling of the differently abled female body and the politics of embodiment surrounding it can be found in Devika Ranghachari’s historical fiction, Queen of Ice. The story revolves around Didda, princess of Lohara, who was born with a deformed leg and ruled Kashmir from 980/981–1003 C.E. in early medieval India.³⁴ It is interesting how Rangachari situates the narrative in ancient India when the stigma of any kind of body deformity—even in a royal princess, whose physical beauty is supposed to be her prime asset—would have been quite severe, not just for the individual who is differently abled but also for her family, especially if her father was the king. The fact that Didda actually grows up to be a conventional beauty with “big, dark eyes,” “long, curly hair that falls down to the waist,” a “wide brow with prominent cheekbones,” “thick, arched eyebrows,” a “nose . . . neither long nor short but . . . perfectly shaped with delicately-flared nostrils,” and a “pretty” mouth does not hold much meaning for the king.³⁵ For him, Didda’s disability becomes her chief defining feature owing to which he curses her for being “one who will never even use her skills to attract a good match.”³⁶ Fortunately, Didda is allowed to live because of a prophecy made by the royal astrologer about how she is destined for greatness. The way Didda achieves this greatness in the novel, not by becoming invisible but through an active engagement of her apparently desexed, lame body, is a remarkable feat that the narrative accomplishes. Notably, disability is equated with desexing of the body within the Indian psyche,³⁷ but in QOI Didda manages to topple and overcome the very sexist body norms that her father uses to curse her. Through this process, the narrative shows a way of reimagining female body image by factoring in differences instead of excluding all different or so-called anomalous bodies as misfits.

To strengthen this point, Rangachari populates the narrative with other “misfits,” one of them being Didda’s prime aide, Valga, whose job was to carry the princess around. An ordinary village girl and the eldest daughter born to a family of many sisters and one brother, Valga is disposed of to her aunt’s quarters in Lohara by her father to reduce the financial burden on the family, which has too many mouths to feed. Valga explains the reason why she is the one chosen to be cast out:

It wasn’t any surprise that my father had picked on me thus. I knew he had no affection for me, his eldest daughter. His eyes sparkled with derision and anger whenever they rested on me. Perhaps part of the reason was that my heavy features bore no semblance of beauty and he knew I would never make a good match. I am short and stout, my broad face unremarkable, my black hair hanging limply down my back. I do not have anything of my mother’s delicate beauty or my father’s chiselled features. The only remarkable thing about me is that I am very strong.³⁸

Strangely enough, it is her strength that helps Valga make “a good match”—a match to Didda. Disproving dominant patriarchal sociocultural norms that mandate marriage to be a woman’s ultimate match, Valga shows that matches can be of other kinds too by finding a match in Didda as a good friend and employer. Through this, Rangachari demonstrates how the imagination of the body ideal and its ultimate functionality can have multiple definitions, not one.

This is more evident in the case of Didda, who is ultimately married as a “trade-off” to Kshemagupta from the alien land of Kashmira. Tellingly, Kshe­magupta has a bad reputation due to his hedonistic lifestyle, but Didda is married to him because nobody notable wants to marry a crippled partner. Didda herself attests to this fact when she says, “Who would want to marry a lame woman, however beautiful she may be?”³⁹ Significantly, if we find Didda internalizing her alleged unattractiveness, we also find her comfortable enough in her alternate corporeality to find both love and acceptance. Hence, she subverts her physical limitations into empowerment when Kshemagupta falls in love with her and gives up all his truant ways to please her. Didda is convinced that her husband falls in love with her mainly because of his fascination with the way she talks, her questions, and her observations about stately affairs in general. However, Valga’s accounts of how Kshemagupta’s eyes light up in Didda’s presence, how he celebrates on knowing of her pregnancy, and how he indulges her materially, including minting coins in her name, seem to suggest that the love is not limited to Didda’s mind alone. In fact, Kshemagupta acknowledges as much himself when he proclaims, “I want our love to be known to all. . . . You are my life, Didda, my world.”⁴⁰ Like Broome, Rangachari also successfully reverses the gendered body politics through a multipronged understanding of the body ideal that is more inclusive of differences. Within this reimagination, Rangachari feels no need to substitute the body deficiencies with some compensatory quality. Indeed, she presents Didda as an astute and graceful person, yet she also highlights the innate beauty of the impaired body itself in all its divergences from the standard, thus showing us ways to reposition the normative gaze.

What is different in the two novels under study from other texts that center on females with disabilities is how they address the differently abled body. There is a general tendency within the discourse of disability to shift the gaze from the body to other abilities. While this is a well-meaning move made to turn the discourse more ableist than visual, it ends up falling into the same trap as that of standard body image discourse by negating the body and reinforcing the myth of the impaired body as the defective one. Within children’s literature, Zai Whitakar has labeled such practices as “the Taare Zameen Par phenomenon,”⁴¹ wherein writers get invested in making up for the disability with some special ability in the child to show how the measurement of merit can be multifaceted and how a so-called flaw may be compensated by a strength. This leads us to the question of what happens to those individuals who lack any other ability whatsoever. The problem with the aforementioned representational politics is that it tries to substitute one condition with the other and hence prompts an inevitable negation of at least one “flawed” parameter in individuals with disabilities. For the impaired female body, it is generally the body that gets cancelled out, or invisibilized,⁴² for being “inadequate.”⁴³ However, as the body is a special site of identity making for all women mainly because “they are more likely than men to be judged by their appearance and sexual appeal,”⁴⁴ such a simplistic this-for-that logic can never work as a permanent solution in matters concerning female body image politics.

The search for an alternative has to therefore begin from within the body and not irrespective of it. It has to begin on the premise that the body is the primary site of identity formation, and the need is to find ways to positively engage with the body in all its uniqueness instead of invisibilizing it. Such positive reimaginations of the body can begin not through a correction of the body but of the gaze, which is the prime determinant in how a body is viewed.⁴⁵ Given the patriarchal preponderance in the formulation of this gaze in the case of body image, one way ahead could be to balance it with the oppositional gaze. A concept developed by bell hooks, in the context of black female spectators, the oppositional gaze is based on the premise that “even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.”⁴⁶ Exploring the politics of the gaze, hooks notes how resistance begins not just in interrogating the dominant gaze but also in looking back with a critical consciousness. It is in these moments of “looking back,” when the viewee turns into the viewer, that the former can find ways of resistance by rejecting being identified by dominant modes of spectatorship as crafted by the latter.

The same can be applied to the present scenario for characters like Atiya and Didda, with a caveat. Seizing back the phallocentric dominant gaze for women with disabilities is not as simplistic as it may seem, as they themselves “become active producers of their bodies through internalization and pursuit of continually shifting ideals of femininity propagated by cultural and media images advocating self-containment, self-monitoring and self-normalization.”⁴⁷ They are not merely the objects but also the surveyors of their own bodies, which they view as “flawed” objects through the lens generated by the phallocentric norms of viewership. Against such a backdrop, the oppositional gaze can work only after a complete separation of the two gazes has been achieved. This will inevitably create a fresh platform where the body can take ownership of itself on its own terms and create newer imaginations of viewership that are more inclusive of different selfhoods, or, as Ghai would say, a space with “an active integration of differences among and within women.”⁴⁸

Conclusion: Celebrating the Body with Special Abilities

Broome’s and Rangachari’s texts attempt this “integration of differences” in their own way. Instead of cancelling out any gaze, they reposition it at certain angles to bring into focus issues that generally get overshadowed. Within this new frame, the disabled body gets presented as a sum of its parts and not separate from each other. The different parts, like the different fingers of our hands, are not of the same size, form, or strength. Yet, as FIF and QOI demonstrate, the important thing is not how different these fingers are but what they can do when they come together. Atiya’s short left leg or Didda’s deformed foot might slow down their movements as compared to others, but that does not keep them from reaching their destinations. Atiya still manages to travel from one end of the town to the other, be it for secret treks or pursuit of music, while overcoming her father’s grave displeasure. Didda, on her part, finds ways to maximize the functionality of her body through means of her own choice (like Valga, for one) and manages to combine it with her lethal diplomatic powers to ascend the throne of Kashmira in defiance of all gender norms of her time. Both Atiya and Didda then achieve extraordinary feats not through a negation of their bodies but through active engagement with their bodies, emanating a certain beauty that comes from being able to assert one’s own individuality in the face of opposition. Therein emerges the oppositional gaze that creates liberating ways of viewing the disabled female body not in its lack but in acceptance of its distinct functionality inclusive of differences.

NOTES

1. Panicker, “Higher Dowry.”

2. Ghosh, “Embodied Experiences,” 60.

3. Berry, Beauty Bias, 3; Liebelt, “Beauty and the Norm,” 1.

4. Berry, Beauty Bias, 3.

5. Tiggemann, “Sociocultural Perspectives,” 12.

6. Swami, “Evolutionary Perspectives.”

7. Ghai, “Disabled Women,” 52–57.

8. Ghai, 53.

9. Ghai, 53.

10. Rangachari, Queen of Ice, 3.

11. Rangachari, 29.

12. Ghosh, “Experiencing the Body,” 103.

13. Ghai, “Disabled Women,” 55.

14. Ghosh, “Experiencing the Body,” 105.

15. Ghosh, “Embodied Experiences,” 59.

16. Broome, Flute in the Forest, 1.

17. Rangachari, Queen of Ice, 4.

18. Ghosh, “Experiencing the Body,” 105.

19. Ghosh, 106.

20. Ghosh, 108.

21. Ghosh, 108.

22. Ghosh, “Embodied Experiences,” 60.

23. Ghosh, 62.

24. Venkataramanan, Flat-Track Bullies, 23, 119, 49.

25. Broome, Flute in the Forest, 1.

26. Broome, 5.

27. Broome, 9.

28. Broome, 2.

29. Broome, 191.

30. Ghai, “Disabled Women,” 54.

31. Fine and Asch, Women with Disabilities.

32. Broome, Flute in the Forest, 59.

33. Broome, 64.

34. Rangachari, Queen of Ice, 174.

35. Rangachari, 19.

36. Rangachari, 6.

37. Ghai, “Disabled Women,” 55.

38. Rangachari, Queen of Ice, 10.

39. Rangachari, 20.

40. Rangachari, 67.

41. Gopalakrishnan, “Children First.”

42. Ghai, “Disabled Women,” 56.

43. Ghosh, “Experiencing the Body,” 105.

44. Taub, Fanflik, and Mclorg, “Body Image among Women,” 160.

45. Ghosh, “Experiencing the Body,” 102.

46. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 116.

47. Ghosh, “Experiencing the Body,” 105.

48. Ghai, “Disabled Women,” 64.

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