The Other(ized) Side of Darkness: Locating the Nuances of Disability in Tagore’s “Drishtidaan”

Abstract

Tagore's early twentieth-century work, “Drishtidaan” (1898), from his short story collection Golpo Guchcha (1926) attempts to grapple with the issue of disability, as an interesting shift in focus, while recent postcolonial and postmodern discourses have emphasised marginalised aspects of existence such as the third world, queer communities, poverty, and tribal cultures. Tagore makes use of the narrative to locate "disability" in a manner similar to that of contemporary disability theorists, asserting that it exists at the point where individuals and socio-cultural surroundings interact. Irrespective of that radical reading, one might assess that by portraying Kumu, the blind protagonist, as an idealised representation of suffering femininity, Tagore, to some extent seems to be conforming to the historical tendency in literature to devalue individuals with "disabilities". Keeping that question in focus, this paper tries to look for the reason for this reductionist interpretation of the woman with "disability".