Disability studies and the law: In conversation with Professor (Dr) Nilika Mehrotra

Abstract

The field of disability studies in India is fledgling, yet burgeoning. Professor (Dr) Nilika Mehrotra is an exemplary scholar from this field, who has played a pioneering role in situating the scholarship on persons with disabilities (PWDs) in a distinctly South Asian narrative. She has not only written extensively on the South Asian experience of disability but has brought together important scholarship by several academics in this area in a recent edited work. Her research on the intersectionality between gender and disability, as well as on the contribution of the state’s schemes on enhancing the rights of PWDs, has shaped the post-coloniality of the discipline in India. As an anthropologist, she has sought to place the experiences of the disabled at the heart of her theorisation, critiquing a top-down approach to representing disability. In this interview, she discusses the inherent interdisciplinarity of disability rights studies and the evolution of disability rights movements in India.