Interpreting Spiritual Identity and Self-Discovery in The Mahabharata through an Underlying Shadow of Disability: Seeking Pragmatics of Robert Mcruer’s Crip Theory.

Abstract

Both central and marginalised characters from The Mahabharata, like Arjuna, Shikhandi, Draupadi, Bhishma, Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Karna, Ekalavya, Dronacharya etc. are often limited to the interpretation of serving as a medium to the Kurukshetra War. Often the hermeneutics of narrating these characters as individuals, have been in ways, deferred or rather, overlooked. The postmodern eulogy of the meaning making process through the individualism, intersecting with the hegemonic connotations of social institutions, have rendered possibilities of redefining and relooking these archetypal stories in the light of individual conscience, imagined in the binary juxtaposition of ability and disability. The binary at the same time, gets deconstructed in critical evaluation of the same. McRuer’s theory of the crip, interprets and re-analyses the conundrum and reality of being disabled, which contrary to popular belief, is a production, a manufacture of the social institutions. Aid and ailment perhaps oscillate into one another, and the awakening of the Self measured against the dogmatic intervention of society is the birth of the rupture of the binary between ableism and disability. This paper seeks to understand some characters of the canonical Indian Epic, The Mahabharata through McRuer's study of disability. This paper also attempts to look into these characters beyond the paradigms of psychological and physical disability, and the way they have been narrated in the epic, in the collocation of a postmodern quandary. In addition, in the vision of McRuer’s theory, this paper will try to reread The Mahabharata in the interdisciplinary routes between Queerness and Disability.