M.Miles

Studying Responses to Disability in South Asian Histories
The initial motivation for studying responses to disabilities was to learn more about South Asian concepts of disability and the cultural baggage attached. There are, however, problems in trying to 'discover' the disability concepts of people long ago, especially those who spoke and thought in a variety of different languages. Fundamental concepts of fitness and unfitness, health and chronic infirmity, ability and lack of ability, are seldom subjected to analysis by ordinary people going about their daily business, or even by writers- such notions lie too deep for frequent review. One finds little direct discussion in Asian antiquity of the 'meaning of disability'. Further, some disabilities appear to be more universallycomprehensible than others- blindness, for example, presents problems of mobility and self-protection in practically any culture, whereas mental retardation is more obviously socially constructed and dependant uppn the sorts of local demands made upon intellectual and communicational abilities (Miles, 1992). The difficulties of investigation are compounded by cross-application of vocabulary. The inability to see physically is commonly used as a metaphor for spiritual blindness or foolishness, which may also be attributed to the inability or unwillingness to hear. This is so in modern Britain, and in the Indo-Aryan vocabulary back to antiquity. One cannot freeze and inspect language at a given period- so trying to 'understand South Asian historical concepts of disability' would mean comparing a muddle of current ideas in English with guesses at fragments of an ancient muddle. My ambitions in this direction had to be modified. (Disability and Society, Vol 16:1, 2001, 143-160)