" Different Views from Different Windows ": Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow and the Literary Subversion of Ableist Disability Narratives

Abstract

Disabled people have relentlessly been spoken about, and persistently been denied the authority to speak for themselves. Historically, disability narratives have been shaped far more by the cultural assumptions of the non-disabled majority – addressing ableist anxieties, fascinations and need for resolutions- rather than the experiential truths of those whose bodies they purport to represent. Although Firdaus Kanga’s novel Trying to Grow has attracted sustained critical attention, it has predominantly been read through the hermeneutic lens of Parsi minority identity in postcolonial India. This paper validates that when read through the theoretical frameworks of critical disability studies, Kanga’s Trying to Grow enacts a far more sophisticated and subversive engagement with disability than the dominant allegorical reading has conventionally permitted. Trying to Grow portrays disability as a lived, embodied and politically charged experience, one that demands to be read on its own terms. This paper establishes that Trying to Grow stages a quadruple challenge to the interlocking discourses through which disability has been historically constructed, socially administered, and culturally normalised; and thereby dismantles the medical model of disability, the supercrip paradigm, the disempowering logic of care, and the desexualisation of disabled people.