South Asian Disability and Deaf Theatres

South Asian Disability and Deaf Theatres investigates translocal intimacies in relation to twenty-first-century transnational South Asian disability theatres in order to lay out new possibilities for accessible theatres.

The book provides a theoretical and methodological framework for thinking through the relationships between disability, translocal intimacies, and visceral ethnography. It presents new and innovative approaches to rethinking bodily, cultural, spatial, and performance practices in relation to disability and disability rights that cut across national, sociocultural, and artistic boundaries. The author presents a consideration of some of India’s specific theatre examples such as Mahesh Dattani’s Tara; Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest; Shyambazar Blind Opera House’s Brihannala; Jana Sanskriti’s The Wasteland: A Journey; and First Drop Change Foundation’s Playback Theatre. Through analyses of specific performances and theatre groups and theoretical explorations of visceral ethnography, disability theatres’ decolonising initiatives, and disability as method, this book furthers the project of creating the conditions for a radically accessible and open-door theatre for both the present and the future.

The first book to cover theatre and Disability Studies in India, it shows that disability literature and theatres assist in delineating ways of reworking the politics of intimacy and belonging within and across differences. The book makes an important contribution to the broad field of theatre, performance and Disability Studies as well as Feminist Studies and South Asian Studies.

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, an Indian American hard-of-hearing choreographer, director, and scholar, is the Co-Director of Wild Studios Consulting, USA. The author of Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theatre (2006), she has also been a Theatre Topics Editor and Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar.