ABSTRACT
This paper works with the premise that disability is only one conceptualization of corporeal difference and makes the case that other conceptualizations of difference are still in the process of being uncovered. Context-sensitive examination and translation of literary narratives in different languages and of distinct cultural contexts would perhaps enable us to become acquainted with multipleways of knowing and ‘going about’ corporeal differences. Rashid Jahan’s Urdu short story, ‘Woh’ frames the encounter and interaction between Safia, a teacher who belongs to a privileged socio-economic class and the protagonist, a woman with facial disfigurement who is only referred to as ‘woh’ or ‘that one’. The story enables us to access everyday disablement experiences of a woman with facial disfigurement by examining the rhetoricity, to use Gayatri Spivak’s notion, that animates people’s responses of disgust to her. The protagonist’s disablement experience is shaped by the ways in which people talk about her without naming her. Translating ‘woh’ and ‘yeh’, from Urdu to English, this paper argues, as ‘that one’ and ‘this one’, retains the rhetoricity that enables us to learn of contextual conceptualizations of difference that challenge the more normative categorization that we have come to know as ‘disability’.
