ABSTRACT
Contemporary academia and scholarship on disability studies have entailed a paradigm shift from a social derogation of disability to refiguring it as an embodiment of human diversity, ascribing to it a differential episteme. This chapter presents an interview with Dr Anita Sharma, where the interview is particularly pertinent as it throws light on multiple ground realities on the socio-cultural, legal and political paradigms of the contemporary discourse of disability in India. Persons with disability have historically been treated as objects of social welfare, passive entities, living at the margins of the visual field of a society that chooses to live in ignorance rather than an acknowledgement of their existence. This rights-based approach in contemporary South Asian narratives around disability therefore seeks to assign a subjecthood along with human dignity and social inclusivity to persons with disabilities rather than thinking of them as passive objects of charity and/or pity.
