ABSTRACT
This chapter fills a gap in scholarship on blindness and faith healing in India. While a few scholars have investigated blindness and special education, and mental health in relation to faith healing by employing autoethnography and critical theory, respectively, the question of faith healing and the blind body still remains open. I probe this troubling matter by carrying out a comparative autocritical discourse analysis of two blind men’s encounters with faith healers. Drawing on the social model of disability and contesting Foucauldian social constructionism, I mine my family’s multi-generational history of blindness to make sense of my own adaptation to life without sight. In reading John M. Hull’s diary entries and letters – contained in his exegetical works on the Bible – which grapple with faith healing for the blind through the Word of God, I reflect on my protracted adjustment to Pranic Healing by an elderly relative. My examination of these two cultural stations unfolds a critical form of writing on submitting to faith healing which brings into relief the conflicting commitments of the healers, those being healed, and the wider social implications, all of which depend on a subtle interaction between faith and the scientific milieu.
