Abstract
Disability history’s emergence as a significant and robust sub-field of disability studies has resulted in the conceptualizing and framing of disability histories of South Asia with concepts and chronological frames that are familiar to Anglo-American and European contexts. While there have been attempts to historicize disability in keeping with context-specific developments, these histories appear not to have escaped orientalist structures of focalization. The phenomenon of ‘Shah Daula’s chuhas’, a category of microcephalic youth prevalent in the Indo-Pakistan region between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, now documented as disability history , serves as a test case with which to explicate the dominance of normatively Western historical frames in non-Western histories. Drawing on a close reading of literary narratives based on the chuhas phenomenon, the fading traces of another disabling condition, female infertility, are uncovered. Female infertility, it is suggested, that remains outside the narrative and ‘emplotment’ of dominant disability history, in fact enables us to access context-sensitive histories of disablement as well as culturally different concepts of corporeal difference . Acting as an advisory to the recently emerged field, bioarcheology of disability, this paper argues for a critical reading of existing histories and makes a case for culturally contextual histories that may reveal not only historical social responses to familiar disabling conditions, but concepts of corporeal difference particular to those contexts.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
—William Blake
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase ‘Shah Daula’schuhas’ has been spelled variously as ‘Shah Dowla’schuas’, ‘Shah Daulah’schuas’, and so on. This paper adopts the spelling ‘Shah Daula’schuhas’ in keeping with the phonetic transcription of the Urdu word ‘chuha’ meaning rat or mouse. However, where the components of the phrase have been spelled differently in various historical records and scholarly accounts as ‘Shah Dowla’ in some cases and as ‘chua’, the spellings used in those accounts have been retained in the references and within quotation marks as necessary.
- 2.
Phrenology was the practice of measuring skulls to determine the relationship between the shape and size of the cranium and the moral character as well as intellectual abilities of the individual. It was widely used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the British and other European colonies to assess the moral and intellectual nature of colonized communities. It was later discredited as a dubious science because of its scientific inaccuracy and later for its inherent racism.
- 3.
The subaltern studies approach refers to a variety of scholarly initiatives, primarily historical in nature, that began in the early 1980s spearheaded by Indian academics that challenged dominant histories which foregrounded a nationalist framework by documenting struggles of sociopolitically and socioculturally marginalized groups and minority communities.
- 4.
Overbeck-Wright followed this book up with an updated version in 1921 titled Lunacy in India. The description of Shah Daula’s chuhas is retained as is in the second book, showing that he found little that was new to add to his previously existing account.
- 5.
A religious ascetic who is known to live only on alms.
- 6.
The psychiatry discourse in modern-day Pakistan, as Miles admits, regards the gathering of the chuhas at the shrine as part of superstitious or as matters of ‘blind faith’. These rationalist views that are part of the discourse of modernizing Pakistan or ‘developing’ Pakistan would also be views that dominate twentieth century discourse and practice of psychiatry and medicine in most parts of South Asia.
- 7.
Shah Sujah is either another name for Shah Daula that was prevalent locally or may be accepted as a fictionalized name used by the author for Shah Daula.
- 8.
Pre-partition India.
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Acknowledgements
This paper benefitted immensely from the comments and suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers. I am deeply indebted to their close reading and critical insights on historical methodology.
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Anand, S. (2017). Historiography of Disablement and the South Asian Context: The Case of Shah Daula’s Chuhas. In: Byrnes, J., Muller, J. (eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56949-9_4
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