Disability and “The Body Politic”: Rereading Embodiments of Depravity in Khasi and Garo Folklore

Khasi and Garo folklores underscore a sociocultural model programmed on the lines of a body that is “too much” or “too less”, the gradations converging on a scale of a disability spectrum that is quite interesting. In certain folktales disability is seen as an “extremity”, an anathema or a grotesqueness that marks the “bodies” as ugly, different or “others”. In Khasi and Garo folklore most of the disabled characters are seen combating antagonistic forces or framings of exclusion and discrimination, like U Ramhah, U Bieit and Rengsin to name a few. Intricately woven into this discourse of depravity is the fluctuating tendency to pin down a disabled character either as an embodiment of evil or virtue. A disabled body is not only a site where “multiple marginalizations” are played out, but it is also a locus of “narrative prosthesis”, an idea that “hinges around ‘fixing’ the disability” (Mitchell and Synder in Narrative prosthesis: disability and the dependencies of discourse (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability). University of Michigan Press, 2001). However, we can further contend that in the mentioned folklores it becomes evident to what a large degree the attitudes and the interactions with others that are usual in the respective social context form and influence the nature and extent of a disability thereby underlining a condition that is not natural or determined by birth but rather constructed by certain spatiotemporal configurations and political alignments. The paper will look at the shifting representations of the disabled body in Khasi and Garo folklore, and the body's affiliations to material culture, political geography and local knowledge. While doing so, the paper would look at folklore as a dense semantic field where cultural, psychosocial and anthropological processes of a community (and a life-world) coalesce and converge.