At the Interstices of Disability and Gender: Narratability, Disability and Motherhood in Geetali Borah’s Antaratam

Disability studies as a discourse has emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. Though initially disability was regarded as only a medical problem located in a person's body, the proliferation of interdisciplinary approaches has shifted the paradigm to other domains of humanities. Scholars have, thus, come up with their notions of disability as a social and political phenomenon and this has resulted in a newer understanding of disability. Literary disability studies make use of the various aspects of disability to address the varied realities of the human psyche and experiences. This paper tries to foreground the experiential realities of the mothers of disabled children and how maternal subjectivities can be presented and theorized. Geetali Bora's semi-autobiographical novel Antaratam projects a mother's ordeal in facing the world with her child with cerebral palsy, where she is engaged in a meaning-making process, being entangled and disentangled with the psychological and societal pressure around her and finally realizing the essence of life. This paper tries to address issues like, how the mothers of disabled children relate their children's disability to their motherhood. How do they transcend the “guilty mother” syndrome? This paper, further, tries to explore the epiphanic moments that mothers of disabled children experience which is very crucial to their existence as these moments open up new understanding of their experiential realities. And finally how, despite going through a lot of pain and trauma, both in the home space and the public space, the mothers maintain their balance and become strong entities to face the harsh realities, provide proper care to their disabled children and move on with stoical acceptance.