Sanjukta Ghosh
Though Bollywood films have long been dismissed as extravagant fantasies, as mere escapist entertainment for the masses, they have always had a historical resonance. Since the earliest days of the industry, the films have tackled social, political, moral and nationalist causes. In recent years, a spate of films has been released that represent the needs of differently-abled people. Rather than use disability as a visual metaphor to showcase the physical and moral standing of the ‘normal’ protagonist, these new films centre the marginalised identities of those facing physical, mental or intellectual challenges.
One of these films, released in 2007 to critical and popular acclaim, was Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on Earth), which focuses on the life of an eight-year-old boy who happens to be dyslexic. The film not only scrutinises the issue of dyslexia, but also gives us a wider critique of contemporary Indian society that values outcome over process and of an education system that has its roots in British colonialism. Thwarting Eurocentric and American notions of cinematic conventions that are accepted as normative, and using common Bollywood codes and conventions of star power and song-and-dance sequences, Taare Zameen Par succeeds in deconstructing the discourses of pity and deviance so prevalent in filmic representations of disability.
Bollywood Conventions
‘Bollywood Cinema’ is a highly contested and much debated nomenclature. While some have used it as a trivialising, pejorative and dismissive term, there are others who have not problematised the term at all (see Basu 2010). At the very least, it is a fluid concept that is both a shorthand and a contradiction. As a shorthand, the moniker refers to the extravagant Hindi-language melodramas emerging from the western Indian city of Mumbai (formally Bombay). As a contradiction, scholars and journalists alike point out that though ‘Bollywood Cinema’ is seen as an entirely indigenous product, the phrase has its origins in the English-language media (see Ganti 2013). Madhava Prasad (2003) argues that it is an empty signifier that can be applied to a range of signifieds within the realm of Indian cinema. Jyotika Virdi and Corey K. Creekmur (2006) remind us that the parallels in the construction of its name with the globally dominant ‘Hollywood’ highlight elements of both mimicry and resistance. In other words, the term ‘Bollywood Cinema’ simultaneously celebrates difference even as it mocks it.
Locationally, Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (2008) use ‘Bollywood Cinema’ to refer to the Bombay-based Hindi film industry. Despite the particularities of its language or place of origin, they see this cinema as unquestionably national in its scope and transnational in its reach and influence. Ashish Rajadhyaksha makes a clear distinction between Indian commercial cinema that ‘has been in existence as a national industry of sorts for the past fifty years’ and Bollywood that ‘has been around for only about a decade now’ (2003: 28). For him ‘Bollywood’ films are characterised by their high-budget gloss, very specific visual and sensory maps and transnational themes. He expands the definition further, arguing that because of its global audience, the sobriquet also covers a range of distribution and consumption activities from websites to music rights, and the ancillary digital production and distribution channels. Ajay Gehlawat (2013) reminds us that Bollywood Cinema is a hybrid cultural form that fuses together theatrical and cinematic elements and Western and indigenous genres, such as the musical, dance drama and melodrama. Added to this multiplicity of meanings is the fact that some scholars do not problematise the term at all using it interchangeably and synonymously with Bombay cinema (see Mishra 2008).
For the purposes of this chapter, I use Gehlawat’s and Rajadhyaksha’s notion of the Bollywood archetype as a highly stylised, high-budget Hindi-language production. It has its own cinematic style that diverges from hegemonic Hollywood cinema in important ways. Chief among its distinctive idioms and conventions are a dense visual style, song and dance sequences
1 and ‘star power’ – all of which are in full display in
Taare Zameen Par. Though the lead in the film is played by an eleven-year-old newcomer, the film also features well-known actors from Bollywood and regional cinemas and stage.
Despite criticisms that allege a lack of nuance and subtlety regarding treatment of any social issue, the annals of Bollywood cinema are replete with narratives centered around casteism, ageism, the gulf between the rich and the poor, widow remarriage and sexism. Representations of disability, too, are found abundantly in Bollywood films. In fact, the portrayal of differently-abled people in Bollywood Cinema dates back to the earliest years of the industry when India was still under colonial rule. The 1925 film
Veer Kunal (
Valiant Kunal), for example, is set in the 3rd century BC. It tells the story of the blinding of Emperor Ashoka’s son Kunal by a courtier and the emperor’s slow realisation that the maiming could have been a punishment for his own sins. In other words, the film was a morality tale where the issue of disability served as a narrative device. This set the trend for decades in the film industry with physical and sensory handicap becoming a metaphor for sin and punishment. Bollywood films would henceforth often use the idea of service for the disabled as a means of penance for repentant sinners.
By and large, the trends and idioms found in Western fictional forms are also present in Bollywood texts.
2 However, as Joyjeet Pal (2013) explains, they are indigenised by grounding them in Hindu scriptures and social practices. Other scholars have found that Bollywood has also used people with physical disabilities as foils for the hero or heroine of the film, either to highlight the idealised body, to provide comic respites in an action or a suspense drama or to indicate their heroic status by ‘rescuing’ the disabled (see Andrade
et al. 2010; Mohapatra 2012). Until very recently, psychological and psychiatric disabilities, too, have been used in similar ways or to heighten suspense in a narrative (see Bhugra 2006).
But as with representations of disability in Western television and cinema, in Bollywood, too, while images abound, the issue of disability gets shunted aside. Like portrayals in the West, disability in Bollywood cinema is used as a device to move the narrative forward or as an icon within a specific
mise-en-scène to compress information about a character. Thus, as Paul Longmore (2006) states, images of disability have flourished in popular culture but it has not led to any real understanding about the disability. It is in this contextual framework that we must assess the pioneering contribution of
Taare Zameen Par – for its examination of a non-corporeal disability, for its sustained critical focus on the lived experience of a differently-abled person and for its success in making visible a hitherto invisible disability.
3Taare Zameen Par marked the directorial debut of the immensely popular Bollywood star Aamir Khan. The film quickly became a huge commercial and critical success in India and was India’s official entry for the 2008 Academy Awards. Subsequently, it was dubbed into several Indian and foreign languages. In 2009, it became the first Indian cinematic work to be bought by the Walt Disney company for global distribution (see IANS 2009).
The film explores the life of eight-year-old Ishaan Awasthi who lives in a middle-class neighborhood with his parents Nandkishore and Maya Awasthi and his older brother, Yohaan. Like many eight-year-olds, Ishaan has conversations with imaginary friends and foes, he sulks, he throws tantrums, he fights with neighborhood boys and he loves dogs. He has a vivid imagination and is a creative artist and painter. Unlike his older brother who excels in school and on tennis courts, Ishaan performs poorly both academically and in ballgames. His fellow classmates make fun of him and his teachers humiliate him. Unable to follow a classoom lesson or do well in any of his tests, he tunes out his teachers. But, while school life seems to bore and puzzle Ishaan, the world outside his classroom both fascinates him and feeds his imagination so much that one day he escapes from school and roams the city of Mumbai.
Frustrated by his continued poor academic performance and his school truancy, Ishaan’s father determines that a boarding school will straighten out his child. At the new school, Ishaan experiences the same difficulties with his classes and gets the same treatment from his teachers; he gets lonely and depressed. A substitute art teacher, Ram Shankar Nikumbh, suspects that Ishaan may have dyslexia. He begins tutoring the little boy using remedial techniques especially developed for dyslexic children. Soon Ishaan’s grades improve and so do his social skills. The film ends with both Ishaan and Nikhumb jointly winning the year-end community art competition hosted by the school.
Woven through this basic narrative of an individual overcoming immense hurdles to become successful, are many secondary themes – a fable about a father/son relationship, the story of a selfless teacher and his gifted student and an indictment of both the education system in India and its treatment of those with intellectual disabilities.
The Eugenicist Foundations of Disability
Several scholars in disability studies have shown that disability and normalcy are both concepts imbued with an eugenicist impetus used to define ourselves as distinct from others (see Garland-Thomson 1997, 2009; Barnes and Mercer 2003; Hayes and Black 2003). Arguing along the same lines, Harlan Hahn (1988) suggests that we seek to distinguish ourselves from disabled bodies because we understand the very real possibility that those bodies can become our own. At the most basic level, then, to shore up our own very temporal sense of able-bodiedness we ‘Other’ those with physical and mental disabilities. Furthermore, as Frantz Fanon argues ‘othering occurs on the basis of physical and verbal differences’ (1967: 154). Thus in an ableist culture, disability becomes a crucial vector that assists in the construction of ourselves as able-bodied, functional and ideal.
The ‘othering’ of Ishaan occurs time and again in the film in a myriad of ways, but chiefly through a binary opposition with his older brother Yohaan, who excels in both academics and athletics. Right at the start of the film, after he fails all his exams, Ishaan returns home from school and before he enters his home, he tosses his exams to the neighbourhood dogs who immediately shred them to pieces. When Yohaan comes home, he greets his mother by telling her that he has scored the highest points in his class in all but one academic area and in that area too, his score is merely a couple of points behind that of the lead student. He then asks his younger brother about his grades. At a parent/teacher meeting, Ishaan’s teachers lament his poor performance, especially because his brother Yohaan is such an exemplary student. This comparison between Ishaan and Yohaan is taken to egregious lengths by their father who uses it to defend his decision to pack off his youngest child to a distant boarding school and to justify his continued disengagement with the child’s problems.
Ishaan’s ‘othering’ also happens when he is interacting with other kids either of his age or older, both at his old school and later in the new boarding school. Again and again he is shown fumbling at tasks that other children achieve with ease, be it reading from a textbook, tying his shoelaces or necktie that is part of his uniform or even throwing a ball. His peers, neighbourhood kids, his teachers and the supervisors at the boarding school repeatedly call him a ‘dimwit’, an ‘idiot’ and a ‘duffer’. Ishaan’s loneliness and alienation are mirrored by long shots and medium-range shots of him positioned at the far-side of the school’s empty hallways, or sitting alone in an almost empty dining hall, or walking alone with his eyes cast downwards even as kids around him are chatting animatedly or playing with their peers. When Ishaan escapes from school and walks around Mumbai, the English/Hindi-language song lyrics, ‘A little sweet, a little sour. A little close, not too far. All I need is to be free’ are accompanied by quick shots of life in the chaotic city. The high camera angles position him as a speck against the big city’s traffic, bustling markets and crowded streets. The dichotomy set up by the camera, the song lyrics and the narrative serve to signify Ishaan’s internal state – his isolation from the rest of society and his slow descent into complete desolation and depression.
There is one area where Ishaan excels and is better than his brother and his peers, and that is art. Acknowledging this, in one scene, Yohaan watches his younger brother paint and praises his skills as ‘Superb!’ (in English). At the boarding school too, some students recognise Ishaan’s creativity and call the teacher’s attention to the intricate artistic work that the boy produces. However, most of the time Ishaan’s vivid imagination and aesthetic competence go either unmarked or are criticised as ‘useless’ for the instrumental needs of a modern society. For such a culture, Ishaan’s abilities become a disability and a burden and mark him as an outisder and a misfit from what is considered the ‘norm’.
Disability as Cultural Work
The discovery of Ishaan’s disability unfolds very gradually in the film. The word ‘dyslexia’ is mentioned for the first time almost three quarters of the way into the 2-hour and 24-minute film. However, there are oblique cues given right from the title scenes. As a teacher reads out the grades of her students’ exams, letters dance around before falling into place as film crew credits. This jumble of letters refusing to take their place in an organised way that signifies ‘correct spelling’ is referenced later in a scene when, in his English class, Ishaan is asked by the teacher to read a passage from a specific page in his book. Unable to decipher the words, he tells the teacher that ‘Yeh to naach raha hey’ (‘the letters are dancing’). When he is doing his homework at home, his mother reviews his work and is appalled to see that he has inverted characters, spelled the same word in three different ways, and substituted similar looking letters such as using a ‘b’ in place of a ‘d’. At his new school, the camera adopts Ishaan’s gaze and we see letters leaping out from the blackboard or his notebooks and reversing themselves.
One hour and 27 minutes into the film, Nikumbh systematically reviews Ishaan’s work. As the camera adopts the teacher’s gaze, we, as audience members, get to see the errors in detail for the first time – the confusion over similar-looking letters, the inversion of characters with similar orthography, the mixing up of words that use the same letters but in a different order. Nikumbh haltingly and hesistantly explains the details about dyslexia to the boy’s parents, saying that Ishaan just has ‘akshar hii nehi samajh mey aatey hongey’ (‘trouble in recognising letters’).
Nikumbh also tells the parents that because their son has difficulty tying his shoes laces or buttoning his shirt, understanding the concept of numbers, following multiple instructions, or correlating size, distance and speed in ballgames, he has weak motor skills. This hints at the idea that in addition to dyslexia, Ishaan might also have dyscalculia and weak temporal-spatial skills, two additional intellectual disabilities. Given that these are not always prevalent in people with dyslexia (see Ramaa 2000; White 2002; Shaywitz et al. 1992, cited in Smith 2004), the filmmakers might have chosen to include them as important traits to enhance the pathos of the main character, to compress the varied difficulties children with learning disabilities face or perhaps simply to show a continuum among the myriad of intellectual disabilities.
Though dyslexia is not mentioned until late in the film, educators do hint that Ishaan’s continued academic failure suggests that Ishaan may have a deeper problem. After the principal of the Mumbai school advises Ishaan’s parents that they send him to a school that concentrates on special needs education, we see Nandkishore seething in anger at what he sees as an insult. He equates Ishaan needing special education as being a ‘retard’ and ‘not normal’. In his Mumbai school, one teacher recognises the errors in Ishaan’s work, but she fails to link it to an intellectual disability. Instead of seeing Ishaan’s isolation, desolation and alienation from the world around him as a symptom of his dyslexia, she reads it metonymically as the cause of his poor scholastic achievement.
The art teacher tells Maya and Nandkishore that far from Ishaan being a ‘retard’, disobedient, rebellious, lazy or dumb, as they have decided, Ishaan realises his inadequacies and tries to overcome them by being openly disobedient and rebellious. With a shattered self-confidence, the teacher explains, Ishaan then adopts the position: ‘Kyoon bataayoon duniya ko ki mujhe nahin aata? Nehin karna! Yeh kehekar baat taal do’ (‘Why admit to the world that I can’t? Just say that I don’t want to’).
The trope of the ‘good’ student being the ‘obedient’ student cuts across many cultures. Unpacking the construction of students of colour from low-income households as ‘troublesome’ kids who are filling up special education courses, Tanya Titchkosky (2008) argues that reading disabilities are profoundly tied to identity politics. What constitutes ‘literacy’ and how young people are classified as learning disabled are very class specific. While America’s class politics are not easily transferable to the Indian context, Titchkosky’s core thesis – that modern ‘literate’ society only values one type of literacy, regards it as necessary and naturalises it – is applicable to both the Indian society in general and
Taare Zameen Par in particular. It also correlates with another important theme taken up by the film – a critique of the Indian education system.
It is important to note that the film does not position Ishaan as a tragic victim. Rather than suffer his disabilities in silence, often the boy rebels against those who deem his behaviour a failure. In an English class, asked to read a passage and unable to do so, Ishaan starts speaking gibberish. When the teacher tells him to leave the room, he makes a furtive victory gesture to his classmates as if to say that this was his objective all along. When his father determines that he should be sent away to boarding school, he glares back at him in anger. That he is also very mischievous can be seen in the opening scenes of the film when he teases his mother by picking up a sandwich without washing his hands or his father by daring to eat strawberries that have not been washed.
Vestiges of Colonial Hangover
Though Taare Zameen Par is undoubtedly the story of one remarkable child, it is also the story of the limits and failure of the mainstream modern Indian education system. What is deemed as modern education in India owes much of its existence to colonialism. Education was a powerful tool in the arsenal of colonial administrations everywhere to both subordinate their subjects but also to ‘liberate’ them from their own cultures (see Said 1993). Thus, colonial education was intended to create hierarchical ‘occident/orient’ relationships. Initially, the British administration in India was tolerant of its indigenous systems of education (see Viswanathan 1998; Seth 2007; Rajivlochan 2008). However, as the administration evolved from overseeing trading to becoming a militarised presence and cementing its political hold on India, it became more coercive.
In 1835, Lord Thomas Macaulay’s famous prescription on the kind of education to be imparted in India laid the groundwork for a system that still exists today in various incarnations. It essentially ended indigenous systems of science, medicine and literature at the charity-led Muslim educational institutions and the
Gurukuls where students were expected to memorise extended excerpts of Hindu scriptures.
4 Under the guise of bringing equitable educational opportunities for all (and not just Brahmins), and introducing Enlightenment values and ideas from the Utilitarian movement, the brand called ‘English education’ was entrenched in India. For the rulers, and the comprador class alike, British education was the normative and civilising education as opposed to the indigenous forms of education. Colonial policy also created jobs that needed ‘English education’ thereby ensuring a continued demand for such education. In the mid-1950s, the post-independence nationalist policies of the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru articulated ‘English’ education as being consistant with Indian values. For Nehru, education, especially that which centred around science, engineering and mathematics, was central to the country’s development and to the modernisation project. In this vision of modern India, art, literature and the social sciences played a secondary role. Decades later, the economic liberalisation policies of the late twentieth-century central governments, and the continued globalisation of the economy, further secured the place of English education in modern India.
The importance of arts and the creative imagination to Ishaan’s wellbeing is shown in the way the boy is framed by the camera. Usually, we see Ishaan’s gaze cast downwards and his shoulders slumped, as if in defeat. But when he paints we see him in medium close-ups with his face lit up. The camera is angled low setting his face against a backdrop that is often dark blue indicating the sky. The joy and wonderment in the boy’s face are indicative of the integral role art plays in his life. Furthermore, often because the camera focuses on the child’s face without actually showing him painting, the cinematography emphasises the human rather than the act. But the significance of the creative and fantasy world to Ishaan is not recognised by any of the adults in his life until his encounter with his new art teacher. It is through this tension between the child’s artistic world which brings him pleasure and happiness and the ‘real’ utilitarian world, that
Taare Zameer Par enters the continuing debates about modern Indian education, an education that has been criticised both within the country and outside for being purely instrumental and reductionist. The child’s impairment functions semiotically to question the extant education system.
Fig. 1: Medium close-up of Ishaan with high-key lighting as he paints.
At the very beginning of the film, we see a montage of quick shots of Ishaan’s mother Maya preparing breakfasts for each member of the family and then seeing each off for the day. The chorus of the accompanying song goes ‘Duniya Ka Naara Jame Raho / Manzil Ka Ishaara Jame Raho’ (‘It’s the way of the world. Your goal beckons. Keep at it!’). The quick edits, the staccato rhythm of the camera shots and the iconography all work as a critique of the monotony of modern life that merely focuses on goals and successful results. A similar comment on modern capitalism is once again seen in another song and dance sequence we are introduced to the art teacher Nikumbh, he is dressed in a clown’s costume and along with his third grade class launches into the song ‘Bum bum boley, masti mey doley’ (‘Swing along, shake a leg, have lots of fun’). Through the song and his classroom interactions, the teacher tells his students to freely experiment with colours and shapes without any concern for the end product. He urges them, instead, to exercise their fantasy. This sets up the opposition between instrumental education that serves the capitalist world and an education that feeds the imagination and soul.
The instrumentalism of education, especially as opposed to art, is again re-emphasised towards the end of the film when Nikumbh goes to the principal’s office to discuss Ishaan’s dyslexia. At first, the principal is glad to hear Nikumbh’s diagnosis – not because they can finally develop a programme to help the child but because, as he says, it would make it easier to tell Ishaan’s father to withdraw him from his school and admit him in an institution for special needs children. Nikumbh reminds him that the Indian constitution mandates that every child has the right to an education at any school and that the school must make the necessary accommodations.
5 But, as he says, very few schools comply with this law. Sharing Ishaan’s artwork with the principal, Nikumbh argues that the child is actually very bright and excels in conceptual thinking and that all he needs is some remedial tutoring. With help from his teachers, Nikumbh says, Ishaan would able to get passing grades in the usual subjects and concentrate on what is his ‘true calling’ – art. The principal retorts that Nikumbh seems to value art above science, mathematics, history, geography and languages – in other words, every academic area but his own. Yet when the teacher does get his principal’s blessing to tutor the child, it is painting, drawing, clay art, computer games and hopscotch that help Ishaan improve motor spatial skills and finally learn to read, write and do arithmetic. In other words, it is art, and not utilitarian academic areas, that finally rehabilitates Ishaan. The message also is that when the skills of reading and writing are divorced from natural interactions, everyday communication (as opposed to highly stylised language found in literature) and play, children often are seen as, and even become, deficient in reading and writing.
At his boarding school, when a teacher in a Hindi literature class asks Ishaan to explain the meaning of a poem, he provides the conceptual meaning, which the teacher immediately rejects. The teacher then praises another student who gives an answer that is clearly memorised but perhaps not understood. Referring to that, Ishaan’s only friend at the new school, a young boy who is physically disabled and uses crutches, assures him that his conceptual reading of the poem indicated that Ishaan was the one who had truly understood the literary work. However, he tells Ishaan that the teacher is very strict and always wants his pupils to simply regurgitate his own explanations. This practice of cramming, or ‘mugging’ in Indian vernacular English, is seen as a problematic practice. But as postcolonial historians point out, cramming was the result of deeply flawed colonial educational policies (see Seth 2007; Rajivlochan 2008). Under the garb of spreading education, the colonial administration opened numerous universities in the Indian subcontinent in quick succession. However, because it did not want to invest too heavily in them, these universities essentially became testing centres with little teaching or research undertaken. This created the tradition of Indian students committing information to memory rather than comprehending it and being personally transformed by it.
The signposts of colonial education can also be seen in the corporal punishment meted out by some of the teachers at the boarding school. As many historical accounts demonstrated, caning was standard procedure in most British schools and the practice came to India with colonialism. The language used by some of the teachers is also very regressive, reminiscent of colonial times. Nikumbh is only a substitute teacher at the boarding school. His full-time post is at a school for children with developmental disabilities. Some of Nikumbh’s colleagues at the boarding school call Ishaan a ‘retard’ and tell him that his unorthodox teaching methods would only work at the school for ‘retards’. Also contained in the film is a criticism of overcrowded schools with neither the will nor the imagination to make the resources work. Ishaan’s father and the boarding school principal both complain about stuffing classes with students who do not get any individual attention.
Any discussion of Taare Zameen Par must be inserted within the larger context of disability studies in India and the disability movement. While disability studies have existed in India for decades (see Ramaa 2000; Anand 2013), critical disability studies is fairly new in the country. As Renu Addlakha points out in her landmark 2013 anthology, until recently, most research in the area was located within the disciplines of medicine, social work and pschology. Most of the empirical works were framed within a medical model which pathologises disabilities and frames deviations from ascribed bodily norms as ‘abnormal’. As Shilpa Anand states, frequently these studies were based on Western epistemological models unapplicable or irrelevant in the Indian context (2013: 51). These studies also individualised the problem and assumed that the solution lay with the disabled person’s acceptance of prescribed cures.
There is no doubt that Taare Zameen Par succeeds in eschewing the regressive medical model of disability which pathologises the impairment into an singular personality trait that the individual should keep hidden. The film shows us that naming the disability itself goes a long way to seeking ways to overcome the disability. However, the film never realises its truly revolutionary potential. It ultimately remains a narrative of individual triumph. It captures the story of a disabled protagonist who struggles with his impairment and overcomes his personal limitations at tremendous odds with the help of another extraordinary individual (see Mogk 2013: 5). In fact, in some sense, Taare Zameen Par becomes the story of a ‘supercrip’. Ishaan’s creative abilities make him an artistic savant. His success in the culminating art competition and his reintegration into his family and, by extension, the larger society become emblematic of a personal redemption.
Individualised narratives are instrumental as a storytelling mechanism; however, their message always ends up being a-political, reinforcing the very disabling difference that they construct. In such instances, unfortunately, disability ends up being symbolically used to disable people with impairments (see Ellis 2007: 2). The individualisation of impairment, its portrayal as a personal tragedy to be overcome, only serves to isolate disabled peoples. As Marja Evelyn Mogk (2013) suggests, such narratives, rather than indicting culture-specific practices, end up glorifying individuals. Rather than presenting a differently-abled mind as a continuum in the variablity of what is considered ‘normal’ and question how reading became a diagnostic category, the film ends up reifying the very system that created the stigmatised social status. After all, as Michel Foucault cautions us, the categories of disabilities are constructs and the exclusion of the disabled body are forms of social control.
For disability film politics to be truly transgressive and potentially revolutionary, impairment cannot be examined in isolation from the larger social system from which it emerges. As the social model of disability reminds us, the problems often do not lie in the damaged body or in the case of little Ishaan, in the mind, but in unfair social, political conditions and the neoliberal policies – things the film never addresses.
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
Khan, Aamir (dir) (2007) Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on Earth). 165 minutes. Aamir Khan Productions/PVR Pictures. India.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Addlakha, Renu (2013) ‘Introduction’, in Renu Addlakha (ed.), Disability Studies in India: Global Discourses, Local Realities. New York: Routledge, 1-31.
Anand, Shilpa (2013) ‘Historicising Disability in India: Questions of Subject and Method’, in Renu Addlakha (ed.) Disability Studies in India: Global Discourses, Local Realities. New York, NY: Routledge, 35–60.
Andrade, Chittaranjan, Nilesh Shah and Basappa Venkatesh (2010) ‘The Depiction of Electroconvulsive Therapy in Hindi Cinema’,
Journal of Electroconvulsive Therapy, 26, 1, 16–22.
Barnes, Colin and Geof Mercer (2003) Disability. London: Polity Press.
Basu, Anustup (2010) Bollywood in the Age of New Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bhugra, Dinesh (2006) Mad Tales from Bollywood: Portrayal of Mental Illness in Conventional Hindi Cinema. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Bhugra, Dinesh and Gurvinder Kalra (2015) ‘Applying Psychoanalysis to Hindi Cinema’, in Lucy Huskinson, Terrie Waddell (eds), Eavesdropping: The Psychotherapist in Film and Television. New York: Routledge, 94-106.
Fanon, Frantz (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Grove Press.
Foucault, Michel (1988) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books.
Ganti, Tejaswini (2013) Bollywood. New York, NY: Routledge.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
____ (2009) Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gartner, Alan and Tom Joe (eds) (1987) Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images. New York, NY: Praeger.
Garwood, Ian (2006) ‘The Songless Bollywood’, South Asian Popular Culture, 4, 2, 169–83.
Gehlawat, Ajay (2013) Reframing Bollywood: Theories of Popular Hindi Cinema. New Delhi: Sage.
Gopal, Sangita and Moorti, Sujata (eds) (2008) Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Hahn, Harlan (1988) ‘Can Disability Be Beautiful?’, Social Policy, 18, 26–31.
Hayes, Michael and Rhonda Black (2003) ‘Troubling Signs: Disability, Hollywood Movies and the Construction of a Discourse of Pity’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 23, 2, 114–32.
Longmore, Paul K. (2006)
Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
____ (2013) ‘“Heaven’s Special Child”: The Making of Poster Children’, in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 34-41.
Mishra, Vijay (2002) Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. New York: Routledge.
____ (2008) ‘Towards a Theoretical Critique of Bombay Cinema’, in Rajinder Dudrah and Jigna Desai (eds) The Bollywood Reader. Berkshire: Open University Press, 32–44.
Mogk, Marja Evelyn (2013) Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Mohapatra, Atanu (2012) ‘Portrayal of Disability in Hindi Cinema: A Study of Emerging Trends of Differently-abled’, Asian Journal of Multidimensional Research, 1, 7, 124–32.
Pal, Joyjeet (2013) ‘Physical Disability and Indian Cinema’, in Marja Evelyn Mogk (ed.) Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 109–30.
Ramaa, S. (2000) ‘Two Decades of Research on Learning Disabilities in India’, Dyslexia, 6, 268–83.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2003) ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4, 1, 25–39.
Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus.
Seth, Sanjay (2007) Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Smith, Frank (2004) Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning To Read. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Titchkosky, Tanya (2008) ‘“I Got Trouble With My Reading”: An Emerging Literacy’, in Susan Lynn Gabel, Scot Danforth (eds) Disability & the Politics of Education: An International Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 337-52.
Virdi, Jyotika and Corey K. Creekmur (2006) ‘India: Bollywood’s Global Coming of Age’, in Anne Tereska Ciecko (ed.) Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 133–43.
Viswanathan, Gauri (1988) ‘Currying Favor: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813-1854’, Social Text, 19/20, 85-104.
____ (1998) Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
White, Linda Feldmeier (2002) ‘Learning Disability: Pedagogies and Public Discourse’, College Composition and Communication, 53, 4, 705–38.