Disability in the Mythological Imagination
Indian mythology is unusually populated with disability and non-normative bodies, and it treats them with a complexity that ranges from reverence to cruelty, sometimes within a single story. These stories share the idea that disability is the residue of misdeeds in a past life (Ghai, 2015; Addlakha, 2008). Some of the most notable figures associated with disability come from the Mahabharata.
Consider Dhritarashtra, the blind king of the Mahabharata. Despite his blindness, he was an able-bodied and capable king in every other sense. Yet any behavioural fault perceived in him is attributed not to his character but to his disability. The epic uses his blindness as a metaphor for moral and political blindness: his inability to restrain his son Duryodhana’s ambitions is repeatedly read as symbolic of his physical condition (Ganguli, 1883–1896). This has had a lasting cultural cost, it fused blindness, in the popular imagination, with weakness of judgment rather than treating disability as a separate, morally neutral fact about a person’s body.
Gandhari, Dhritarashtra’s queen, offers a different case: her blindness is not congenital but chosen. On learning she is to marry a blind king, she ties a cloth permanently over her own eyes. This act has been interpreted as the ultimate expression of pativrata (wifely devotion). Read another way, though, it exposes a deep flaw in the narrative that persists even today: a woman voluntarily surrendering her own sight and agency to compensate for her husband’s disability.
It shows the emotional labour women are expected to perform to meet social expectation, and it glamourises self-sacrifice. It reduces her role as queen to that of a wife managing a husband’s disability, so that the royal household’s moral “blindness” toward Duryodhana’s wrongdoing is doubled rather than corrected (Bhattacharya, 2004).
Ashtavakra offers a very different model. Born with eight bodily deformities, his name literally means one with eight bends, he is mocked as a child but grows into one of the greatest philosophers of Sanskrit literature (Byrom, 1990). His story separates bodily form from intellectual and spiritual worth (Ghai, 2015). Yet the narrative still insists that his disability must ultimately be cured: In popular versions of the story, after he frees his father, his father blesses him with a normative body.
Even a philosopher who has attained enlightenment is, in the story’s own terms, not permitted to keep his disability. The message being that the value of a person with disability remains less than that of a person without one, and that an able body is still the implicit final goal, however much one has already achieved.
Shakuni, the maternal uncle of the Kauravas and the chief antagonist of the Mahabharata, is a limping man with a miraculous pair of dice. Different versions of the epic explain his limp differently. In one, he is humiliated when Bhishma asks for his sister Gandhari’s hand for the blind Dhritarashtra; in another, his family is imprisoned and starved by Bhishma, and his leg is deliberately broken so he cannot flee.
He alone survives, and is said to have carved his magical dice from a bone of his own dead father, using them to destroy the Kuru dynasty (Debroy, 2010). His disability is thus written into the story as the origin of his grievance. The physical sign of an inner evil. This fuses visible impairment with moral deviance, reinforcing a durable stereotype in which disability signals a crookedness of character to match a crookedness of body (Ghai, 2015).
Even Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity, can be read as an instance of a non-normative body being embraced as auspicious rather than shameful. Though this reading remains contested, since Ganesha’s form is divine rather than disability as lived human experience (Ghai, 2015). At the same time, portraying Ganesha as an unmarried brahmachari (celibate), particularly in many Indian traditions, can easily be read as the asexual objectification so often projected onto disability more broadly.
The Fetishisation of Disability in Mythological Fantasy: The Case of the Shiva Trilogy
Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy: The Immortals of Meluha (2010), The Secret of the Nagas (2011), and The Oath of the Vayuputras (2013), is one of the most commercially successful examples of Indian mythological fantasy, and it is a useful case study because it takes the trope of deformity as curse and builds an entire social order around disability.
In the novels, the Nagas are a community into which anyone born with a visible physical deformity in Meluha is exiled at birth, sent to the hidden forest capital of Panchavati regardless of family, class, or circumstance (Tripathi, 2010). They are introduced to the reader, and to the protagonist Shiva, as an ostracised and sinister race of deformed humans with astonishing martial skill, feared as terrorists. Structurally, this is disability discrimination made literal: a society that deliberately expels its members with disability from citizenship, mirroring the exile-like segregation disabled people have historically faced in India, from leprosy colonies to exclusion from temple entry to families concealing a member with disability from public view (Addlakha, 2008).
The way the Nagas are written also reproduces two classic disability tropes: the supercrip trope, and the fetishisation of disability.
Nearly every major Naga character; Kali, the exiled twin sister of Shiva’s wife Sati, who becomes a four-armed warrior queen; Ganesh, reimagined as a brilliant Naga strategist and merchant, is not merely accepted despite disability but enhanced into a superhuman in order to earn equality. This reaffirms the implicit rule that disability earns dignity only by being exceptional, never by being ordinary. Real people with disability are rarely superhuman; the supercrip trope manipulates audiences into believing that an unremarkable disabled life is less interesting narratively, and, by extension, less deserving of social attention.
Kali is written as a figure to be feared and desired simultaneously, the textbook profile of what Barbara Creed termed the monstrous-feminine. In mainstream fiction, disabled bodies, and disabled women’s bodies especially, are overwhelmingly desexualised: written as childlike, asexual, or simply absent from any register of desire. Kali resists that pattern. She commands armies, dominates every room she enters, and is given the same charisma and physical presence typically reserved for conventionally attractive heroines in popular fiction. But this is precisely where fetishisation reasserts itself in a different form.
Kali’s desirability in the text is never separable from her otherness. Her body is compelling because it is dangerous, because it is non-normative, because it transgresses the boundaries of acceptable femininity that govern the civilised Suryavanshi women around her. Her four arms, her dark skin, and her scant, unconventional clothing are presented together as a single package of exoticism, details narratively explained as practical facts of Naga forest life, a community outside Meluhan norms of dress, but that simultaneously code her, for the reader, as monstrous, sensuous, and other, all at once.
Darker skin carries an additional charge here, intersecting with a long-standing colourist aesthetic in mainstream Indian popular culture that already codes fairness as civilised and darkness as untamed or of the forest. Kali’s exoticisation thus operates through race and disability together, not through disability alone.
A striking contrast emerges when Kali is set against her nephew Ganesh, who shares her Naga status and is, by Meluhan standards, just as marked by disability. His elephant-like face, like her extra arms, is grounds for exile. Yet Ganesh, inspired partly after Lord Ganesha’s traditional association with auspiciousness and wisdom, is written as an almost entirely desexualised figure: a brilliant strategist and merchant, but never an object of desire in the way Kali is.
This asymmetry is the crux of the point: disability intersects with gender to produce two opposite but equally objectifying outcomes. The man with disability is desexualised and dehumanised through erasure; the woman with disability is hypersexualised and dehumanised through exoticisation. Both strip the character of ordinary, unremarkable sexual subjecthood.
This gendered pattern is not new to Tripathi’s fiction; it has deep roots in the classical epics themselves. Hidimba (or Hidimbi) in the Mahabharata, a rakshasi (demoness) of the forest who falls for Bhima and eventually marries him, fits the monstrous-feminine mould almost exactly: a tribal, othered woman whose desirability is bound up with her wildness and danger, acceptable as an object of desire only at the margins of civilised Aryavarta society, never fully absorbed into it.
More strikingly, Surpanakha in the Ramayana offers the clearest case of the epics literally disabling a woman as punishment for expressing desire: she approaches Rama and then Lakshmana, is mocked for her sexual assertiveness, and is mutilated, her nose cut off by Lakshmana in retaliation. Surpanakha is not written with disability at the story’s outset; disability is inflicted on her by the narrative itself, specifically as the price of a woman’s unwelcome sexual agency, after she is first coded as monstrous (dark-skinned, rakshasi, framed as grotesque) to make that punishment feel narratively justified.
Read together, Kali, Hidimba, and Surpanakha suggest a consistent pattern across a thousand years of Indian mythological storytelling, from the Sanskrit epics to twenty-first-century mythological fantasy: female bodies coded as other, through race, tribal origin, or disability are permitted sexual charge only as spectacle, are punished or exiled for asserting desire on their own terms, and are rarely allowed the quieter, more radical possibility available to conventionally-bodied heroines.
From Myth to the Present: Disability in Contemporary India
The gap between mythological reverence and lived reality is clear in the numbers. Census 2011 counted about 26.8 million persons with disability in India — 2.21 percent of the population, nearly 69 percent of them living in rural areas (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, 2011). The WHO and disability scholars consider this an undercount, a modern echo of the karma-based thinking traced above (WHO & World Bank, 2011; Kumari, 2019).
India’s laws have improved steadily. The 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act recognised only seven categories of disability and reserved 3 percent of government jobs for people with disability (Government of India, 1995). After India ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007 (United Nations, 2006), this was replaced by the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016,
Thich expanded recognised disability to 21 categories, raised the job quota to 4 percent, added a 5 percent quota in higher education, and set accessibility deadlines for public buildings (Government of India, 2016). The Accessible India Campaign (2015) and the Unique Disability ID (UDID) system followed, aiming to make public spaces and welfare benefits easier for people with disability to access (Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, 2015).
In practice, this looks like progress mostly on paper. Government reviews show the 4 percent job quota for people with disability remains largely unfilled, and accessibility audits still find temples, railway stations, and public buildings without ramps, tactile paths, or Braille signage (Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, 2021). The same pilgrimage sites that inspired mythological imagery still physically exclude many devotees with disability.
Closing Thought
Every figure examined here; Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Ashtavakra, Shakuni, Ganesha, Kali, Surpanakha, shows disability doing narrative work that has little to do with the lived experience of disability itself: it stands in for judgment, devotion, transcendence, grievance, auspiciousness, danger, or punishment. What it rarely stands for is simply a body. An epigraph drawn from the tradition itself may make that point better than argument does; a few options follow below.
– Akanksha Gautam
