“Mad-Daughters”: Dehumanization, Institutionalization and Intellectual Disability in Indian Short Fiction

Abstract

Intellectual disability has historically occupied a liminal position within the social imagination, often situated at the threshold between the human and the non-human. Literary representations of intellectual disability frequently reveal the anxieties, stigma and structure of power through societies regulate bodies and minds that deviate from the normative expectations of rationality, productivity and social interaction. Within the Indian literary context and disability scholarship, the experience of intellectually disabled women remain underexplored. Using interdisciplinary method of disability, and drawing concept from Lucia Carlson and David Livingstone Smith’s dehumanization, this paper examines the representation of intellectual disability in the short stories Vishakha by Harshad Trivedi and Ties of Blood by Ishwar Petlikar. The characters of the two “mad-daughters” Chandudi and Mangu are framed through the language of animality, bodily excess, irrationality and social burden. Their intellectual disabilities are not merely biological anomaly, but socially constructed markers of normative “category violation”. The study focusing on the intertwined dynamics of animalization, dehumanization, institutionalization and social exclusion. Consequently, the narratives expose how ableist society responds to intellectual disability through practices of segregation, surveillance, cure-oriented intervention, and institutional confinement.