Mapping the Aesthetics of Differently Abled: Exploring the Hidden Identity of the Marginalised in The Shiva Trilogy

Disability is one of the major reasons for marginalising people. The term disability is nowadays gaining new insights, rather than the helplessness of a person to tackle the absence of a body part or senses. In a comprehensive view, not only the inflexibility of the body but also the problems of LGBT people, poverty, unemployment, even infertility can be regarded as a state of disability to act the idea of “normal”. Sometimes culture and society label people as disabled when it fails to identify a set of qualities in them. Therefore, it can be rightly considered that the notion of disability is psychological rather than physiological. Disability in the new cultural era has gained various interpretations as there are multiple psychological and technological ways to cope with it when compared to previous times. Many eminent personalities considered their disability as different abilities and created history by shaping their own identity and space. When most disabled people consider themselves as victims of fate, only a minority changes their destiny positively. This minority makes themselves “specially-abled” when society calls them “differentially abled”. The present paper tries to explore disability in terms of character and theme in the literary narrative of Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy, both inside and outside of the traditional literary canon. It also analyses how disability studies help to motivate people who are considered as disabled. The various perspectives in disability studies can destabilize established theoretical paradigms in literary criticism. Literary representations of disability open up discussions about some of the most pressing issues of our age: austerity, empathy, minority status, social case, and citizenship.