Rethinking Disability and Identity Politics in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Abstract

In this paper, I read Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980) through the dual lenses of disability studies and identity politics, examining her representation of Baba, an intellectually disabled adult. If the novel has been conventionally read as a Partition narrative, a tale of memory, loss, and reconciliation, Baba's ever-present spectre of an absent father would appear worthy of analysis as a locus of identification and familial negotiation. Baba's intellectual disability refracts the Das family's relationships, which require his sister Bim to take on caregiving and the family to reconfigure expectations of duty, typical, and belonging. This paper draws on theoretical frameworks of Disability Studies - notably Garland-Thompson's "extraordinary bodies," and Mitchell & Snyder's "narrative prosthesis" - to argue that Desai questions normative constructions of identification and productivity. Baba's silence is not the void but a tentative speaking that undermines relations of (in)action, power, and social value. This paper situates Baba in the politics of identity to explore how Desai negotiates disability, memory, and familial obligation at the intersections of disability and identity in postcolonial India. Identity politics cannot ultimately be relegated to race, gender, or class alone. However, they must make an accounting with the neglected territory of disability, a site where silence and presence speak their own kinds of resistance.