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Contemporary Indian English fiction has begun to treat disability less as personal tragedy and more as a socially produced experience. This paper reads Mathangi Subramanian’s A People’s History of Heaven (2019) and Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch (2021) through the social model of disability. It focuses on two blind protagonists, Deepa, a young girl in a Bangalore slum facing demolition, and Matangi Ma, an elderly matriarch holding her Delhi joint family together during the COVID-19 lock-downs. Both novels demonstrate that inner strength, sensory adaptation, emotional labour, and relational agency enable these women to negotiate and resist disabling social structures. Rather than celebrating physical ‘overcoming’, the texts foreground community solidarity, intuitive wisdom, and quiet defiance. Deepa dances to the sounds of her environment and joins collective protest; Matangi Ma perceives suffering beyond sight and anchors her family’s mental health. By centring resilience as a social and affective practice, these works contriHowevere meaningfully to disability studies, health humanities, trauma narratives, and pandemic imaginaries in Indian literature.
Settu A, Dr. Sudha R. “Inner Strength amid Social Barriers: Disability and Resilience in Mathangi Subramanian’s A People’s History of Heaven and Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 290-307. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.16.
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