Yash Gupta

Of मिर्ची in Our Blood: Intergenerational Dis/abilities and Toxic Contradictions of Postcolonial Care in the Survivor Narratives of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy

Premised at the intersection of Critical Dis/ability Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Postcolonial Literary Analysis, this project attends to dis/abling inheritances in communities impacted by the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (BGT), examining how these inheritances constitute post/colonial frameworks of bodily contradiction. From the vantage point of Contradiction Studies, I argue that the afterlife of methyl isocyanate (MIC) materialises as a molecular contradiction: while toxicity seeks to truncate genealogies among those exposed, it simultaneously equips them with modes of care that counteract its effects. 

With an emphasis on vernacular archives, namely oral testimonies and situated literatures, I theorise intergenerational readings of dis/abilities that emerge not despite chemical violence but through it, as survivors metabolise MIC’s molecular inscriptions into rhizomatic kin networks and shared vocabularies of care. Here, intergenerationality denotes collective and embodied experiences of bodily difference that are shared amongst individuals by the virtue of mutual debilitation. 

Such an approach seeks to take account of debilitation in the postcolony, marking a departure from the individualist foundations of Global North Disability Studies. As such, I contend that dis/abilities are not incidental to neocolonial extraction, but are constitutive operations within its racial and economic logics. Building on this, I analyse the molecularization of neocolonial harm and decolonial care as corollaries and contradictions within merged processes of neo/post/de-colonisation. 

Methodologically, I adopt a trans-medial, iterative approach grounded in my positionality as a second-generation BGT survivor with dis/abilities. Through Bhenga reading practices, an autoethnographic mode attentive to perceptive forms of blindness cultivated in my community, I enact a lived ethics that reframes the BGT as an evolving text inscribed on bodies, ecologies, and futures.