Revoking Disabilities And Invoking Inclusion: A Critical Study On Select Indian Films

Cinema is considered to be a powerful medium that reflects the happenings in a society. While it is caught up between the real and reel life. Disability is an important issue that is widely misunderstood even today in India. The concerns of physically disabled (differently abled) group of the society have also attracted the filmmakers throughout the world including many from Indian film industry. Many mainstream Bollywood (the film industry which produces Hindi films) movies have depicted the experiences of differently-abled people either as a part of the plot or as the main subject of the story while exploring varied ways of fascination with the topic. This paper is an attempt to discuss on how Bollywood mainstream cinema incorporates the idea of disability in their movies, what the level of sensitivity is when it deals with issues of disability and whether the idea of disability has been romanticized or patronized in Bollywood movies. It is an attempt to present a progressive outlook towards disability in cinemas.