“What Does the Virus Look Like…?”: Disability, Pandemic, Senility and the Bodily Embodiment of Crises in Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities, increasing the vulnerability of disabled individuals to social isolation, inadequate healthcare and the barriers imposed by an inaccessible environment. The novel The Blind Matriarch is a matrix of crises of impairment, pandemic, ageing and death, and it 3narrativises the crises of embodying disability during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel presents Matangi Ma, an eighty-year-old, visually impaired matriarch living in C100, a four-storey house in Delhi, as COVID-19 ravages the whole world unsparingly. The havoc Ghokale poignantly captures in the novel evokes the Oppenheimerian apprehension of the Bhagavad Gita ‘Now I have become death, the destroyer of the world’ This study undertakes a cultural and literary analysis of the bodily embodiment of disability, pandemic, senility and womanhood in Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch. It aims to examine the socio-cultural implications and representation of these minority identities through the lens of disability studies, particularly their narrative construction. Employing Anne Waldschmidt’s cultural model of disability studies as an analytical tool, this research explores the representations of disability within literary discourses. Keywords: disability; COVID-19 pandemic; embodiment; crises; cultural model