Disrupting Narrative Exclusion

This article analyzes how contemporary Indian children’s literature represents disability through the lens of spatial negotiation and exclusion. The focus is on three middle-grade chapter books, Manya Learns to Roar (2017) by Shruthi Rao, Kittu’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Mad Day (2017) by Harshika Udasi, and Against All Odds (2017) by Ramendra Kumar. The analysis explores how disabled characters encounter, contest, and reclaim spaces that are often socially and physically inaccessible to them. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Dan Goodley’s dis/ablism and Tobin Siebers’s ideology of ability, the article foregrounds how spaces such as educational institutes, school stages, and playgrounds are not neutral but are constructed as able-bodied domains. The texts highlight the multiple layers in which disabled children are made to feel out of place and often face bullying and psychological exclusion when they assert their presence in normative spaces. However, the protagonists are not positioned as extraordinary heroes who overcome their disability; these narratives allow the characters to exist as ordinary children negotiating layered social realities. The stories resist the medicalized and moralized depictions typical of earlier Indian children’s books and offer a more grounded representation that disrupts dominant spatial hierarchies.